Welcome to Gaia! ::

Okay, yeah, now I'm leaving.

wwwwwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

Shadowlegend looks pretty good. I like the Guilty Gear reference they made in the item

Come follow me, Can.
To the top.
So all the night owls can gaze at you.

I don't really know if I wanna read something incredibly unnerving...

Well, if you don't post it soon, I'll have to read it in the morning because I'm really sleepy.
Or not.

Entering the temple made everything seem more like a Zelda game, but something strange caught my eye. Rather than the textures being worse than those in OoT, they were better. There was more detail in everything, but it was all dingy and rotten-looking. Extra polygons only served to make things look more grotesque. The random blood spatters didn't help anything either. It didn't take long for me to realize that the entire "dungeon" could hardly be called Zelda-like. Puzzles usually only consisted of pulling a lever or pressing a switch. In fact, there weren't even any sliding blocks. There were no enemies either, but the blood spaltters on the floor and walls soon served to be warnings of booby traps. Some become inescapable, and simply send you back into the darkness again. Others are escapable, but still extremely creepy and... depressing. The dungeon was riddled with the low-poly remains of old adventurers, and sometimes they even had items on them. The items could be picked up, but the inventory screen seemed unfinished, and the game only auto-equipped the first three items picked up since there was no accessible inventory screen. After several gruesome deaths and retries I find my way to a door marked with a scratched on eye, similar to the ones on the Lens of Truth and various other objects. Entering this door reveals a boss battle.

The music by this point had changed, and I only realized it by the last room. The moaning had never looped once, but still seemed to change according to the mood. A discordant violin melody started playing, but the rest of the sound remained nothing but moans, sobs, yells, and weird scratching. It was never enough to rise past the level of "background noise" but it still remained unnerving, almost as if it wasn't music at all but monsters that were wandering somewhere in the temple.

When I said entering the door revealed a boss battle, I was not entirely honest. It could only be called a boss battle by the most generous standards. It featured an empty room with the same textures on the walls as the rest of the temple. The only out of place aspect was a giant face on the other side of the room, colored as gray as the walls surrounding it. It's skin seemed stretched over it's head and lined with the wall, so it looked as if the wall was growing a face. Moss seemed to be growing over it's closed eyes and cracks were apparent everywhere on it. Still, the door back was locked and the only thing to do was approach. I did so, carefully, making sure nothing was waiting for a surprise attack. I went up to the point where I was nearly in contact with the face. Nothing. It was still there, with it's sunken eyes and cracked lips. I attacked it with my sword. The sword went through, and made an incredibly vulgar flesh ripping sound, but nothing happened. It remained there. I attacked some more, and then more, and still more, until eventually the music stopped. Soon the cacophony of violin music became even louder and the moans started up even stronger, and then something happened. In one movement it's eyes open, staring at me with dry, soulless eyeballs. And then... nothing. The music was still louder, but I continued to attack the face with no reaction, until it simply had enough, ripped to shreds, and fell away in fire, in typical Zelda fashion, revealing a door. The music had stopped. There were no more moans, screams, anything. I went through the door.

What a fool I was. That was only the tutorial.

The screen was replaced by a white screen, followed by a moment of extremely loud static. I jumped, but it was over almost instantly. The white screen was replaced by an endless desert. The ones from the image. I was in shock. By that point I was creeped out enough to turn the game off. Still, that respite didn't last long. I had nightmares of the game. Normal nightmares, nothing weird about them (it was, after all, a pretty creepy game). However what frightened me most was something I skimmed over while I played and realized afterwards. The game changed each time I started over. When I tried to take the same path through the labyrinth I always ended up lost and confused. By the time I finished I was relying only on instinct.

I kept going the next day, stopping only to eat and go to the bathroom. When I turned it on I was still at the desert, even though there was no file screen. This time it was night. I walked. Sometimes I would walk for 20 minutes only to find a half-sunken obelisk, or the ruins of what looked like some village hut. Other times there would be a skull or a few bones, but nothing more noticeable than that. Other times I would see great expanses of oasis and tropical forests. I found my first enemies here. They were similar to tektites only with larger bodies, mostly containing their large eye. They had thin, long legs and would still attack by leaping, only when they hit you they would pin you to the ground and attack. Soon the sun rose, and I continued walking. Sometimes I would find small tombs. These were almost always similar in style to the first dungeon, only without the moaning and with no bosses.

LAST SECTION

What I did find was information. Runes scribbled onto the walls that could be read. The description would almost always be vague, with phrases like "...and knowledge shall guide... way to heavens..." Sometimes they would be followed by other comments, but most writing seemed glitched and unintelligible. It seemed to be a history, though. The maps I'd sometimes find confirmed it. I simply explored, and after a while I learned to let instinct guide my way. Soon I found the next dungeon, a large pyramid rising out of the desert... upside down... Over it, straight up to the sky, was another large upside down temple. It stretched so far I couldn't see the top. But I couldn't keep going. I needed sleep again.

The next day came and I entered the dungeon. It was like all the small tombs I would find, only a bit more perilous. More bottomless pits, chasms, spike traps, and monsters this time. Long arms that would grab you from out of the wall like wallmasters, only these simply threw you into the traps, killing you. What probably used to be redeads and skeletons. At the end of this dungeon I found a large spiral staircase. I followed it up and up until I reached what seemed to be the top. It took two hours of climbing, but the time seemed to fly by. The top was merely a platform with a large ornate arrow pointing off an edge. Since there was no where else to go, I jumped. The screen again flashed white, and I was in a new area.

This went on for the next few weeks. There were many places to visit, and at times I could find the borders where one locale met another. I started to name the locations I had been to, but although I started knowing all the places intimately, there never seemed to be an end to new locations. Sometimes I would go through one door and come out on the other side of the world. Places didn't behave by constant rules of space, but it became easier to find my way regardless. Each time I revisited a place it was rearranged in a different, more navigable setup. From every corner though, I could see the tower in the distance. I quickly realized that I had not reached the top, only fallen into one of the many traps. In fact, I still have not reached the top.

In the few times I went about the real world I could feel that the game was different. It changed itself. It seemed to react to me. I was sure that a game like this should not have been able to be created. But then, they were going for a free-roaming experience more similar to the original Zelda. What if they succeeded. They created a world one could always roam. And they really did create a world. I had learned of the many gods in that land. The three goddesses who had created such a perverted physical world. The god He Who Sees, who decided to cleanse it. I still did not know my own role, but I felt that if I simply followed my instincts, I could find my goal.

That's why I'm writing this now. My instincts still tell me where to go. But it's not here. It's not in the game. I have to leave, and I will do it. But before I go, I feel that I have to leave this message for someone to find. I should warn you though. It may be a game, but it knows you are playing.

The end.

There's also one of Mario 64, and it's much, much worse. Should I post?