Replayed for the nostalgia and found the presentation still remarkably effective even when the scares themselves veer toward silly. Horror potential peaked in the early 2000s when grainy digital footage could be combined with the anonymous wild west internet. Now there's too much HD, too many real identities and centralized to too few sites for urban legends to take off and get under your skin the same way. This doesn't actually pass itself off as anything but fiction but the aesthetic, being seemingly made of real modified photos, sets it parallel to found-footage and epistolary horror.

A bit disappointingly amateurish besides the presentation though. The main puzzle is both overly cryptic and easily brute-forced, the story is told through three insanely verbose and blunt text dumps rather than conveyed more organically in smaller pieces, and by the end it leaves no room for the ambiguity that can give horror a "still thinking about it at 3am" kind of half-life.

Still, for a 20-year-old free bit of Flash web design I got my investment's worth of spooks.

Sort of a precursor to today's Itch.io horror microgames. Too slight to leave much impact despite being a cool idea that's theoretically well-suited to its short runtime, and includes one of the worst, most esoteric puzzles I've encountered in a while. The moral choices, supposed to be a test of character, are so obtuse it's hard to even parse them as choices on the first run let alone for them to feel meaningful.

On the other hand frantically opening a door and then locking it again while something closes in on you is the best part of these games and there's an extended, multi-room instance of that in here which is further heightened by the permadeath. Worth a spin if you have the collection.