Secret of Hell: The Twisted Truth Behind the Horror
It had taken the horror-game scene by storm, and the way streamers leapt out of their chairs at its signature jump scares had become half the entertainment all on its own.
The story was simple enough. Decades after the hospital had been abandoned, a letter arrived for the protagonist, and that was where it began.
The game told you nothing at the start. You pieced the story together from letter fragments scattered through the building. Cutscenes broke up the exploration here and there, and the further you went, the more you found yourself sinking into the tragic past of a vengeful spirit named Acacia.
"Alright. So this hospital was used for human experimentation. And Acacia was one of the victims. I get that."
Her rage was understandable. She had been sacrificed in the name of some greater good, tortured under the pretense of medical research. But did that justify dragging a complete stranger into this and tormenting him like this?
For what, exactly? Just because he was the protagonist of a horror game? For the sake of keeping the game moving?
I tried venting my grievances at the foot of the stairs to the third floor, but Yandere shut me down without a shred of mercy. The odds of getting the reaction I actually wanted were vanishingly small, so I just started climbing.
The moment my foot touched the first step, a video donation rolled in.
"Don't send that!"
Why would you clip me crying? You couldn't even see my face.
Haa... Fine. People watched streams to be entertained. As long as Yandere was having fun, that was what mattered.
"Jump the string here and dodge it!"
After a brief interlude of clip-based bullying, I climbed the rest of the stairs. I slipped past the bell rigged along the staircase without setting it off and stepped onto the third floor in one piece.
The third floor was laid out like every floor below it: a long corridor with windows running down the right side and patient rooms lining the left. I opened the nearest door and checked the floor before going in.
"Nothing."
"So everyone does this? See, I told you it wasn't just me."
Anyone who had actually played the game behaved the exact same way. The only way to know about that floor bell in advance and dodge it was to watch someone else's playthrough beforehand. It was a cheap, nasty trap designed so you had no choice but to trigger it — and once you had, you had no choice but to start checking.
"That's just mean. You're drawing a line here?"
What a bunch of hard-asses. Why not just call yourselves Hard-Ass instead of Yandere?
"You don't have to show me. Just keep that safely to yourself."
I had a feeling that if I asked her to show me, she actually would, so I shut it down. I was curious how she planned to demonstrate her yandere credentials, but I was not in the habit of taking unnecessary gambles.
"Nothing in here. If that's the case they should've just boarded it up."
The first patient room had nothing worth finding. Same as the others: six beds, a dresser, a smashed TV. I pulled the drawers open and found them empty. There was nothing else to see, so I moved on to the next room.
"Second room is... ha! You thought I'd fall for that?"
This time I could see a thin thread stretched across the floor. It caught a faint glitter if you swept the flashlight over it, but you would never notice it unless you were looking on purpose. It looked a lot like fishing line.
"Something like this, you just jump over and— huh!?"
Tiiing... tiiing...
The second I jumped the threshold, a bell started ringing. There was no thread. There was no reason for it to go off.
I whipped around, scanning everything I could. For a split second I thought I caught something glittering at about the protagonist's head height. By then it was already too late.
I yanked the mouse in a panic, and the camera spun toward the doorway. I saw it.
I had already seen it.
"Hh—!?"
Until now, Acacia had always appeared at a distance. This time she was standing right in the doorway. One jump away. Two or three steps and you could have touched her. I had never imagined she would be that close.
It turned out to be true — when you were startled badly enough, you couldn't even scream.
"I-I didn't faint..."
I only managed to get the words out after the game-over dumped me back at the start of the third floor. I couldn't raise my voice. If I did, I was certain something would appear in my actual house. I wanted to rub the goosebumps off my arms, but I could barely twitch a finger.
"I... I can't move..."
"What was that...? Why did she appear that close?"
Was that not the kind of thing they could have warned me about? I would have jumped even if I had known.
"Yeah. Right when you start getting used to it, they hit you with that."
Whoever made this game had clearly studied human psychology. There was no other way they could have timed that scare so perfectly, sliding the knife in the exact moment I let my guard down.
"Haa... I swear that just took ten years off my life."
It was another ten minutes before I could move again. I had already cried myself out earlier, so at least this time I didn't start sobbing.
"Okay! I've got it all figured out for real this time!"
The last room on the third floor. Search that one, put the final piece of the story together, and you were guaranteed to run into Acacia. That was when the chase began — you had to get out of the building without getting crushed by the collapsing structure. If you slowed down along the way and she caught you, that was it too.
