So I've been playing this game recently. You probably haven't heard of it. That's not a flex, either. It doesn't seem like anybody has. I barely even heard of it.

Somebody on Reddit mentioned it on r/creepygaming, in a thread sprawling out of another post's comments. I'm not really much for Reddit, but I do go sometimes just to see what people are talking about. Alternate reality games. Lost media. Soviet-era Russian architecture. That sort of thing.

The commenter didn't have much to say in their recommendation, simply that the game was “So fucken weird” and “Kinda creepy.” Then dropped a link. I perked up immediately, obviously.

Soon I wandered over to itch.io to look into the developer. Their account was named Lost103 and they had a black circle for a profile picture. Very vague. Very creepy. The game didn't have a name, by the looks of it, listed as simply 103_apartment.exe. The dev's Itch page didn't offer much more context about the project, either. Just a few screenshots, a link to the file, and a description.

I can't find my way out of this building. Every door just opens to a new hallway. Nobody outside can see me. I don't know if I'm alone anymore.

I think I'm scared of knowing.

When I open the program, a black screen pops up to fill my monitor. No title screen, no menu, no options. No buttons for saving or exiting the game. What little there is to see consists of a simple health meter and an inventory for items on the side of the screen. Clicking around the screen brings up a series of photos, each labeled for their location within the space they occupy.

Down a long cold hallway. Click. A heavy metal door. Click again. A drafty exterior. An outdoor staircase. A grimy room. Click. Click. Click.

It's…a little familiar. Like I've been here before. Or I used to live here.

In fact, I used to live in unit 103.

Sounds strange, right? Sounds like the premise of a creepypasta? Or a short horror film? Maybe the topic of an overproduced YouTube video essay?

Yeah. That's because it's not real.

Well, the game isn't real, or the story about the mysterious Itch page. There are certainly hundreds of purposefully obscure and creepy Itch pages out there, hosting all manner of weird and creepy games. Roam120 and 0_abyssalSomewhere leap to mind immediately. But this game, 103_apartment.exe, is not one of them.

I should know. I'm the one (not) making it.

I'm kind of obsessed with video games. Not playing them, per se, because I only have so many hours in the day. Rather, I'm obsessed with what video games represent. Digital spaces. Artificial places. A collection of mechanics that create a unique context for an aesthetic experience.

You kind of just…surrender yourself to a game. You know? Not so much when it comes to sprawling AAA games, with all their exorbitant costs and photorealistic graphical fidelity, such that they need to make their labor and marketing costs back at launch. You pretty much know what you're going to get, because it's a corporate product designed to make money.

You're…safe. Comfortable.

I mean old games. Small games. Cheaper games. Weirder games. Games made by lean teams or solo developers. You turn it on, you learn its rules, and you play by them. Whatever world the game exists in, whatever mechanical context it operates within, you take it as it comes. You don't get to ask questions. If you don't accept the game on its terms, you can't play. It's that simple.

I admire game devs. Truly. I don't think I have the brain for this kind of stuff, so I'm really fascinated by what people can make with engines and code. The way it makes me feel, the presentation of the world and its rules, it's something that I really want to try and recreate in other mediums.

That's why fake video games are such a hobby of mine. I've talked about this sort of thing before. You probably know some of them. Petscop. Diminish. Valle Verde. Plastiboo's Vermis series of fake game guides.

You can learn all about this and more in Eyepatch Wolf's video essay below.

The fiction is of the game as an object. An unplayable thing that's so close you can almost touch it, but can't. It looks like a game, has the aesthetics of a game, but can only be experienced passively like any non-interactive work. And it fascinates me endlessly.

To make something that feels like a digital space, an artificial place, that you surrender yourself to as a viewer.

To accept what it wants to show you, as you imagine yourself navigating its architecture through mouse clicks and key presses.

To make you long to play a game you can't. Or to fear the contents of a game that you will never be able to experience.

That, to me, is a strange yet delicious endeavor. One that I decided to pursue for myself, rather than sitting on the sidelines as a passive enjoyer.

Something that I've been thinking about lately is the function of art as a mode of participation.

If you've been following along with this newsletter for any length of time, you probably know that all I do is talk about art. That, in and of itself, is art. By writing through my thoughts and feelings on a piece and how it fits into my life at that moment in time, I'm finding things to say about the world. I'm participating in broader discussions about the art at hand. The artist. The genre. The medium. Et cetera, et cetera. I write it, you read it, you have your own feelings, and we're having a dialog through characters and symbols.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped talking about my own art. That's because I wasn't making any. Not really, anyway. Nothing finished. Nothing coherent or tangible. Just drafts of things, mostly. Pieces of a larger story told across scraps of notebook paper and digital files.

There were different reasons for that. Some of them were better than others. The short version of the story is that everything I was working on was still too raw, unprocessed and unrefined, to push through to a conclusion. A longer version entails a lot more personal struggle with my art, what I'm doing with it, what it says, and what I'm trying to say with it.

The result of this, however you arrive, is a sense of absence. You aren't speaking, aren't engaging, if you aren't actively creating what you want to say. Conversations are unheard, words left unspoken, because you simply have nothing within you to speak aloud.

