Action Figure World

INVISIBLE GAMES (or, if that link is down, you can check out the mirror here) is a horror (or quasi-creepypasta) site by Catherynne M. Valente, taking on the subject of old, lost games that seem to take on a sinister or unnerving air as one reads through the tales about them. Perhaps the most famous entry on the site is that entitled Killswitch, which has been spread across the internet and terrified many a pasta-fan. Here it is, now, but don’t forget to check out Valente’s site to check out the Invisible games entry or any of her writing beyond.

In the spring 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived.
The game was “Killswitch.”

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the Myst and Silent Hill franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague grey and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folksongs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character–he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.
Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth–she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons which will become obvious, his work was lost.

Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused. Seeking a way out, she ascends through the levels of a coal mine in which it is slowly revealed she was once an employee, investigating its collapse and beset on all sides by demons similar to Ghast, as well as dead foremen, coal-golems, and demonic inspectors from the Sovatik corporation, whose boxy bodies were clothed in red, the only color in the game. The environment, though primitive, becomes genuinely uncanny as play progresses. There are no “bosses” in any real sense–Porto must simply move physically through tunnels to reach subsequent levels while her size varies wildly through inter-level spaces.

The story that emerges through Porto’s discovery of magnetic tapes, files, mutilated factory workers who were once her friends, and deciphering an impressively complex code inscribed on a series of iron axes players must collect (This portion of the game was almost laughably complex, and defeated many players until “Porto881″ posted the cipher to a Columbia BBS. Attempts to contact this player have been unsuccessful, and the username is no longer in use on any known service.) is that the foremen, under pressure to increase coal production, began to falsify reports of malfunctions and worker malfeasance in order to excuse low output, which incited a Sovatik inspection. Officials were dispatched, one for each miner, and an extraordinary story of torture unfolds, with fuzzy and indistinct graphics of red-coated men standing over workers, inserting small knives into their joints whenever production slowed. (Admittedly, this is not a very subtle critique of Soviet-era industrial tactics, and as the town of Karvina itself was devastated by the departure of the coal industry, more than one thesis has interpreted Killswitch as a political screed.)
After solving the axe-code, Porto finds and assembles a tape recorder, on which a male voice tells her that the fires of the earth had risen up in their defense and flowed into the hearts of the decrepit, pre-revolution equipment they used and wakened them to avenge the workers. It is generally assumed that the “fires of the earth” are demons like Ghast, coal-fumes and gassy bodies inhabiting the old machines. The machines themselves are so “big” that the graphics elect to only show two or three gear-teeth or a conveyor belt rather than the entire apparatus. The machines drove the inspectors mad, and they disappeared into caverns with their knives (only to emerge to plague Porto, of course). The workers were often crushed and mangled in the onslaught of machines, who were neither graceful nor discriminating. Porto herself was knocked into a deep chasm by a grief-stricken engine, and her
fluctuating size, if it is real and not imagined, is implied to be the result of poisonous fumes inhaled there.

What follows is the most cryptic and intuitive part of the game. There is no logical reason to proceed in the “correct” way, and again it was Porto881 who came to the rescue of the fledgling Killswitch community. In the chamber behind the tape recorder is a great furnace where coal was once rendered into coke. There are no clues as to what she is intended to do in this room. Players attempted nearly everything, from immolating herself to continuing to process coal as if the machines had never risen up. Porto881 hit upon the solution, and posted it to the Columbia boards. If Porto ingests the raw coke, she will find her body under control,and can go on to fight her way out of the final levels of the mine, which are impassable in her giant state, clutching the tape containing this extraordinary story. However, as she crawls through the final tunnel to emerge aboveground, the screen goes suddenly
white.

Yamamoto is crying.