LABYRINTH

I am not sure who is ever going to read this, but here it goes.

When we found this place, we had high ambitions and absurd beliefs. It was a broken toy, helding a lot of promise in the shapes of its to-be. We truly believed we could buld something novel out of it. I mean, it made sense. It had everything, and everything could be spun into new directions.

A multiplayer experience, first and foremost: answering to that cheap desire for human connection that gave way to present horrors. The comfort of another human being, at the safe distance of a body abstracted? We got you.

And a game, of course. Something that calls back to the Internet of past ages. Trying to get that old-school vibe just right - at the time, nostalgia seemed to be a cash-printing machine. And the place was huge already. We were not even sure about what was in there.

But of course, it needed a core. And seeing as how things were, we found it in words.

Good stories, bad stories, deep thoughts, weird ideas, anything really - all together, scattered around in a place built for obscurity rather than fame. We hoped people would try doing it differently. Leave your solitary pinnacles, children! Come write on the labyrinth's wall! Come find what others have written there.

That last part was a bit smudge, even for a tongue-in-cheek reference, but felt harmless. And yet, I think that is when everything started going sideways. A stupid joke she made on a Sunday evening, which the place was more than happy to accomodate. In any case, there is little I can do at this point. Pain and fear came and went, and now I am left with little more than an impossible choice. Which I am already making, I suppose.

So, the thing. There is a tutorial embedded in the first five or six rooms. Just create an account, login, read that and go from there.

I hope you will use this place as intended. I hope you will fill it up with your writings, with random thoughts and mad ramblings, with poetry and literature and dreams and horrors, all painted in blood on this forgotten corner of the Internet. I hope you will deliver your secrets to its depths, abandon them like unwanted children. Someone might find them. They might care where you didn't.

I hope you won't get lost in here. I hope you won't dig too deep. But this contradiction I cannot defeat, as otherwise I wouldn't leave this up. And still. What else can I do?

Safe travels, friend. May you never know her name.

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LABYRINTH is a textual multiplayer game, a social space and a novel. Discord community: https://discord.gg/b8RNxXW6