After repeating the chase seven times, I had finally mapped every pattern. I was, as I had said before, bad at games. That was why I preferred memorizing every pattern and dodging on knowledge rather than reacting on instinct. That was also why I had never been any good at playing against other people. A human opponent didn't come with a pattern you could memorize.
"Alright. Last chase!"
I skipped the story cutscene that triggered when I found the last letter fragment in the final patient room. Seven times is more than enough. I don't need to watch it again.
A warped, unearthly sound rolled through the speakers, and Acacia appeared. She stood in the center of the room and did not move until I left. I stopped in the doorway, took one deep breath, and ran.
I dodged the falling debris exactly as I had mapped it, careful not to veer into any route blocked by obstacles. That was how I finally reached the last stretch of the second floor. The seventh run had killed me here.
When you passed the patient room right beside the stairs, the door came crashing down. If you just kept going, it flattened you and it was game over. You actually had to stop for a beat, then jump through.
Remember what I said about slowing down getting you caught?
That was the trap.
They trained you to believe that stopping was death — and then made you stop to survive the trap.
"This is it! This is really it!"
I cleared the door, took the stairs down from the second floor, and the first-floor lobby opened up in front of me. The entrance I had come in through was right there. I sprinted for it without easing off the keys — and then my movement cut out dead, and a bell began to ring.
I mashed every key I had. Nothing. The character would not move.
"Huh? Why is it suddenly— ngh!?"
Bells started ringing from every direction.
There had been one unbroken rule since the moment I started this game. Only one bell ever rang at a time.
That rule had just been broken. Something was happening.
"What now...?"
The screen had already cut to a cinematic. Static started crawling across it. The warped, chalkboard-scratch sound that had been going this whole time slowly faded, and a human voice bled through. At the same time, the screen went black.
"Le... xi..."
The center of the black screen began to brighten, slowly at first, and then light burst across it all at once. A bright hospital room resolved into view.
A woman in a nurse's uniform was calling to the protagonist.
"What is this? A hospital?"
"Were you having those strange fantasies again? I told you not to do that."
"Acacia..."
Acacia. The protagonist had just called the nurse in front of him by that name. The camera slowly pushed in until it filled the frame with the name tag pinned to her chest.
The hospital name and the name Acacia were printed there in stark, unmistakable letters. The same name as the ghost that had been hunting the protagonist this entire time.
Then a clear, bright bell rang out.
"Lexi! You're zoning out again."
"Ha... hahaha! So that was it?"
The pieces finally locked into place.
Everything up to this point — the abandoned hospital, the exploration — had been the protagonist's delusion. The ghost was a nurse at a psychiatric hospital. The nurse assigned to his intensive care was named Acacia, and the bells were rung before she entered a room so the patient wouldn't be startled.
That was why the bells had been placed with no apparent logic, and why the ghost appeared the instant one of them rang. A patient never knew when the nurse was going to walk in.
Secret of Hell.
I had assumed they named it that because the game was about uncovering Acacia's secret. Every letter fragment you picked up in the abandoned hospital, every line scrawled on the walls, had been feeding you Acacia's past.
But all of it had been Lexi's imagination. The title had been pointing at Lexi's secret all along.
The secret that he was a patient in a psychiatric hospital.
Acacia's story had been a MacGuffin.
"...That's kind of a letdown."
The game ended with the nurse putting a needle in the protagonist's arm. I stared at the credits rolling up the screen, my head completely empty.
"Wow. Okay. That twist is actually insane."
I glanced at the clock. It was almost one in the morning. I had been playing this thing for over five hours. I hadn't been able to let my guard down once the entire time, so of course I was wrecked.
I toyed with the empty water bottle and said, "Yeah, well... it's fun. Yeah."
"Chapter 2? This isn't the end?"
The game's biggest secret — its single greatest twist — had just been revealed. How was there a sequel?
...Not my problem, I guess.
I wasn't the one who was going to play it. I was never looking at another horror game again.
"Haa... Anyway! That's it for today's stream! Thanks for sticking with a long one, and good work today, everyone!"
Normally I would have signed off right there, but today I tacked something on at the end.
"And finally — Hae-myo, who recommended this game, and Yandere, who voted yes. I hope you both stub your toes on a doorframe. Bye!"
Ian has ended the stream.