Sonic.EXE Review

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.