#existential dread simulator

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

Playing Anomaly has given me a rather dim view of games that supposedly can’t have difficulty options or customization without ruining the experience. Anomaly’s base game (if you can call it that) has the most customization options I’ve seen in any game, allowing you to change everything from merchants’ prices, how strong each faction is, to whether Emissions and Psi-Storms kill you at all. This hasn’t “tarnished” its reputation as a brutal experience in the slightest, and has only increased its popularity— to the point it’s more well-known than the games it was made from!

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

[ID: digital art of a character in camo, a hood, and a heavy backpack kneeling atop a grassy hill, aiming a gun down at something offscreen. Across the river, in the distance are buildings and a dull gray sky. The colors are desaturated and gloomy. End ID.]

(somewhere in Jupiter) fuckim WIMDY

stalker oc Dima

[timesforham]

[the-most-humble-blog]

🌀 The Simulation Doesn’t Owe You Closure, Sweetie

✨ The world is under no obligation to make sense to your primate-ass brain. 🧠🐒

It never signed a contract. It doesn’t owe you a neat plotline, a moral arc, or even a coherent beginning. You're demanding Shakespeare from a kaleidoscope of atoms mid-fart. Let that sink in.

👁️ You Woke Up Today and Just... Assumed Everything Was Still Real?

🛌 You opened your eyes. ☀️ The sun “rose.” 💬 Your brain whispered, “Same planet, same timeline, same you.”

But what evidence do you actually have?

You don’t know where the sun was five minutes ago.

You don’t know your memories are real — you just have a highly convincing slideshow in your skull.

You’re trusting your meat processor because it feels consistent.

Feelings are not facts. 🥴 Neither is “breakfast.” 🍳 You cooked it in a dream. 🎭 And your dream cooked you.

🌌 Alternate Hypothesis:

👉 The entire universe may have booted up this morning ⚡️ Fully formed 🗃️ With backlogged memories 📚 Fake Wikipedia articles 📸 Childhood photos pre-installed

...just so you wouldn’t freak out when you looked in the mirror and said:

"Oh thank god, I’m still me."

But that “you”? That little voice saying “still me”? 🎤 Might be the software. Not the speaker.

💫 You Ever Wonder Why Dreams Feel More Like Home Than Real Life?

Because they don’t ask for logic. They don’t care about time. They don’t require coherence.

And your brain... loves it.

🌪 Dreams are where your inner tyrant gets to speak. 🦴 Your subconscious gets to lick its wounds and howl at nothing. 🐍 Your fears wear your face, and your fantasies violate causality.

Meanwhile, “reality” asks you to pay rent.

Which one sounds more like base reality to you?

🪞 Your “I Am” Is a Lie of Convenience

Say it with me:

"I...am."

👃 But your nose bacteria said it too. 💩 So did the E. coli in your gut. 🦠 Your biome — the literal orgy of germs you walk around with — voted unanimously on your behalf.

You’re not a “person.” You’re a coalition of goo, pretending to have a name.

You're basically a haunted Roomba in a trench coat, gaslighting yourself with words like "consciousness."

☠️ Death? You Think You Know Death?

You think it’s an ending? A door? A fade to black?

👻 Some theories suggest you never actually die. You just quantum leap into another version of reality where you didn’t.

🚙 You crash the car.

🎲 Reality branches.

🧍One version of you dies.

👤 Another keeps driving, blissfully unaware.

Congratulations. You’re quantumly immortal.

Now live with that.

🧩 Nothing You Believe Is Yours

🔄 Your preferences? Algorithmic.

💬 Your language? Colonial malware.

🎶 Your music taste? Trauma harmonized.

🍔 Your favorite meal? A mouth-based memory of safety.

🧍‍♂️ Your personality? Copied and pasted from people who bullied you in 7th grade and won.

Everything you think is you is actually borrowed, imprinted, marketed, or stolen.

You’re just the crust forming on top.

👾 Thought Experiment:

Imagine you wake up tomorrow and everything is the same, but:

Gravity is 2% weaker

Everyone speaks your native tongue, but words now mean different things

The moon is slightly larger

Diddy is President

Would you notice? Would you even question it?

Or would you just scroll your phone, complain about gas prices, and say:

“Ugh. Mondays.”

Because here’s the horrifying truth:

Reality doesn’t need to be real to be consistent. 🧠 It just has to feel real long enough for you to shut up and go to work.

🕷 The Memory Trap

You can’t even prove you remember things accurately.

Your brain doesn’t store memories — 🧱 it reconstructs them. Like a trauma-themed Minecraft server.

