I AM NOT WHAT REMAINS

About I AM NOT WHAT REMAINS

I AM NOT WHAT REMAINS was made by ompuco, the game developer and technical artist Sam Blye, for the Two-Minute Horror Jam of 2020, whose rule was that each game had to last less than two minutes. It is built in Unity, plays free in the browser on itch.io, and has no download.

It opens on a black terminal: a remote server stream has been found, and you press E to connect as its client. What follows is a short first-person walk through a low-detail town seen through that connection. The picture does not hold together. Buildings and streets smear into one another, blocks of image tear and repeat, and lines of scrambled text in several colours pile up over the view, reporting errors and missing data while a flat synthetic voice says things that do not quite make sense.

There is nothing to fight or solve. The fear is in watching the place, and whatever is speaking from it, fail around you, and in not knowing what you have connected to. Players in the comments praise the datamoshing effect, and several say the text changes from one run to the next, so it rewards a second try.

It suits players who like experimental, art-driven horror and glitch visuals, and anyone with two minutes to spare. Those sensitive to heavy flicker and visual noise should take care.

How to play I AM NOT WHAT REMAINS

1. Open the itch.io page; the game loads in the page.
2. Press E at the terminal prompt to connect to the server stream.
3. Walk forward through the town with the keyboard and look around with the mouse.
4. Watch and listen as the connection breaks down; a run is over in a couple of minutes.

Tips

• Play with sound on: the synthetic voice carries much of what is said.
• Play it more than once; players report the text is not the same each time.
• Use the full-screen button at the bottom right of the game for the clearest view.

Questions