Entity

About Entity

Entity is a tiny horror game made in Bitsy, the minimalist engine of single-colour tiles and short text, by the itch.io creator ultrabrilliant (Andy Kelly), with audio by davemakes. It came out on itch.io in March 2021. Its premise is one line: a salvage crew discovers a derelict starship in deep space.

You play one of the salvagers. It opens in your ship's cockpit, three little crew figures in front of a viewport with the wreck hanging in it. From there you move through the rooms in a top-down pixel world with the keyboard or a gamepad, and walk into highlighted objects to read what they tell you. The story comes in short lines of text as you go deeper.

What players praise most is how much fear it draws from very little. Your character's breathing runs under the soundtrack and changes as the story goes on, and the colour scheme shifts the further you get, so the ship feels less safe with each room. Players call it incredibly tense and atmospheric despite its handful of pixels, and some read in it a parasite like the fungus that takes over ants.

The soundtrack used to be optional. It's now built into the game, so you don't need to start it separately. davemakes also put it out on Bandcamp as The Derelict, with almost an hour of haunted-spaceship ambience if you want more of it afterwards.

It is free in the browser and takes a few minutes. It suits players who like small, sound-driven sci-fi horror such as Erebos, Descent: Valis XI or 10-103, and anyone curious how frightening a Bitsy game can be.

How to play Entity

1. Open the game's itch.io page and press Run game.
2. Advance the opening text with the movement keys.
3. Move with WASD or a gamepad through the derelict ship.
4. Walk into highlighted objects to interact with them and read what they say.
5. Keep going deeper into the ship until the story ends.

Tips

• Play with headphones: the breathing and the soundtrack carry most of the tension.
• Watch the colours; they change as you progress and tell you how far in you are.
• It takes only a few minutes, so play it in one sitting with the lights low.

Questions