Chapter 83: Fried Chicken
A man was playing in front of his computer, lost in the glow of the screen. He was playing an old retro game, one he used to sink hours into when he was younger.
It was quite a fun game with a lot of things jumbled together. It had multiple endings, a lot of collectible NPCs that can join your party, and four styles of gameplay. The main turn-based one. The duel system turns it into something like a fighting game. Then there was a strategic, grid-based battle system, even a tower defense, and the last one was similar to a galge game where you make dialogue choices to increase affinity with certain NPCs.
He had just finished one of the many branching playthroughs and reached for an energy drink from the mini-fridge beside him.
"No matter how many times I play this game, it’s always fun."
He drank his energy drink and scrolled through the many walkthroughs of the game he was playing.
Even after fifteen years, new content was still being uncovered. Secret endings. Unused NPCs. The fanbase remained alive, and so did the game’s mystery.
’Even now, gamers are still finding routes we never knew existed... The devs truly were insane geniuses.’
The man couldn’t help but admire the ability of the people who made one of his favorite games of all time.
He then started scrolling through the various blogs about the game. He then noticed a weird blog that he thought was a fan fic, but it posed an interesting question.
[Hey, I started thinking what if the game isn’t just a game, but a real world. The reason why it has so many endings and so many characters that feel real is because it is.]
When the man read the first line of the blog, he couldn’t help but smile. It was the kind of thought he used to entertain back when he was a teenager.
There had always been theories like that floating around. Some people believed reality itself was a simulation, or a dream conjured by some godlike being.