Gaming: This Horror Game Built From The Bones Of An Abandoned Fps Server...
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
Before I played No Players Online, I knew nothing about it, except that it was a horror game set in a server for an abandoned multiplayer FPS. In some ways it is exactly that, but in others it is not really that at all. If that description seems confounding, then it is only accurate to my experience with this deeply strange game, which is at once a fairly derivative horror experience and one of the oddest puzzlers I've ever played.
Even the history of No Players Online is confusing. I've been vaguely aware of the game for years, but it turns out that the No Players Online I was familiar with is not the No Players Online I just played. The commercial version that launched late last year and costs $15 is based upon a free, short game released back in 2019, developed by Adam Pype with sound design by Viktor Kraus and additional art by Ward Dheer.
Like the new version, the original game centred around an abandoned FPS server, with the player partaking in a solo round of capture the flag as strange events unfolded. Available for free on itch, No Players Online proved unexpectedly popular, to the point that a small Easter Egg Pype added to the game convinced fans that No Players Online had hidden depths.
As it happens, it didn't. But Pype seized the opportunity, adding secrets and extras in and around the game, riffing on the mysteries its community had imagined. This culminated in an ARG that involved supplementary games and a poem hidden in the depths of the real forests of Belgium.
The commercial version of No Players Online, which has been in development since 2023, builds the experience out even further. Now the eerie multiplayer shooter sits at the heart of an experience that's a little bit Her Story, a little bit Hypnospace Outlaw, a little bit Slenderman, and maybe, just maybe, a fragment of something you've never played before.
Where the original No Players Online was 'contained' in a virtual cassette tape, the experience now takes place within a simulated desktop PC. Inside, you'll find a simulacrum of the late '90s PC experience, back when computers were beige, monitors were chunky, and the internet
Source: PC Gamer
