If you’ve grown up playing video games, you’ve probably had to bear your parents telling you in all manner of assorted ways how video games rot you (one more unbelievable than the last, no doubt). If not, then believe me when I say that should the envy of all those who had to deal with what I described above fall upon you, you’d be crushed into a paper-thin pancake, along with the rest of the planet.

Gaming really is everywhere now, and despite the wide-ranging opinions of others, I have to say that it is an art form that I truly respect.

I was a gamer.

I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

Two unreasonably large monitors.

Idolizing Ninja.

A desk set-up that would give anyone with epilepsy an instant seizure.

A pair of headphones that looked as though they were meant to protect my ears from the sound of large-scale kiloton explosions.

Wasting an entire weekend editing dumb-ass Fortnite gameplay like it was a would-be Hollywood masterpiece, when in reality getting people to watch it would be hard enough when it was free, let alone if you charged them.

I also enjoyed playing some classic games on the side on my dad’s old NES and SNES, which in my mind balanced me out by negating the effects of modern media and this somehow made me a more well-rounded individual (but which in all likelihood didn't do shit).

But I digress.

You, reader, might be wondering by now why I referred to my gaming self in the past tense.

Well, that’s because what I mentioned above is all in the past.

I am 18 years old as of writing this.

I haven’t “gamed” in almost three years.

So, what do you think happened?

Did I get addicted and was shipped off by my parents to some institution to get cleansed?

No.

Before you jump the gun, I have to stop you right now and just say that no I did not get scared straight as some parents like to say.

I mean…at least not in the traditional sense.

The event in question happened around April 2020.

Lockdown.

I was a stupid-ass sixteen-year-old, and, to me, Lockdown was the blessing from God I had been constantly nagging him for only he knows how long.

I had unlimited free time to game to my heart’s content, and I resolved that I would make my gaming channel, with a grand total of five subscribers (all of whom I knew in my real life), take off and join the ranks of Ninja and Markplier, make millions, quit school, and prove to my dumb parents (who I love very much now) how profitable gaming was and how I wasn’t just rotting my brain all this time.

See?

I wasn’t exaggerating when I said I was a stupid-ass sixteen-year-old.

So, instead of doing my fucking homework, all of my time was spent screen recording the worst gameplay of Fortnite and PubG imaginable while my crackling voice commented and screamed every once in a while, editing random and sudden zoom ins, making unfunny jokes and-

Christ you get the picture.

Anyhow, despite two months of effort, I had made a grand total of one dollar from all of my videos combined and gained only one subscriber (whom I also knew in real life).

Needless to say, I was disheartened.

Was this the moment I decided to stop being a gamer?

Was what scared me straight the cruel dream-destroying reality of this world?

Nope.

I wasn’t ready to give up.

I still blindly believed in my dream.

School had just “ended” and I decided that my summer that year would be spent giving gaming my all (again).

After all, I had to justify all the F’s I had “somehow” gotten.

Anyway, I remember lying on my bed one random day and thinking hard (quite the challenge for little old sixteen-year-old me).

I knew that to get subscribers I had to do something niche.

Something that no one else was really doing, if at all.

Something unique that was sure to gain a following and that no one else could copy.

And as I lay there in bed, it suddenly hit me.

I should play games that no one else was playing.

But by that I don’t mean games that were unpopular.

I meant games no one else had access to.

It was around evening when I logged into the dark web through TOR.

Now, before I continue, let me explain something about the dark web.

99% of what you’ve heard about it on whatever creepy ass animated story or fake Creepypasta you’ve listened to is false (I hope you’re not surprised).

They’re false because they portray the dark web as a minefield that will pretty much fuck you up immediately, a place full of drugs and hitmen and fucked up individuals.

While you can find those things on there, you don’t just stumble onto them as a first timer like all these stories talk about. They’re right about lists of .onion links, but you can call bullshit when they say they randomly clicked a link and found themselves in a digital hell of some kind.

The dark web, if I had to compare it to something, is a lot like 4chan.

Just an endless collection of message boards.

