Leo used the arrow keys to move. As he navigated the maze, he noticed there were NPCs standing in the corners. They weren't moving. They were just turning in place, their blank, pixelated faces always locking directly onto Leo's character. Then, Leo's webcam light flickered on.
When he looked up into the mirror, his blood turned to ice. Taped to his actual, physical bathroom mirror was a small, crudely cut piece of paper with pixelated font that hadn't been there ten minutes ago: Level 2. PRG.rar
Leo opened the text file first. It contained a single line of text: Leo used the arrow keys to move
On the game screen, the NPCs began to shift. Their tiny, 16-bit faces distorted, stretching out into horrifyingly detailed, photorealistic renders of human eyes. They were just turning in place, their blank,
The file took an agonizing hour to download over his high-speed connection, which was strange for its listed size of just 500 MB. When he tried to extract it using WinRAR, his processor spiked to 100% capacity. The files that poured out into the folder were bizarre: Thousands of .dat files with strings of gibberish names. A single executable simply named Run.exe . A text file named READ_ME_NOW.txt .
And they weren't looking at his character anymore. They were tilted slightly upward, staring directly through the screen at him.
He decided he was done for the night. He went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face.