Things That Go BLEEP-BLOOP in the Night

Your humble co-narrator has been busy. Busy with video games.

It might be suspected that as far as business goes, video games might be one of the more pleasant things to be busied with. And, heck, I would have thought so too! But in playing some two dozen horror video games in rapid succession, jumping across systems and decades in a craven search for an understanding of the breadth of the matter, I fear I have begun to do immeasurable damage to my psyche.

In true Lovecraftian form, I may have unearthed secrets not fit for the gaze of man. Each of these games, after all, serves as an attack on a player’s sensibilities. To be truly afraid, something must be undone, leaving some fuse in the viewer’s lizard brain frayed and sparking. But each of these games chooses a different approach, a separate jab and feint that may be radically different from others of its kind. Put together they form a kind of onslaught upon all regions of the self, like a particularly virulent form of Neitzschean nihilism but with way way more zombies.

Like the Inuit's apocryphal hundred words for snow, I am discovering new words for FEAR.

FUN FACT: In one ten second period, Christopher Guest says "suck" four times.

These varying visions of spookiness jumble together, a melange in the slow cooker of my subconscious. These horrors take hold of me when I least expect them... I have begun to be plagued by fevered dreams! In some, I am assisted by my erstwhile companions, but often I am alone. Perhaps I am on a spaceship, or in a strange town, or confined to a mall or a haunted house. Sometimes I have a gun, or something else entirely, but often I have nothing.

In every dream I am chased by something... something inscrutiably terrible, seen only in the corners of my eyes. It looms over me, hovering, long, black finger of a forgotten god.

Is it.. Oh, God, is it? It is! IT IS!

It's an Atari 2600 Joystick!

I didn't even know they still made those.

- Rook