It’s actually pretty boring, because you can’t just access the (hard) drugs and the hitmen and the snuff videos right off the bat.

It’s like being admitted into a secret society.

The ones who are in scope you out after you’ve shown interest on a message board and determine whether or not they should let you in.

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They then basically hack your private life for two reasons:

1. To make sure you’re someone who can be trusted
2. To use as leverage in case you decide to snitch.

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Besides that, it’s just weirdos talking on forums about whatever bullshit’s going through their mind or you just ordering some weed.

Basic stuff really.

Well, I’m no script kiddie, so needless to say, I knew my way pretty well around these parts.

I used a non-window operating system.

Disabled all my scripts and FLASH.

Booted up TAILS.

Had a custom VPN I had someone whip up for me.

The whole One-hundred yards.

On the day in question, a hot summer day, I logged into a chatroom and posted a query asking about any interesting games I could play, shit I couldn’t find on STEAM or on the surface web.

The conversation went something like this.

Query: Yo Im looking for some interesting video games to play. Shit u can only find here in this part of the internet

It wasn’t long before I received a message back from some dude with the handlebar “John”.

John: WDYM?

Me: Ive got a fucking game addiction and stuff on STEAM no longer floats my boat. I want to know if I can find any “niche” good stuff here

John: Ah, how interesting :) I can tell that ur an amateur minus script kiddie (since U don’t know what Im about to tell u but since you seem to know how to keep urself safe here). As you know, games are an expression of humanity, as is this corner of the internet. People want to express themselves, but sometimes those expressions are not appreciated on the surface web, so they post their “artwork” here, where like minded individuals dwell. Games are no exception. I can send you a link if you want.

Me: Whut U gonna show me some “SAD SATAN” shit? I already know about that bro. Stupid ass fucking game and I don’t want my precious PC to get any fucking viruses from something a damn fucking pleb made.

John: No no, this is the real deal. “The Community” suffered quite a reputation blow from the leak of that game. A real piece of shit made by a pieceof shit whohad no feel for art. Luckily, its developers have been working hard to cleanse the palettes of us, the consumers, from that shit fest. Are you still interested?

Me: Ofc

And just like that, he sent me a link and logged off.

Christ…this link was something I had never seen before.

It was a .onion link, but everything before that was just a jumbled mess of letters, words, numbers, digits, random punctuation marks, and a few weird ass lines that made text distorted (those who’ve watched Game Theory videos on YouTube will know what I’m talking about). It wasn’t so much a link as much as it was a paragraph of the strangest collection of text imaginable.

I’m sure everyone reading this knows where the fuck this is going.

With (and I am talking in a very literal, no exaggeration manner) absolutely no fucking hesitation, I clicked the link, and just like that I’d unwittingly stepped into hell, just like the so many unfortunate protagonists of all those fake dark web stories.

The website took three solid Mississippi seconds to load, and did so just as I was about to opt out.

Just thinking about it gives me the impression that damn thing knew I was about to leave and didn’t want me to.

The screen immediately went black, and just when regret was about to hit me, a text box came up.

“Welcome dear player to our humble website. We appreciate your patronage and hope you will be able to enjoy our extensive collection of free games made by the finest in the industry. Happy playthrough. Sincerely, MOD.”

The message made me feel uncomfortable.

I know, right?

Countless times of wafting through the cesspool of humankind and a polite message is what gets under my skin?

Exactly.

My parents were asleep, I’d just drank a can of MONSTER and a can of RED BULL, and I was given the prospect of entertainment until dawn.

And so I took it.

I clicked on the search bar, but saw that I couldn’t actually search anything.

Instead, a list of categories popped up.

What were the categories?

Rape?

Murder?

TorturePorn?

Nope.

None of those.

Every single one was plain as can be.

POV

Action.

Suspense.

That kind of stuff.

You could select multiple categories and then hit search.

I chose the following combination for my first game:

2D --> Detective --> Mystery --> Choice-based

Simple, right?

I pressed “ENTER” and waited.

It seemed to last forever, but finally, the churning wheel of loading disappeared and I was met with a retro home screen.

