Warden

Warden - by Anonymous

On july 12, [REDACTED], the local authorities were alerted of the sudden disappearance of Edwin [REDACTED]. A close internet contact of his, Matthew [REDACTED], was subsequently questioned regarding the case. The following is a transcription of a key segment of the interview with him:

"I never really knew him, I mean, at least not personally, we were just online friends. In fact, I didn't even know his real name until... until all this happened. I still can't explain this whole thing to myself really."
"Yes, he was a very introverted guy in general, just like me, I guess. I met Deruba at an online [REDACTED] tournament back in [REDACTED]. 'Deruba' was his nickname. He was very good at the game, and we both got to the final quarters. We became friends soon after, it turned out that we shared a lot of other hobbies as well. I didn't know his real name, but I didn't mind, that's pretty common with online friends."
"Which hobbies, exactly? Oh well, the usual really, videogames, anime, youtube... you know, the stuff..."
"The thing is that, with time, he started getting into more deep stuff, you know? Dark stuff... he started visiting gore websites and he mentioned he was interested in the occult, that sort of... dark stuff. At first, I was a bit worried, of course, but as I said, I knew the guy, I knew he wasn't some sort of psychopath or something, he was completely harmless. The gore may be just out of boredom, we all eventually see it on the internet, I thought it was probably just a phase, really."
"No, of course I don't watch that kind of content myself, I mean, i've seen it, really, as I said everyone eventually ends up exposed to it on the internet, but that doesn't mean I regularly... enjoy it, you know what I mean?"
"Anyways, things continued as usual for a year or so. One day, we were playing [REDACTED], as we usually did when we had the time, when he casually mentioned this new game he just recently learned about in the dark web. 'Warden', he said it was called. He told me it was not like most other games. You see, in this one, you didn't win or lose, in fact you could say that it wasn't even a game to begin with, more like a simulator, a sandbox. If you have played minecraft or any other... creative kind of game, you know what I mean. And yet, this one really was like no other."
"To start off with the game, it was, and please excuse the expression, a kinda crappy looking game, and despite the ugly models and simple interface, my machine almost got fried every time I booted it for some reason, it either had more than it seemed or was very badly programmed. If I recall correctly the file itself was called AD128.exe or something like that. I almost suspected it was some kind of virus, but at the time I totally trusted Edwin, you know? So I had no issue with it. The game had co-op features, we used to play together on the server he hosted."
"The game took place in this dark and creepy maze, like an underground dungeon. I could see Deruba in the game, he had a generic human model, and I think mine was the same. There wasn't really anything to do to start off, it had no enemies or anything, no objective. Edwin warned me from the start that this wasn't a normal game, so I was not surprised by the eerie vibes. He told me the game was special because it had a secret hidden in it, people on the internet were looking for ways to summon a demon... I mean, a demon inside the game, of course, it was this NPC that appeared sometimes for no reason, and people were trying to figure out how to make it appear on purpose. Many speculated that certain secret actions you did in the game would summon him. It had no name but people called it the demon because, well, it looked like a demon. It didn't hurt you or anything, as I told you, you couldn't lose in the game, it just... watched you quietly for a bit and then banished. I saw it just once, personally. It was a tall figure, dark and with a horned animal head. I think it would have been scary if not for the fact that the model had such a low resolution.”
"There wasn't much to do in the game itself. You could bring objects from a menu, things like swords and boxes, but also people and animals, which had their own artificial intelligence, though it was very basic and rudimentary. You could move the objects around, tie them together, equip weapons and use them. It reminded me a lot of a popular game, Garry's Mod, but this was clearly more oriented towards action and gore, having very realistic death animations. Basically the game was pretty much just that, really, finding ways of torturing the models. You could get very creative, using the advanced physics to create whole torture devices. For example, you could tie them to the ceiling and let them fall, and then they would crawl on the floor as if their legs were broken. As I said, I didn't enjoy watching gore, i'm not that kind, but I was really hooked by it. It was addictive in a way. And yeah, since the demon sometimes appeared, the objective soon became finding the ways to summon him."
"Well, some time passed. I didn't play the game by myself that much in my spare time, I only did so with Edwin to spend some time with him. But Edwin, on the other hand... I suspect he played by himself very often. Every time I logged in to the server he hosted, I could see bloodstains all over the floor and the walls, and the torture machines he made seemed increasingly complex. He clearly was trying it all to summon the demon. Eventually, he told me that the demon spoke to him once. By then, I was all creeped out by this, not only was the game pretty off-putting, he seemed... deranged by it. I don't know how else to describe it, but he was more off to himself than usual. So yeah, I wasn't really that interested in the game anymore, so I stopped talking to him altogether,so this is when we started to distance ourselves from each other, I guess. I don't know what he did during this time or what the demon supposedly told him, I wasn't really interested anymore, I was busy with real life stuff at the time anyways."
"Some months later, one day, all of a sudden he texted me and begged me to log into his server one last time. He had something very important to show me. This was like months after we messaged each other for the last time, so I agreed, mainly because I felt bad for him, I was his only friend after all."
"But yeah, things didn't turn out as I expected. Not at all. He was deeply disturbed at this point. He told me that he had killed his family, I mean, in real life. I couldn't believe him, I thought he was kidding. Then he explained to me that he had killed them in the game at first, he made NPCs with their names and killed them in a specific way, he even showed me the corpses. When he logged out of the game, he found all his family dead. But he wasn't sad or regretful about this in the slightest, he was actually even kind of proud, he only told me that he had finally found a way of making the demon appear definitively. After he killed his family, it seems he had a whole conversation with the demon. Of course at this point I thought that he had lost it completely, I was very sad, not worried, I felt that this was my fault in a certain way for having stopped talking to him. Not for a single moment I thought he actually killed anyone. I was about to log out from the game and end the call right there when he attacked me, in the game, of course. He wasn't mad at me or anything, it's more like he planned to do it from the start. Maybe he wanted to summon this demon again. Anyways, I logged out before he could kill my character, and blocked him in all social media. I soon deleted the game for good, too."
"That was the last thing I knew about him, until of course you told me he had actually killed his family. This whole situation is.... I don't know, truly disconcerting, I guess. As I said, maybe I could have stopped him. It's all so messed up, man...”

During the rest of the interview, Matthew would imply in several other instances that Edwin was dead, despite no official confirmation of this. The following year after the interview, Matthew would be charged with allegations of holding child pornography; upon investigation, explicit material including animal cruelty videos, gore, and snuff films were discovered in his computer, including some which contained yet unseen footage of other related victims which were labeled as key evidence for the whole case. Matthew is currently being held in a mental hospital, although he's not suspected to be responsible for the multiple killings and disappearances. The current state of Edwin [REDACTED] is still currently unknown and the case remains unsolved up to date. Investigators haven't found a copy of the game mentioned during this interview yet, nor have they confirmed its existence at all.