The Game - Chapter 2 – The Game Learns Your Name

The cartridge powered on the moment I entered the room the next evening.

The console was off. The controller lay unplugged. Yet the screen glowed, showing the same forest clearing. My character stood exactly where I had left them. A new line of text crawled across the bottom of the screen.

WHY DID YOU LEAVE, MARK?

I hadn’t typed my name anywhere.

I should have pulled the cartridge out then. Instead, I sat down.

The forest had changed. Paths that weren’t there before branched outward, leading to structures that looked like corrupted versions of houses—walls bending inward, doors opening into darkness. As I explored, the game began to mirror details from my life. A calendar sprite on a wall displayed today’s date. A radio in one room crackled with audio that sounded eerily like my own voicemail greeting, warped and slowed.

Every so often, the screen glitched violently, frames stuttering as if something else were trying to render beneath the game. During one freeze, I caught a single frame of a photograph—my living room, viewed from the corner near the ceiling.

I checked the corner instinctively. Nothing was there.

The character in the game stopped responding to inputs. They turned again, locking eyes with me.

DON’T TURN AROUND.

The lights in my apartment flickered.

I did exactly what the game told me not to do.

Nothing was behind me. But when I turned back to the screen, my character was gone. The forest clearing was empty, save for footprints leading straight toward the bottom edge of the display—toward me.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model