Journey 8 Theme: Horror

The neighborhood wasn’t where you intended to spend your evening, but it’d seemed lively enough when you got off at the wrong station. That was early evening, though, and as the sun clipped behind the wrong skyline things took a turn. The passerby began to be…off. Walking as though they were wearing a new skeleton, breathing on the wrong beat. The hair on your neck began to rise, slowly. Haltingly. Like the proverbial frog in the warming pot, until you decided that leaving was the only acceptable action. This place was familiar in all the wrong ways, like a fever dream of a drunk passed out in poorly-ventilated cinema. The storefronts were at wrong angles, paths looped in false directions. Two rights made a left and gazing behind you was headache-inducing.

It was almost a relief when the zombies appeared behind you. They might not be actual zombies – voodoo? Plague? Alien meteorite? – but their eyes were glazed and they chased you in packs. An actual threat sharpened your thinking, and you began to run. Wherever you turned – North, South, East, West – Tokyo Tower was visible in the distance, and running towards it brought you back to the same intersection over and over. You’d need to find another way out of the eldritch location in which you’d trapped yourself.

Evading the zombies eventually ran you into an answer. The zombies will not set foot in some places. You couldn’t figure out why until someone gave you a task. Who they were was always right behind your tongue, a memory that failed to break into your consciousness. They promised the location of another haven in exchange for doing something inexplicable. They were quite insistent that it be done, and completing their demands would eventually get you back to Tokyo.

Can you do it? Solve their little puzzles and unravel their little games? Can you evade the hordes of the maybe-dead? Can you survive your Journey to the End of the Night?