The title read, in all caps, “INTERROGATION OF FINNEUS WHEATLEY” in a strangely well-chosen color palette that didn’t make me want to vomit.

Needless to say, sixteen-year-old me was stoked.

I thought I’d just hit a video game jackpot.

Fantastic games too niche for the mainstream all at my fingertips for absolutely free.

In case you’ve been wondering, no, I don’t have any footage of these games. My plan was to master their gameplay and then record it so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself like I had done before.

Yes, I do regret it tremendously, but what are you going to do?

Sue me?

This game, unlike a standard NES one, allowed me to use my mouse, so with that, I clicked “START”.

The screen went black, and a new image loaded on my monitor (the one that was logged in the dark web).

It looked like a photograph which had been pixelated.

Imagine the ending picture of the original “Resident Evil 2” on the PS1, which shows what happened to all of the characters after the main story line concludes, and that will give you a pretty good idea of what I saw.

A young man with a poker face seemed to be sitting before a metal table, utterly motionless.

Below him was the word “ASK HIM”.

Without warning, two black bars with white letters appeared under it.

The one on my left read “why he called you there” while the one on my right read “how he’s feeling”.

I was dumbfounded, so I just clicked the option on the right because I was curious.

The two bars along with “ASK HIM” disappeared, and a large rectangular speech bubble, with an arrow pointed at this “Finneu’s” mouth, replaced them.

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“I’m feeling fine detective. Thank you for showing concern and for arriving so quickly.”

​

The large speech bubble disappeared, and the “ASK HIM” prompt came back up again, but now there was only one bar under it, the one that said “why he called you there”.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued at that moment.

I’d expected to come across some sort of Sad Satan clone or morbid images or whatever shit idiots think would be fitting for the dark web.

Instead, I had seemingly stumbled upon a hidden gem.

I clicked the bar and the speech bubble came right back up.

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“I know I am going to die detective. I know he will kill me. I find it only appropriate that I give my last confession before I am taken.”

​

The speech box disappeared and two bars came up again.

The one on the right now read “who he thinks wants to kill him” and the one on the left read “Why he killed Sam”.

I was tempted to just choose right but I just really wanted to get things over with.

The following are all the responses I chose with his answers in bold.

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“Why he killed Sam.”

“As you very well know, Sam was my first time. I wanted my first time to be special so I chose Sam because he was special. It was that simple.”

​

​

“How he killed Sam”

“Come on detective! Surely you must know already!”

​

​

“How he killed Sam”

“Alright alright. As you wish. I knew Sam lived home alone so I enacted my perfect murder. The perfect murder isn’t about how you kill someone. It’s about how you cover it up, and I knew that disposal would be my biggest problem. So I planned things out. I started to work at a taxidermy shop in town with my son, under the guise that I was being a good supporter for him to get some good extracurricular activity for his college applications. Mr. Flank, the owner of the shop, mainly made animal skeletal models and shipped them internationally to institutes of education. You know how he’d extract the bones so cleanly? There are special beetles called Dermestid Beetles that eat only flesh. People like Mr. Flank have entire containers full of them. They just throw in the carcass part and wait for the beetles to eat it clean. I found a big enough tray, and stole some beetle eggs from Mr. Flank. I raised them all on my own patiently. Once they were fully grown, I put an ad on Craigslist for a child skeleton model.

After all that was said and done, I just lured Sam down, killed him, and threw him into the vat. A week I waited, and the beetles had done their job. I then shipped the skeleton off, and out of my life for good.

Simple as that.

I then just burned the beetles along with Sam’s clothes, buried his organs out in the forest along with a few worms for good measure, and that was that. It was as if nothing had ever happened.”

​

​

“how he got caught”

“Just thinking about it makes me mad. Turns out you have to use Hydrogen Peroxide to preserve bones so they don’t yellow over time. What happened in my case is that the person who received the skeleton was a medical expert and immediately realized that he’d just received a real child skeleton. The rest, I’m sure you know. A fun experiment that ended up biting me in the ass.

The bar on the right disappeared and the remaining bar now read “Why he needed to speak to you.”