So when someone says:

“But I remember that happening…”

Know this:

🎥 They don’t remember what happened. They remember remembering it once.

You're a feedback loop hallucinating confidence.

💃 You’re Dancing in a Dead Man’s Dream

What if everything you see is a ghost’s last vision before brain death?

🧬 What if you're the synaptic echo of someone else’s final moment — A projection flickering through dissolving tissue?

And your purpose?

To feel just enough agency to make death seem like it had meaning.

You were never supposed to wake up in the first place.

🎯 So What Now, Smart Guy?

You think you’ve got a grip on reality?

Cool. Name five sensations that are definitely real and not simulated.

Take your time. I’ll wait.

(Just kidding — time is fake too.)

And while you’re busy explaining your deep, spiritual certainty…

Let me ask you this:

🕵️‍♂️ Where were you in 1997? Be specific.

What socks were you wearing? What did the air smell like? What did Diddy do to you?

Exactly.

You don’t know.

Which means...

You don’t exist with the kind of continuity you think you do. You exist like a flickering cursor on a corrupted save file.

🧼 Clean on the surface. 🧟‍♂️ Rot underneath.

💣 The Final Blow:

You’ve never been “awake.” You’ve never been “alive.” You’ve only ever been stimulus fed to a frightened organism trying to rationalize entropy.

And the universe?

It was never “created.” It just booted up. No moral. No meaning. No arc.

Just inputs → outputs → extinction.

And all along you’ve been pretending:

“I get it now. I understand.”

Oh really?

Then why can’t you even remember if Diddy touched you, dumbass?

🧬 Reboot your expectations. Reality was never built to comfort you. It was built to run — and you’re just a background process.

🔻 CALL TO REALITY STACK 🔻

⚖️ Free Speech Disclaimer:

This is a work of satire. Unless it isn’t.

🔁 Reblog if your dream self is starting to feel more like you. 💬 Comment if you think “waking up” might be the real delusion. 📩 DM if you have memories that feel older than your body. 🧼 Wash your hands, but reality won't rinse off. 🔁 Share before the simulation changes your backstory again.

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

Cannot wait for Heart of Chornobyl.

[greatwickeddark]

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

[ID: digital art of Strelok from Shadow of Chernobyl, sitting against a wall, reading a paper. In the background, a campfire burns. The drawing is grayscale with sketchy lineart, rendered in a chalky brush. End ID.]

[aventurineswife]

more sahsrau painter!creator!reader!!!!!!!!1

how would they react to paintings getting increasingly more dull and depressing? like, it can go from a sunny meadow to a dark hallway. and sometimes it switches up day by day like that

The emotional volatility of their creations becoming visible day-to-day would have every self-aware character on edge. Because they wouldn’t just see the change—they’d feel it, and wonder if it’s something they caused.

You, once their divine painter, your brush a gentle godsend… now create only uncertainty, dread, and mood swings painted in oil.

General Reactions Across the Cast

At first, they try to rationalize it.

“You’re just exploring another style.”

“There’s meaning in shadow, too.”

“Art reflects the world. Maybe the world is just…darker right now.”

But they all notice the pattern.

A field of blooming irises one day—painted with almost childlike warmth.

The next? A lonely, windowless hallway, lit by a single flickering lamp, with a shadow at the end you never explain.

And you keep going.

Sometimes you skip colors entirely. Sometimes you paint over old canvases—your own joy erased by jagged black strokes or ink-dripped fingerprints.

Jing Yuan

He tries to act unaffected, like he’s just concerned about “the quality” of your work. But he’s been standing in front of that hallway painting for an hour, hands behind his back.

“When you painted me, it used to glow. Did the light run out… or did I?”

He worries this is about him—that something he said, or didn’t say, fractured something in you.

Kafka

She laughs at first.

“Ooh, a spiral arc. How bold.”

But then she notices a recurring element: hands. Reaching, clawing, or sometimes limp in corners. One of them looks suspiciously like hers.

“...This isn’t just aesthetic.”

She starts digging. Quietly. Obsessively. Trying to find out who made you feel like this—and whether it’s fixable… or deserved.

Blade

He recognizes the patterns of emotional self-destruction far too well.

“You’re not painting. You’re bleeding.”

He never says “Are you okay?”—because he knows you’re not. But he won’t leave unless you ask him to. Even then? He might still linger.

Dan Heng

He’s quiet. Hurting. Overanalyzing every canvas.

Was he too distant? Too careful? Did he inspire that one painting titled “Delicate Silence, Deafening Void”?

He starts leaving you things. Tea. Books. Paper lotus flowers. Trying to coax you back to color without ever confronting the wound head-on.

