The Ouroborous Incident

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Follow a tech giant's robot snakes through a low-bandwidth web.

Platforms: Browser
Stores: itch.io
Price: Free
Rated: 4.9 out of 5 on itch.io (79 ratings)
Players: 1
Controls: Mouse only: click the underlined links to continue a video transcript, refresh a liveblog or open a new window; close windows with the X.
Made by: Deth Rod (DOMINO CLUB)
Released: 2022

What frightens A tech giant releases robotic data-gathering snakes across the Earth, and you follow what they do through trail camera captions, blog posts and forum threads: plants and insects come back wrong, a critic is doxed through captcha images, and the machines start remaking more than grass.
Content: body horror, gun violence, doxing, strong language, snakes, climate change.

The Ouroborous Incident is a free text-based horror story played in the browser through a desktop of pop-up windows. Read press releases, blogs, forum posts and captioned camera footage as the Turing Corporation launches RAVENOUS, small robotic snakes meant to map the Earth for Mars, and as the world around them starts to change.

About The Ouroborous Incident

The Ouroborous Incident was written and designed by Deth Rod and published by the indie collective DOMINO CLUB, made with Candle's Jupiter Engine; DOMINO CLUB's gallery lists it among its Metal and Flesh Jam games, and its itch.io comments go back to October 2022. It is free and plays in the browser, with no pictures at all: everything is text.

The setting is a near future where climate laws ration how many CPU cycles anyone may use, so people browse a "lo-tek" web of text descriptions and auto-generated captions. Allan Goleman, head of the Turing Corporation, announces RAVENOUS: a three-inch robotic snake that samples soil and plants and sends the data to his orbital network, supposedly so Earth can be rebuilt on Mars. A blogger named Sloane Redyard does not trust it, a PhD student named Krik keeps trail cameras in the California parks, and a fan on the forums wants very badly to see one of the snakes up close.

You play by clicking. Each link opens or updates a window: a video transcript continues line by line, a liveblog refreshes, a press release or an encyclopedia entry pops up beside it. By the end several windows are open at once and you move between them to follow what is happening. The fear builds slowly from small wrong details, grass bent at right angles, insects with legs on one side, and from a corporation that can turn every captcha on the internet against one person, toward a climax its makers flag as body horror.

Players on itch.io compare its writing to China Mieville and praise how the interface carries the story. It suits readers of interactive fiction and of techno-thrillers that tip into horror, more than players looking for jump scares.

How to play The Ouroborous Incident

Open the game page on itch.io and press Run game.
Read the window that opens and click its underlined link, such as (CONTINUE VIDEO), to go on.
Read each new window as it appears: press releases, blog posts, forum threads and encyclopedia entries.
Follow the links inside the posts for background, and refresh the liveblog when it asks.
Near the end, move between the open windows to keep up with each feed until the story closes.

Screenshots

The Ouroborous Incident cover: a text window describing its own cover image, a glossy black metal snake biting its own tail around the game's title

The Ouroborous Incident opening: a green Trail Camera 3 window captioning park footage of a hooded figure and a person in a Turing cap, with a (CONTINUE VIDEO) link

Tips

Read the encyclopedia and forum side windows: they explain the CPU limits and swear-word filter the story depends on.
Play with sound on: the game has music and notification sounds.
Take it in one sitting; the windows pile up and the threads only make sense together.