​

This is the response I got when I answered.

“You see detective, I’m afraid I’ve been a tad dishonest with everyone. I’ll cut to the chase and just say that little Sam wasn’t my first. Nor my second. Nor my third. He was number thirty-one. Normally, I’d just cut up the bones and bury them. Sam, on the other hand, was a special case, as I thought it would be a neat idea for me to ship my ‘friends’ out. But alas look at where it got me.”

​

​

“Where the hell the others are.”

“I’ll be frying tomorrow, so I might as well say: I ain’t telling you squat chief. Just wanted you to know. You can doubt me, but you can’t doubt all those other missing posters. I am a fair man however, and I will say that I have mapped all of their coordinates on a special sheet of paper that you can only find in genesis. That’s all detective”

The screen immediately went black, leaving me in total darkness for a moment.

When it came back up, I saw that the style of the game had changed.

It now looked like…”Earthbound”?

I saw a sprite that looked like a stereotypical detective – trench coat and hat and all – standing outside what seemed to be a police station. The palette of my surroundings was a dark blue and it appeared to be raining heavily.

I used my keyboard, and found that I could move around by pressing the standard arrow keys.

On the far corner of the screen was an arrow that pointed to something beyond it, and I followed it.

I found myself being guided through a deserted town, and without warning, the arrow suddenly pointed up.

It was a house.

A really quaint house.

I entered it, and the screen went black for a moment before I found myself inside the house, and I have to say, it was a real pig hut. It gave off the impression of a drug den, a place even pigs wouldn’t want to live in.

I walked around and found that I could explore the whole house.

The arrow was gone at this point, so I didn’t have a clue where I was supposed to go next, but as I passed through a hanging portrait, the only decent thing in the whole place, a prompt appeared imploring me to “inspect” it. I did so and a pixelated photograph appeared, just like how the game was before. It showed a middle-aged man who I immediately recognized as Finneus. He was standing behind a young man who looked a bit like him, albeit younger.

I understood now that I was in his house and it didn’t take me long to realize that the basement was where I needed to go.

I found another door, and I was able to enter it.

Now, my detective sprite was in a large and dark basement.

It was complete and utter silence throughout the entire game.

But I only noticed it at this point.

I walked around for a bit, but no prompt appeared.

But then I noticed a container, a large sprawling one, right in the middle of the room, and it caught my eye.

I approached it, and the long-awaited prompt appeared.

I pressed it, but then, without warning, another sprite suddenly came out of nowhere.

The screen went black and I found myself in the same style of gameplay as before. I recognized the sprite that appeared before me as Finneus’s son.

​

The prompt read “What are you doing here?”

​

There was only one bar, which is the one I clicked.

​

“I came here to find the truth.”

​

The screen went black for a second and the image changed. I was now facing the container.

The screen went black for another second, and the container was open in the picture that came up.

Even though it was pixelated, the detail almost made me vomit.

It was another body, fresh, covered by what I assumed to be beetles.

A single white piece of paper lay on it.

The screen went black and I could now see the paper.

There were locations and coordinates on the paper, about five.

The screen went black, and I was now facing Finneus’s son again, but now he was holding a gun pointed right at me.

​

“I knew daddy wouldn’t go quietly like I told him to,” he said , “and while I am sorry for doing this Mister Forem, I would be remiss if I didn’t reiterate that, unlike my father, I’m not made for jail. I take after my mother, after all.”

​

The screen went orange, and then blank.

Two prompts appeared.

“Play Again” and “Exit”

I clicked exit.

I laid back in my chair and let everything that happened sink in.

It really was like a high.

Like drinking yourself to a stupor on good alcohol instead of the cheap kind.

It felt good, but I had this feeling that ruined that particular “high” for me.

This gnawing feeling that I just had to act on if I wanted to relax.

I went to my other monitor (the one logged into the surface web) and typed “FINNEUS WHEATLEY” in Google.

I just expected some forum links discussing the game, but instead, I got an eyeful of news reports and archives about “FINNEUS WHEATLEY: THE GRANDVILLE FLESH REAPER”.