“If you ever want to talk… or not talk… I’ll be here.”

Silver Wolf

At first she shrugs it off.

“You’re just in your ‘sad little gremlin’ phase. Art people do that, right?”

But then she starts glitching out when she stands too long near one of your newer paintings. Code flickers. Things warp.

“...Wait. Are you… rewriting reality with your emotions?”

Cue her spiraling not just emotionally but existentially.

Acheron

She understands. Too well.

“Storms don’t choose the shape they take.”

She becomes your silent guardian. Whenever your emotions spike, she’s there—just out of view, blade sheathed, watching. She knows that even gods fray at the edges. And if your art is a cry for help, then she is your echo.

Welt

He notices immediately. He’s been through this spiral before.

“This is what burnout looks like in someone who doesn’t admit they’re hurting.”

He doesn’t try to fix it. He just keeps showing up. Asking the hard questions.

“What changed?”

“When did you stop painting for joy?”

“What do you need?”

Herta

“Ugh. You’re going through a phase.”

She brushes it off at first—until she realizes you haven’t painted her in weeks. Even when you did? Her eyes were blacked out.

Now she’s spiraling. Overcompensating. Creating miniatures of your older work in her lab just to simulate feeling important again.

“You’re still thinking about me, right? Right?”

One day, maybe you don’t paint anything at all.

And that’s what scares them the most.

Not the hallway.

Not the blood-red self-portrait with the mouth sewn shut.

Not the poem about erasure you scrawled in pencil on the edge of a landscape.

But the blank easel.

The untouched brush.

And your silence.

[ayeforscotland]

Today we're jumping into the demo for Date Everything!

Here's what it entails because...yeah:

Date Everything! is a sandbox dating simulator set in the comfort of your own home, featuring 100 fully voice acted datable characters! Let the romance flow between your bed, smoke alarm and… Overwhelming Sense of Existential Dread? Are you ready to Date Everything?

We're also fundraising for Concern Worldwide as part of their Hunger Ends Here campaign!

[boredtechnologist]

Zero Time Dilemma: Where Free Will Dies Screaming

"If you remove all the pieces of a ship, one by one, is it still the same ship?"

That’s not just a dorm-room question for philosophy majors - it’s the silent scream at the heart of Zero Time Dilemma (2016). The third entry in Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Zero Escape trilogy isn't just the darkest - it’s the most disturbed, fragmented, and meta-aware. A game that doesn’t just tell a story - it gaslights you into questioning whether the story ever existed at all.

Beneath its pseudo-Saw setting and logic puzzles lies a game obsessed with one terrifying question:

What happens when a person becomes aware they are a variable in someone else's equation?

Fragmented Consciousness as Horror

Unlike its predecessors, Zero Time Dilemma doesn’t let you follow one linear path. Instead, you bounce between timelines and memory fragments - completely out of order. This isn’t just narrative novelty. It’s weaponized disorientation.

You, the player, are forced to simulate the experience of temporal dissociation - a horror that mirrors real-world psychological conditions like dissociative identity disorder, PTSD, or memory repression. You wake up in a new “fragment” without knowing what your past self did. You watch the same character die in three different ways. You solve puzzles to try to prevent an outcome you already witnessed.

You are complicit. And yet, never in control.

That’s the dread: Zero Time Dilemma doesn’t ask "What would you do?" It says: "You already did it. And it didn’t help."

Free Will as a Lab Experiment

The Decision Game - the core premise - operates on the illusion of choice. But like Schrödinger's cat, each decision you make is a quantum state: both right and wrong until observed. The real horror is realizing that even your agency is a variable in someone else’s algorithm.

Characters aren’t making decisions. They’re being watched, measured, split across timelines like cells under a microscope. Every death is an iteration. Every betrayal is a test result.

The mastermind Zero isn’t just an antagonist. He’s a surrogate for the player, the developer, and the narrative algorithm itself. The game hints that causality has collapsed. That time isn’t a line but a mobius strip soaked in blood.

If 999 was about survival, and Virtue's Last Reward about trust, then Zero Time Dilemma is about despair as design. It’s a world where your only role is to suffer well.

Identity Is a Lie Told by Continuity

Characters in ZTD begin to suspect they are not singular beings. This isn’t just sci-fi - it’s existential dread. Sigma and Diana face a future where their souls are uploaded, duplicated, fragmented. Phi is born of paradox. Akane becomes myth. Q isn’t even sure if he’s human.

The deeper horror? The more they learn, the less human they become. Knowledge severs their emotional grounding. In the real world, identity is formed by memory, morality, and embodiment. In ZTD, those are just file properties - subject to overwrite.

