The Depths

Ever heard of a game called "The Depths?" It's not surprising if you haven't; it was never released to the public. Bootleg copies were spread in the United States from roughly 2006-2007, but it was completely gone by 2008. To date, only a few people have reported knowing of the game and even fewer have actually played it. It is still unknown who developed the game or where it came from, for details are not found anywhere within the installed files.

Additionally, no one has ever finished the game due to the gratuitous amounts of scarring images portrayed and the trauma that followed. The following is a description of "The Depths," from those who have played it.

The users who had successfully installed the game said that after installation, their computers never functioned the same. Freezes, blue screens, and file corruption were common after playing. The only way to remove the game was to wipe your hard drive. There was no deletion of the files, no uninstalling, nothing. It would stay on the computer, never leaving. Some users even reported seeing the file being duplicated to different parts of their computer - a cloning of sorts - making the file appear in unwanted folders.

The setting of the game is supposedly a mountaintop, as it is a snowy environment and whenever the player would walk too far, they would fall and die. Not much can be seen in the beginning, just snow. An endless display of falling snow. This is what frustrated players the most. They would try walking in every direction but find only more snow, until they fell off the endless array of white and died. This is where most players stopped playing, though the persistent gamers found an alternative.

It took multiple deaths, but players eventually found where they were supposed to go: down. As soon as you spawn, you can look down and see a bolted door. Opening it takes you to the next sequence of the game.

As soon as you open the door, the player starts to fall into a pit of darkness. It is pitch black and all that can be heard is the sounds of the wind as you fall. After about twenty seconds of nonstop falling, you see light at the end of the tunnel. The player reaches the bottom of the pit and as soon as they touch down, a scream can be heard. The player is now in a large room with no doors or exits, just the light next to them and the tunnel above them.

The walls are covered in blood, the light is flickering, and sounds of faint mumbling are playing in the background. This area is where most players quit - either out of boredom or fear.

There is nothing the player can do at this point except to walk around the room, looking for whatever it is they are supposed to do next. More sounds begin to play while walking: wind blowing, water dripping, and growling. Players usually hear the growling behind them and, in fright, turn around rather quickly. When the player turns around, they see, for a split second, a dark figure run away into the darkness of the room.

This occurs every time the player makes a sudden look behind them. Touching the dimly lit walls makes the game freeze for a moment before returning to normal. More and more sounds start to become audible and eventually piano banging and screaming become more and more frequent.

The volume of the noises increase over time and some users try to mute their sound, but can't; the noises continue playing over and over until they are at an ear-piercingly high level. All players at this point experienced the same thing. Their game flashed, their mouse wouldn't work, and the room would suddenly be full of dead bodies. Lifeless corpses, flashing out of nowhere, surround the room and pile up until the player is practically covered in bodies. Each one of the corpses are mumbling indistinguishable words.

Their mouths blurt nonsense while their eyes appear to be open, but are pitch black. The player is forced to stay with the talking corpses for they are stuck and cannot move. The only thing they can do is look around them and see the bodies staring at them and talking in a foreign, demonic tone.

At this point, the player is unable to pause or close the game. They can only look and see the corpses speak to the player in gibberish words. This only happened for a short period of time, but by this point, most of the remaining users had already shut down their computer. The corpses start to eventually chant their nonsense in unison. In one last scream, they all spread their mouths wide open to impossible lengths. It looks as if their jaws should break as they all scream at an alarmingly high volume.

The collective screams of the bodies gets louder and louder, and more distorted. As soon as the screams become ear-wrenchingly unbearable, the screen cuts to black and the screams suddenly stop. This darkness lasts for a very long time. The player starts to hear someone laughing close to them. The laugh is off, though; it sounds as if someone has messed with the audio. The laugh gets closer and closer until finally, it ends with one final "HA!" playing loudly. This noise is accompanied by a picture of an old man's face, cripped with age, and taking up nearly the entire screen. He has his mouth wide open... smiling.

This frame only appears for split second, however, and afterward, the darkness ends. Although there is only a sliver of light, the player can look down and see their body tied to a wooden pole.

This part of the game is what users described as the worst. The light above them, shining onto the player, is confined to a small circle around the player. Small shadows start fading in and out of the circle onto the ground; the shadows look like mangled and distorted bodies. Finally, footsteps are heard. The old man from the photo can be seen in full now as he walks toward your pinned body. He is short and bald; his face is down and he is wearing only ripped pants.

His torso is almost completely torn in half. The only thing keeping his body from not splitting in two is the thread of skin connecting his neck to his head. His left leg is replaced with a long, rusty, metal tube. As he inches toward you with scissors in his hands, the scraping of the tube against the floor gives the player a nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. When he is right next to you, he looks up; the player can see his face in full.

The man's face looks the same as it did when it flashed before. His eyes seem to be missing and his mouth is open, smiling. It is covered in blood - blood that looks days old and dried out. He starts rotating his head as he stares at you with his mouth open. The player can only look around them, unable to move. The man lifts up his crippled arm, holding scissors, and jams them into your body. Blood spurts out of your body in abnormally large amounts. The few players who experienced this scene described it as horrifyingly realistic.

The man then takes the scissors and brings them up to your neck, leaving a zipper-like effect on your chest. The player's body is cut wide open and guts pour out all over the old man's torso. He then removes the scissors, reaches to the floor, and picks up a mirror. He turns the mirror towards you. Although the player's face cannot be seen in the mirror, the player's chest - now cut in half - can be seen in its full gruesomeness.

The man then drops the mirror, reaches down once more, and picks up an axe. He swings the axe at the pole you are tied to, multiple times, until you and the pole you are attached to fall to the ground.

The player is now staring at the ceiling, listening to the old man laugh. He kneels down in front of your face, mouth still open, and let's out one last "HA!" He then stands up and walks around the player with his axe in hand, dragging his metal leg across the floor as he walks. When he reaches the player's feet, he lets out three words in a disgusting, repulsive voice, "Just... like..." He raises the axe above his head, stares at you, and rotates his head. He yells his final words as he strikes the axe down into your knee. "ME!"

The game continued. Few players remained up to this point.

After the old man has chopped off your leg, he continues to laugh and turns his head. the blood from your wound sprays all over his split torso while all the player can do is look around and see their mangled corpse, tied to the bloodstained pole. The man then drops his axe. He comes right to your face, kneels down, and opens his mouth to impossible lengths. He seems to swallow you.

The game stutters for a moment as the old man's mouth is all that can be seen by the player. Instead of cutting to darkness, you are instantly placed in another scene; this time, players were in a long, dark hallway lit only by torches on the walls. The player is limping.

The player can only walk in one direction - forward - towards the end of what seems like an infinite hallway. With each step the player takes, the camera shakes and gets blurry until, finally, nothing can be made out except dim circles of light. Through this blurriness, a small figure is seen in the distance. It looks like the same figure seen in the shadows of the room before; it is disfigured and deformed. Instantly, the figure then jumps into the player's view as the screen becomes clear once more.

From the few players that remained, each one reported seeing a different figure jump towards them. It was, to each of them, though, horrifying. The fear they felt in that one moment was indescribable, so overwhelming that nearly all of them quit the game at that very moment. The users who played that scene reported that the game had short-term effects on their mental health, but no long-term repercussions. To this day, no known user has played past that point.