I read everything.

I read how he’d killed a local and sweet little innocent boy and had nearly gotten away with the perfect crime.

I read how the detective who last spoke with him has never been found.

And I read how he was survived by one son, Michael Wheatley, who preferred to stay anonymous.

My high went from me feeling as though my skull was full of clouds to feeling like my brain had been replaced by a bowling ball.

I rubbed my eyes hard and wondered what I should do.

Those coordinates were surely fake, I told myself.

Just the fan fiction of a serial killer aficionado.

That’s all there was to it.

Like a junkie for a fix, I was hungry for more.

My senses were screaming at me but I refused to listen.

3D --> POV --> Suspense --> Exploration

I hit enter, and just like before, my screen went black before a menu popped up.

“VOYER’S POV”

The only other thing was a “START” button, which I also clicked with no hesitation.

The screen went dark, and a loading wheel appeared with the words “searching for a server” below it.

I waited, honestly oblivious to what I was about to be thrown into.

The spinning loading wheel disappeared, and a view appeared on my monitor.

It was a first-person perspective of a backyard at night. At the bottom of the screen, there was a piece of text which read “Quebec, Canada”.

I am ashamed to admit it, but I really did feel intrigued.

Especially by how realistic the graphics looked to me, not just for a free game on the internet but for a video game in general.

I tried moving around with my mouse and keyboard keys, but nothing worked.

It was only then that I noticed the bar at the bottom of my screen.

A text bar.

In that bar, I, without much thought, typed in “Go to shed”.

To my surprise, the camera turned and started to move towards the shed in the far corner of the yard.

I typed “Open Shed” and a gloved hand appeared on the screen and opened it.

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“Enter Shed”

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“Take dagger”

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“Exit shed”

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It felt exhilarating. Much better than “Until Dawn”. A true update of old text-adventure games.

The character was doing everything I told him to.

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“Enter house”

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“Go upstairs”

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The camera followed all of my commands.

I was now in a bedroom.

A girl, about my age, the one I’d seen in the family pictures on my way up the stairs, lay sleeping before me.

She seemed so real on my screen that I had to blink.

A prompt came up at that very moment as I sat in my dark room.

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“End it?”

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Right now, all I can do is swear on my honor, my life, and the lives of my entire family that I thought that prompt meant to end the game.

That, and that only, is why I typed “yes”.

The power plug of my monitor was pulled not a moment after I witnessed the gloved hand plunge the knife deep into the chest of that girl.

The last thing I saw on that damned thing were her eyes fluttering open in an instant.

Like a dam, they held back a contagious fear that no one, certainly not her, should ever feel.

On the floor I collapsed and on the floor I cried and on the floor I slept.

The last thought that went through my head before I lost consciousness was “it’s just a game”, but my nightmares certainly didn't want me to believe that.

I awoke that morning, about four hours later, and I barely had the strength to stand up again.

Seeing my monitors made tears come to my eyes again and I still didn’t know why.

I tried to calm down and thought I knew the perfect way to do so.

I turned on my other monitor and hopped on Google again, my previous search related to Finneus Wheatley inflicting a whole other wave of disgust back.

I just searched “Quebec, Canada” and went to “News”.

And what do you think I found as the top story?

A news article that featured the house I had seen at night in that “game”, only now it was covered by police tape, and one of the family photographs I had seen inside that house while climbing the long staircase glared at me from behind my screen.

The girl, smiling brightly in the photograph, had been killed, survived only by the others in that picture.

I know I’m next if I report this.

I know they know everything they need to know about me.

All I can do for now, before I turn in the evidence, is to be a son that my parents can be proud of, so that when I am taken, I can at least leave knowing that their time raising me had not been wasted.

To you, you know who you are, reading this, it has already been done.

There’s nothing you can do.

Your operation will receive quite the blow, much like Playpen.

I’m ready for you.

Just please don’t go after my loved ones.

They have nothing to do with this.

If you can promise me that, I’ll go quietly.

Mom.

Dad.

I'm sorry.

Love, James.