Ask yourself: If you're distributed across realities, and you only exist in pieces, are you still a person?

Or have you become a narrative function?

The Player as God - and Monster

This is where the meta-horror cuts deepest.

You, the player, are orchestrating this suffering. Your omniscient perspective gives you power - but it’s cold, detached, and amoral. You’re not solving for justice. You’re solving for completion. You need to unlock every outcome to unlock the truth. Which means forcing every character to endure every possible trauma.

Kidnapping. Betrayal. Murder. Regret. You press "Continue" as they scream, just to see what happens next.

You’re not playing God.

You’re playing Zero.

And the game knows it.

The Psychological Toll of Absolute Knowledge

The deeper you go, the worse it gets. ZTD reveals that full awareness across timelines is not empowerment - it’s psychic decay. Phi, Sigma, Akane - all show signs of wear. They become ritualistic, obsessed with timelines, detached from the emotional weight of death.

Their empathy erodes. They become more like the player.

It’s a rare game that dares to say this:

“Knowing everything will not save you. It will destroy you.”

Zero Is Not a Villain. Zero Is a Mirror.

In ZTD, the villain isn’t a twisted genius - it’s the system itself. The escape room. The timeline. The branching logic. It’s the framework of the narrative, and you, the player, are the one making sure it runs to completion.

In the final analysis, Zero Time Dilemma becomes a kind of theological horror. A game where God has been replaced by a sentient flowchart, where the soul is just a conditional flag, and where hell isn’t punishment - it’s repetition.

And maybe that’s the darkest thing of all:

You didn’t come here to save them. You came here to watch them suffer in every way possible. And the game made sure you had no choice.

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

[ID: digital art of Strelok from Shadow of Chernobyl, kneeling with his hands between his legs, eyes shadowed under his hood. The truck from the opening cutscene looms behind him, headlights glowing a burning orange. End ID.]

[ahfrickenfrick]

i completely understand why jason would never do weed, like the whole ‘gateway to other drugs’ thing probably really fucking startled him as a kid, and it’s still engraved in his mind

he however would probably happily be a trip sitter but he’s literally the worst

roy: oh no man i’m kinda buggin’

jason: well yeah, dude we’ve been in a simulation this whole time, you’re probably having a shut down and restart

roy: A WHAT

———

steph: can you pass my my phone?

jason: *simlish*

steph: yeah my pho- huh?

jason: *rolling his eyes, still speaking simlish as he hands steph her phone*

———

tim: i’m hungry

jason: i would say ‘hi hungry i’m dad’ but that’s a sore spot for both of us

tim: *existential dread filling him* what the fuck is wrong with you

[the-most-humble-blog]

🛐 HEY DUMMY, IF MANY WORLDS THEORY IS EVEN HALF TRUE…

(Good luck sleeping tonight.)

You ever sit back after a horror movie and laugh?

“Oh man, imagine being that guy. Couldn’t be me, bro.”

Yeah. About that.

If Many Worlds or Parallel Universe Theory has even a droplet of truth to it…

It is you.

Right now. Right this second. Somewhere on another branch of spacetime, another "you" is eating it raw — and not in the fun way.

🧠 Let's Break It Down, Einstein:

If reality splits at every decision point— Every flicker of choice— Every breath taken slightly left instead of right—

Then somewhere:

You didn’t check the locks.

You did go into the basement after hearing the weird noise.

You are bleeding out face-first on a barn floor while something ancient and giggling licks the marrow out of your femur.

💀 That Slasher Movie?

Yeah, there’s a universe where you were the cold open body count.

You know the scene:

Screaming for help.

Phone with 2% battery.

Car keys just out of reach under the couch coated in suspicious, moist shame.

That’s you.

Not “theoretical you.” You-you.

A full, breathing, shitting, panicking you — whose last words were probably something elegant like "Aw f—" before darkness hit like a brick wall.

🛸 That Sci-Fi Flick with the Predator?

You laugh at the guy getting skewered and flayed?

Cute.

Because somewhere, another version of you is:

Gutted.

Disemboweled.

Hung from a jungle tree like a cheap Christmas ornament.

Waiting.

Wishing your slow-ass imaginary "platoon" would hurry the hell up.

Spoiler: They find your intestines before they find your face.

📉 Oh, But It Gets Worse:

You know those worlds where:

You trip at the wrong time?

You trust the wrong smile?

You linger too long at the wrong stoplight?

Yeah.

Those branches exist too.

Somewhere right now there’s a "you" realizing, in a final flash of agony, that bad vibes weren’t just vibes — they were a premonition.

