Sonic.EXE
Rating: X - Comedy
Themes/Genres:
Creepypasta;
Video Games
Main Characters:
Sonic, Author
Overview:
The author receives a strange CD
in the mail one day, believing it to be sent by a friend, but inside finds a
cursed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 game and a request for its destruction. Instead of doing as the letter asked, the
author decides to play the game out of curiosity and soon find themselves faced
with bloodshed, gore, and demonic entities.
Before long the game bleeds itself into real life and turns the author’s
life upside-down.
Review:
Dear god this creepypasta is a
mess.
Seeing as this is the first
creepypasta I’ve reviewed and there are still those who have never heard of
them, allow me to explain. A creepypasta
is a term used for internet-based scary stories, basically the upgraded version
of telling spooky stories around a campfire.
It’s a wonderful addition to the horror genre, creating wonderfully
horrific tales that are sure to leave a mark on your psyche… but also having
plenty of duds amongst the batches. As
there tends to be with anything.
Sonic.EXE is the latter.
Despite an immense popularity
amongst creepypasta fans, gaining not only tons of fan art but even a fan-made
game recreating the game of the story… the actual written story is downright
awful. And about as terrifying as, “The
Room.” You spend more time cringing at
the awful grammar and try-hard “gore” than you do actually fearing for the
writer’s life or wondering about the potential reality behind the story. A well-written creepypasta often leaves you
wary and silently fearing that it may actually be a true story, that there
truly are silent monsters always just out of eyesight or you’re actually stuck
in an endless loop of recovery limbo.
Sonic.EXE does nothing of the sort.
Right from the get-go it throws
your suspension of disbelief to into the furthest corners it can possibly
manage with a delivery that shouldn’t have even made in the first place. The friend wants the CD destroyed… but
instead of just doing it himself, he sends it to a close friend, telling him to
and giving no real explanation as to why he can’t. The best you can gather is that ‘he’ is after
him and has run out of time… how long does it take to break a CD in half? How much longer does it take to package,
stamp, and send something off? This
entire story gets thrown off with that one single detail.
You could, of course, argue that
the entire situation is immediately full of shit and that this friend is just
trying to be a clever asshole and prank his friend by giving him some bullshit
“oh no don’t play this, I’m ded” spiel and then sending his friend a hacked
game for the sole purpose of scaring the shit out of him… and really, that’d
make the entire story more believable.
But I feel like that’s not what the writer was going for. Unfortunately.
Instead, we now get led into the
clusterfuck of a tale about the author and his terrible experiences with a game
he was told not to play in the first place.
So moving on, we now get into the game itself, and hoo-boy, let me tell
you… I haven’t seen this much try-harding since the last three Saw movies. Split-second image recalling, the
ever-present 666, HYPER REALISTIC BLOOD, playing music backwards, far too many
“gory” details on tiny pixelated animals that you couldn’t possibly have
actually seen, Kefka laughs, and the mixture of about 10,000 different games
for no reason whatsoever. This story is
not only ridiculously long in the first place, it makes it feel even longer
considering all the ridiculous shenanigans you have to try not to laugh
through.
The author consistently forgets
what he wrote just a couple sentences back by constantly repeating himself
apparently, for example when the music slows down… only to start slowing down a
couple sentences later. Or completely
changes between “this is definitely not a glitch” to “I can’t tell if this is a
glitch or a hack” later on down the line.
He can’t make up his mind about anything. But then turns around and seems to be able to
perfectly time exactly how long certain sequences take. While freaking the fuck out. I don’t know about you, but when I’m freaked
out I have no concept of time whatsoever, all I can think is “dear god there’s
hair everywhere, where the fuck is the DOOR?!”
But maybe that’s just me -- maybe the author sits there counting exactly
how many seconds are in-between screens for whatever reason. I’m just going to go ahead and call BS,
anyway.
Of course, we need to get some
game-breaking-into-reality nonsense in, as well, by having the author suddenly feel like a specific character
is in trouble. You know, just after
watching shit go down the entire rest of the time, but chose that specific
moment to decide the characters were in trouble. Or claiming that the “characters, themselves,
were actually in trouble”. You know,
that real life Sonic and Tails that’s floating around out there, their actual
souls are in trouble, and the author can just feel that… playing this hacked game. Finally we get some nightmares to tie it all
up into reality, naturally. Because
nightmares obviously mean that it’s definitely a demon-possessed hacked video
game and definitely not that you’re
just a little bitch. I am definitely
trembling now. This is some Freddy
Krueger-level scares now, we’ve got nightmares.
By this point most people would
quit playing the game, not only because it’s so “horrifying” but because the
author legitimately believes the souls
of these video game characters are doomed to eternal damnation because of this
game. Most people would be like “you
know what, maybe I should actually break this CD like that letter said to do in
the first place”. But not this guy! No, in true Genocide-Route fashion, he’s just
got to know what else there is and
continues playing, sending another character to their HYPER REALISTIC
death. But it’s okay, because he cries
about it. This game supposedly drags the
characters and the player into actual Hell just for playing it… but I guess he’s a
completionist, gotta get that final ending.
And what is this final ending,
the conclusion to all this mental torment, the last piece of the puzzle?
A plushie.
That’s right, folks. Play a Hell game, get a free Sonic plushie.
BE AFRAID!!
Look author, Sega already has a
terrifying plushie and it’s not a blood-dripping, red-eyed Sonic. In fact, it’s a Tails. A Tails Doll, if you will.
This entire story is a mess to
get through and don’t think I’m going to excuse bad writing just because it was
an early creepypasta, as some people seem to do. People have been writing and creating horror
for as long as the human race has been telling
stories, and they didn’t need hyper-realistic blood or details no one would
actually be able to see to do it well.
No pass. It’s too long, the
grammar is awful, the setup is laughable, and the plot is questionable at
best. It’s got the subtlety of an action
film
.
I’ve always said, just because it
has blood… doesn’t automatically make it a horror. Just because there are deaths, doesn’t mean
its horror. There is no better example
for that than here. You can’t just throw
every cliché in the book in and expect it to be scary, you have to create an
atmosphere, you have to make it believable, you have to be subtle, and you have
to let readers’ imaginations run mad.
Sonic.EXE does none of this. It’s
not scary. It’s cringe-worthy and
laughable.
