Warden - Creepypasta for my /x/ frens

On the 12th of July [YEAR REDACTED], the local authorities were alerted to the sudden disappearance of Edwin [FULL NAME REDACTED]. A close contact of his, Mathew [FULL NAME REDACTED], was subsequently questioned regarding the case:
"I never knew the guy, I mean at least not personally, we were just online friends from many years. In fact, I didn't even know his real name until very recently, some time after... well, what ended up happening to him. I still can't explain this whole thing to myself really, so sorry if my story sounds a little weird or doesn't make much sense. But I swear, this is all true. I just want to help, I promise.
"Yes, he was a very isolated and introverted guy in general, if a bit shy, kind of like me, I guess. The only thing I knew about him, really, was that we both lived in the same city, we were the same age, studying the same thing [web design], and we even more or less shared the same hobbies. So it's no wonder why we became online friends, really"
"Which hobbies, exactly? Oh well, the usual, really, videogames, anime, youtube... you know, the stuff..."
"But the thing is that, with time, he started getting into more deep stuff, you know, dark stuff... he started watching gore websites and he mentioned he was interested into 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, he was completely harmless. The gore may be just out of boredom, we all see it eventually 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 in 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 a [REDACTED INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY] match online, as we usually did when we had the time for it, when he casually mentioned this new game he just recently learned about and why it was so interesting. Warden, as he said it was called, was not like most other games; you see, in this one you didn't win or loose, 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 any other."
"To start off about this game, the technology was cutting edge, it was a next generation virtual reality game with online features, and despite the ugly models and simple interface, my machine almost got fried every time I booted it for some reason, it either couldn't handle it or was very badly programmed. I started to wonder where he got it in the first place, the odd installation method, the fact that there was almost no information about on the web, and worst of all, the fact that it never showed the name Warden anywhere, did not help. If I recall correctly the file itself was called AD128.exe or something like that. I almost suspected it was some kind of virus until I figured there's just too much effort put into it for that to be true. And at the time I totally trusted Edwin, you know?
" The game took place in this dark and creepy maze, like an underground dungeon. I could see Edwin 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 the demon... I mean, the 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. It had no name but people called it the demon because, well, it looked like a demon, the horrible thing. It didn't hurt you or anything, in fact, as I told you, you couldn't loose in the game, it just... watched you quietly for a bit and then vanished again. I saw it just once, personally.”
"The game allowed you to import models, of things like boxes and swords, but also of people and animals, which had their own artificial intelligence. It also allowed you to name them and customise them however you wanted. The human NPCs would behave pretty realistically, if you hit them, sometime they would run, sometimes they would defend themselves, I think each one had a different personality, it all seemed really well done to me. Not the models, those were very generic, as I said, the intelligence, on the other hand, pretty advanced stuff. And well, the game was pretty much just that, really, finding ways of torturing these models. You could get very creative, using the advanced physics to create whole torture devices, you could tie them to the ceiling and let them fall to some spikes, and watch them bleed over. As I said, I don't enjoy watching gore, i'm not the kind, but I was really hooked up by it, it was addictive in a way. And yeah, since the demon sometimes appeared, the objective soon became finding the way to summon him."
"Well, timed passed on. I didn't play the game by myself that much on my spare time, I only did so with Edwin to spend time with him, really. But Edwin, on the other hand... I suspect he played by himself very often, every time I played logged in to the server he hosted I could see the blood all over the floor and the walls, and the machines he would make for torture were very advanced things, really. He clearly was trying it all to summon the demon. Eventually, he told me that the demon spoke to him. By then, I was really creeped out by all this, not only the game was pretty weird, even to him, but he seemed... deranged. I don't know how to describe it. He was really more off to himself than usual. So yeah, I wasn't really interested in the game anymore, so I don't know what he did or what the demon told him."
"This is when we started to distance from each other, I had other friends as well, but I knew that he didn't, I was probably his only friend, so that's why I tried to be in contact with him, sending him messages from time to time. He eventually started to ignore me, though."
"One day, he called me and be begged me, for one last time, to log into his server one last time, he had something very important to show me. Of course I was annoyed by him and his recent attitude, this was like months after he messaged me for the last time, so I agreed, but with the intention to have a little talk with him about his behaviour and how he was slowly loosing it from my perspective. He was my friend after all, I really wanted the best for him. But yeah, thing didn't turn out as I expected. He was genuinely disturbed by that point. He told me he had killed his family, in real life! I couldn't believe him, I thought it was a joke. 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 on the slightest it seemed, he only told me that he had finally found a way to make it appear definitively. After he killed his family, it seems he had a whole conversation with this demon. Of course that at this point I thought that he had lost it completely, I was very sad and ashamed, not worried, it was my fault in a certain way to feed this madness. 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, and blocked him in all social media we shared. I soon uninstalled 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, and himself. This whole situation is so tragic to me, really, as I said, I could have stopped him, I was his only friend, if only I had known what he was truly capable of... It's all so messed up, man.”
During the rest of the interview, Mathew would imply in several instances that Edwin was dead, despite no official confirmation of this. The following year after this interview, Mathew would be charged with allegations of child pornography possession; upon investigation, explicit material including videos depicting animal cruelty, gore, and snuff films were discovered on his computer, including some which contained yet unseen footage of other related victims which were labelled as key evidence for the whole case. Mathew is currently being held in a mental hospital, although he's not suspected to be responsible for the many killings and disappearances. The current state of Edwin [FULL NAME 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.