And you ignored it.

Because of course you did.

🩸 Let's Widen the Nightmare:

Many Worlds doesn’t just mean:

"Another version of you makes better choices."

It means:

"Another version of you suffers every grotesque possibility reality can conjure."

The serial killer.

The haunted asylum.

The man-eating forest.

The ancient portal.

The backrooms you fell into when the elevator twitched one floor too low.

You didn’t just die.

You screamed. You begged. You lost.

And no one ever found you.

🔥 Existential Takeaway?

In some reality, you're not reading this.

You're a statistic.

You're a stain on a forgotten mattress.

You're the cold case that made a rookie cop puke into a bush and think about quitting the force.

You’re the news headline that flashes for three seconds before getting buried under celebrity gossip and microwave dinner ads.

🧠 And Here's the Real Fucked Up Part:

You can feel it, can’t you?

That sick, silent gut twist at 3:17 AM.

That instinctual recoil when the lights flicker.

That flash of dread when the doorbell rings and no one’s there.

It’s your body remembering something your mind was lucky enough to forget.

🤯 TL;DR

If Many Worlds is real, you’re already dead somewhere.

Not peacefully.

Not painlessly.

Not beautifully.

And every time you smirk at a horror movie character making dumb decisions...

Understand:

You already made one.

You just don’t remember.

Yet.

💣 CALL TO ACTION:

🔁 Reblog if you want to remind the whole damn world how thin the veil really is. 🧠 Save this post for the next time you hear a strange noise at 2AM and hesitate at the door. 🛸 Share it with the friend who thinks they’re too smart to die dumb. 💀 Bookmark it for when your dreams start bleeding at the edges tonight.

⚖️ LEGAL DISCLAIMER: This post is satire, cosmological commentary, existential horror performance art, and protected by the sacred right of reminding people that physics is an asshole sometimes.

If you’re uncomfortable: Congratulations. That’s your parallel self screaming across the void.

Sleep tight, dummy.

Tootles. 👋

[tawked]

Aliens #4, 1989, first published by Dark Horse, this version republished by Marvel.

Some food for thought for fans of David 8 / robotfuckers.

In the 1980s Alien comics, Newt (from the second movie) and an android soldier named Butler fall into a romantic relationship. This is loaded with drama for Newt. She is a thoroughly traumatized young woman with who's life has been destroyed by the a corporation essentially selling her family a lie (Hadley's Hope / LV426), and who now has an abundance of unprocessed medical trauma after being abused in a psychiatric facility for years. In this version, due to legal reasons, Ellen Ripley needed to be written out, so she simply isn't in Newt's life, and while this is not elaborated on (note: Alien 3 came out in 1992, this was all written in 1988-1989) the audience can obviously infer that this was not a cool separation from Hicks and Newt.

Ripley shows up later (incidentally, at the end of this specific storyline) but it's weird and tangled.

So, Butler - Butler and his squad are never informed that they're androids. When Butler begins his relationship with Newt, he does so under the belief that he is human. He only realizes that he isn't after being cut in half by an aylmao. Newt initially attempts to continue their relationship but existential dread seeps in as she comes to understand he is, in a sense, another lie sold to her by a corporation, and that as an artificial being with implanted memories and emotions, there is an element of unreality to his feelings for her.

When they sleep together in the literal sense, she is aware that he isn't really sleeping, he's just running a program that simulates sleep for the sake of passing as human, which to her is, in a way, a kind of natural deception on the part of Butler's creators. It's not that he's lying to her, he is the lie.

Now, David 8 is interesting because he is at all times fully aware that he is a robot and while he is probably the most advanced-looking android we've seen, with human mannerisms and Bladerunner Replicant-esque cognitive sophistication (that is, emotions and shit), he simply never has to operate under the illusion of being a human. This is also the case for Bishop and almost certainly Ash.

Butler is kind of a rare take on an android in that he's complex enough to deal with the reality of unreality, that is the concept of being an an artificial person with all of the existential horror that revelation implies, through the lens of a personal discovery.

And I think we should explore this dynamic more in horny robot fanfiction and art thank you

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

[ID: digital art of a player character from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, in a hooded coat and gas mask. “This is fine,” the character says as they carry a backpack three times their size through a grassy field. In the background are patches of gray trees, and the sky is overcast. End ID.]

Over-encumbered

"I’ll go and make a quick trip to Zaton, probably shouldn’t loot to much."

>1 hour later

[blackbirds-on-the-marsh]

Anomaly is one of those games where the story generates itself from your experiences playing, and every so often I get the urge to turn my characters’ experiences into a couple of short stories.