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I'm sure we all have family, mom, dad, siblings, aunts and uncles, the like. I'm sure all of us also have an aunt living in a really weird, odd-looking mansion that we got stuck in due to paranormalities.
When we got to the address, we didn't expect a house that looked more like a piece of history than a piece to live in. The outside of the house stood out from the rest of the suburbs. It was huge, the type of house you'd find on very old, musty posters during the night of Halloween, the type of house an old war veteran might've made in his early days, and then not bother renovating. Going inside, we were greeted with the creaking turn of the door, floorboards that squealed on each step, and audible drops of water in an obscured area. Despite how depressing the view looked, Aunt Graham was as eccentric as ever to see us. She excitedly pulled us in, despite how unsure we were now, and sat us at the dinner table. Didn't even greet much and all of a sudden, we were now having lunch.
My parents and aunt were in a conversation, with my mom suggesting that maybe she should've gotten a newer looking house and my aunt immediately rejecting all of it. In the midst of this, I decided to get up and explore the place a bit more. I thought that since the house seemed so old, there might've been a few valuable antiques. Looking around the house, I didn't find much besides furniture wrapped in plastic, a few stained walls and slightly torn wallpapers. I got to the top floor and found a string attached to the ceiling. Pulling on it as hard as possible, the ceiling seemed to have budged open, spewing a cloud of dust. After the dust dispersed, I realized that a staircase was in front of me, leading up to the attic. It seemed like it my aunt hadn't been here before me, so I went up to explore.
I scrounged around dusty shelves while the light occasionally flickered and went back to illuminating a tinted yellow. There was nothing but cobwebs woven everywhere, two shelves and some cockroaches darting away from every place I searched. Eventually, I noticed a piece of cloth covering something big behind one of the shelves. I moved the shelf aside and pulled the sheet off gently as to not distribute any dust, I found an extremely old CRT television with some sort of device connected to it. Upon closer inspection, turns out it was a game console, but not like anything I've ever seen. It was a grimy yellow with an alien design. There was only one controller which was part of the console itself and the buttons were arranged like one of those rotary dial telephones. When I plugged the TV into an outlet nearby, sparks flew and static emerged from the TV.
This was one of those simplistic plug and play consoles, probably decades old. There was nothing on the screen, except a prompt to press one of the numbered buttons. Upon pressing the button to start the game, the screen shifted to black with some compressed wind sounds accompanying it. Suddenly, the attic door sprung back up out of nowhere, leaving me in the dark as the the lamp went out at the same time too.
I was terrified at this point because I didn't actually expect this house to be run by a ghost or maybe even a family of them. Perhaps they gave my aunt company. Regardless, the attic door didn't seem to budge, and I couldn't pull the plug on the TV, so I had no choice but to continue with this accursed game. Upon hitting the 'start' button, bright colors emerged and I was suddenly playing a pseudo 3D game with 2D squares for graphics. The game had no tutorial or anything, it just plopped you into the game. My confusion was worsened with the bizarre controller I had to play with. On the top left was an orange square, which was apparently my character, with "5x" next to it, showing the number of lives I had. On the top right was a grey square with "0/5" beside it, so I figured that was the main collectible.
Walking through empty screens of space, eventually I found the first grey square. Touching it with my character, who was merely an orange rectangle, led to another strange occurrence. The orange square turned blue and the level switched to a simple maze. There were now two paths next to me, I chose the first one and was about to collect the second grey square, but suddenly static emerged and the screen changed again, landing me into a wall where the square should've been. So now, not only had this loathsome entity trapped me in a dusty attic, it would now pull pranks on me for the rest of the play-through. The screen reset once more after a while of waiting, and now there were three paths to go through. This loop of choosing an incorrect path and winding up with more paths went on for a painful two minutes, until finally, I got the square. Two out of five done, and I could only imagine what other painful tricks this game was packed with.
Static emerged once more, and the entire play style of the game changed. Now, it was a simple side scroller. I just needed to move and jump onto a few platforms and get to the square, but it was an utter nightmare with this type of controller. On top of that, my inputs would randomly freeze for five to ten seconds, then come back but completely flipped on its head. Sometimes what was supposed to be to move left was to jump, sometimes it was move right, and if I was really unlucky, it was to reset the whole game. I lost progress twice in a row from this and had to do the whole thing again and again. Finally, the stars seemed to have lined up for me and I jumped upon grabbing the third square.
Time for the fourth square, another side scrolling level, but way longer and much more difficult. The game's possessors decided to be humane and not flip my controls. Instead, they would mess with everything else instead. Every step I took, it seemed they would tweak the game slightly until it was nearly unplayable. Sometimes the platforms would disappear, sometimes you would pass through them, sometimes they would kill me, sometimes they would shoot upwards, sometimes the game would flicker colors to be nearly seizure inducing. After all of this, I was next to the fourth square and I grabbed it just before the game planned another trick. The fifth and final part, I was nearly done but at that point I wasn't sure if the attic would just magically unlock if I finished the game. Maybe this was a trap anyway and the game was warning me with all those glitches. Regardless, I continued.
The game had switched back to the pseudo 3D style, now it was only a narrow path with twists and turns I had to carefully navigate through. I had used up all of my lives so dying here might as well have been dying in real life. Three painful minutes of walking on a tightrope until I finally got to the last square, this one more illuminated than the others. As I got closer, input was suddenly snatched away from me and the character just kept walking in a straight line. I was only a pixel away from death until I regained control and nabbed the final piece. In doing so, everything went black, except for my character and the counter on the top left. The screen stood there for a while until the counter changed to "0/10", horrifying me until it went back to normal. It was as if this haunted media had tried out all of its jokes and was playing a few gags to put salt in the wound. Abruptly, the screen started flickering in a random pattern of bright colors with bizarre, bit-crushed music playing out loud. My senses were overloaded, and I passed out.
After a long while, I was awoken by the slamming of a car door while lying on the backseat. I overheard a conversation between my parents and my aunt, with my parents constantly apologizing for some reason, and my aunt being absolutely furious. I couldn't make out most of the conversation, but I heard my aunt scream the words "attic" and "old TV". Did my aunt know of how haunted her house actually was? Does she just casually live with such scares? Whatever the case, I should probably curb exploration of old houses for now.
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