It's…a cold sort of feeling, I find.

But that's not very fun to talk about. What I want to talk about instead is why I started taking photos.

For the last eight years, my girlfriend Melissa and I (and my mother-in-law, too) have lived in subsidized city housing. It's a little block of apartment buildings on a plot of swampy land, surrounded by the offices of city- and county-run social programs. Our building is a pretty typical mid-century, low-income Florida structure, with a once-sunny tan exterior and a smattering of palm trees outside to hide the decades of wear and tear.

Everything inside is concrete, steel, and artificial light. Think of the nondescript utility of military barracks or dormitories. It makes for a sturdy shelter during hurricane season, but often a pretty bleak place to spend time otherwise. To make things worse, the spaces are…odd. It's an old building that's seen many occupants, owners, and uses. Functionality comes and goes with the times. The spaces that connect corridors of units are large and hollow, stripped of any furniture or sense of human comfort.

A hallway is a transitory space, sure. The same goes for an elevator bank or lobby. But strange corners for fixtures that no longer exist leave you a little confused. Long stretches of windowless hall feel like a permanent night. Doorways open to short, sharp corridors with new rows of doors locked to everyone but the maintenance staff. There are weird, seemingly arbitrary little places to hide in if you know where to look.

And that's a bit eerie, to say the least. To have the knowledge, through rote memory and years of walking the artificial day of rambling corridors, that someone could be standing in a corner that shouldn't even be there. To know this, because you have stood in those corners when no one else was around, just to see what an imagined observer would see.

I work from home, after all. The building is almost completely empty during the day. There's no one to observe or to observe me. No one observes the building but me, to take in all its strangeness. And after living here for so many years, just being weird in weird spaces, I finally decided to start taking photos.

I'm not a photographer the same way I'm not a game developer. I have only a Samsung phone camera and some basic image editing apps. My laptop suffered heat death a while back, and otherwise I have a tablet that I use for reading. There hasn't been a real need for better equipment, so I just don't have it. I taught myself what little I know about photography by taking pictures of dolls and miniatures for fun since sometime in 2023. What little I know about lighting, composition, and color grading comes from the handful of film classes I took in community college.

But since January of this year, I've been possessed by a need to document the building. I drop my phone in my pocket to take out the trash or get the mail. Then I walk up and down the stairs to see what I find. Traveling empty halls. Investigating uncomfortable corners. Finding the angles that feel the most inhospitable, the most inhuman. I never have a plan when I leave my apartment. I just hunt down the shots that make the familiar seem incomprehensible.

In that time, I've graduated from editing and posting these shots to creating short films and artifacts with them. That's what I call them, anyway, these artifacts from games that don't exist. The style I'm trying to recall is a 90s point-and-click PC game, as if shot on an ancient Nokia flip phone or the last gasps of a dying camcorder. Think Myst if it was found footage.

I assemble my photos into a loose narrative, put them through rounds of editing to make them look as off-putting as possible, and draft some lines of narration. I make slides of the apartment in a grimy lo-fi heads up display and stitch them together in the Canva app on my phone. The effect is stilted and cold, as if you're just clicking through screens of a game you don't know how to play. It's pleasantly off-putting. I enjoy it quite a bit.

The core focus of the project is the relationship between the narrator and the apartment building they're trapped inside of. How I arrive there is merely a matter of taking photos to see what sticks. What can be combined and recontextualized in service of a narrative. It's just intuition and plain luck, honestly. The visuals are minimal. The sound design is all ambient drone and ASMR sounds, culminating in small crescendos that break the tension before cutting to black. The story is tenuous at best and driven by the mood of the photos and what I'm able to capture in the moment.

Is it original? No. We're post-Backroomscore. Post-liminal space aesthetic moodboards. Post-Doctor Nowhere, -Spencer Lackey, -Molly Moon, -The Obelisk. There is a glut of real (for real) games on Steam and itch.io that play the way I'm gesturing toward. Minimal liminal horror with a degraded lo-fi aesthetic and ambient sounds is about as played out as it gets in online spaces.

But I want to put my own take out there, as a person who has moved through these spaces for the last few decades. My perspective is rooted in my tactile experience of clicking the chunky old mouse at the family computer. The muddy output of my dad's handheld camcorder, recorded and re-recorded on the same handful of old VHS tapes. The unease of digital spaces on the CRT screen, with opaque mechanics and seemingly arbitrary rules. The reality of living within inhospitable architecture, as if the building is ambivalent about you at best, and actively antagonistic at worst.

This is all a part of me, at the end of the day. It's my adult home. It's my childhood memories. It's the ceaseless march of technological adaptation across my nearly four decades of life.

Whether I am or not, I feel like I'm contributing to a conversation again. These silent years shed like a winter coat. Taking photos and creating small, urban horrors with what I find feels like showing up in the world again. Perhaps it isn't, given the tiny scope and reach of this project. That's okay, too. At the end of the day, this has been an opportunity to challenge myself and create in an entirely different medium.

Even if it doesn't mean anything to anyone but me, it's good to feel like I'm out there. Just me, running around my apartment with my phone camera, and learning to make something of it as I go.