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Review
Exceptionally bizarre videogame creepypasta, September 30, 2025Violent Delight hearkens back to the creepypastas I used to read as a kid about haunted videogames and cursed cartridges: games that demand ridiculous effort to play, games that are impossible to win, games that suck the life out from the player and expose them to real hazards. In these stories, you play a cursed videogame and it blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, the terrors inside invade your actual life, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You, etc.
A lot of these haunted games had aspects to them that made them extremely difficult to access. In Killswitch, the titular game deletes itself permanently upon completion, can't be copied, and released only in a limited run: after the 5000 existing copies of the game are played, no one can ever play it again. In SCP-4054 (The Seventh Door), the titular game also can't be copied and requires the cartridge to be manually reset with transistors every time the player dies, causing more and more glitches to appear with each death until the cartridge becomes unplayable. Escape from Terminus is a solo TTRPG rendered unwinnable by the supernatural Minotaur at its center, and is passed down from player to player as each previous player loses and consequently dies. Having to wait an hour for The Playground to arrive (and a few minutes every time it restarts) is nothing in comparison, but it's delightfully reminiscent of these other creepypasta games to me. The game also has several resonances with some other SCPs I like: the glitchy cartoon horror/gore, made more distressing by the low fidelity that obscures exactly what's happening on the screen, is really similar to SCPs like Goat VR and the overwhelmingly long and detailed SCP-8060 (Toontown), which follows the main character's descent into insanity as he's assimilated into a kids' TV cartoon. This game and Toontown also both have themes of escaping into childhood nostalgia and cartoon worlds, no matter how much they might hurt you.
I'm a sucker for horror stories about fictional games in general. I really liked InGirum, another horror IF with metafictional elements about a game-within-a-game. In fact, InGirum shares a lot of concepts with Violent Delight, though it's much shorter, so I'd recommend it to people who liked this game.
All this is a long way to say Violent Delight hits on some of my favorite aesthetics and concepts in horror, so of course I liked it. Something about the fictional games described in creepypastas just gets to me. Maybe it's a combination of that corrupted retro/cartoon aesthetic and the blurred quality of the storytelling, where in-game and out-of-game elements merge together until they eventually become indistinguishable, with no way to distinguish between the "normal" and supernatural parts of the game, and no way to see the designer's original vision before something malignant nested inside it like it was born there - and maybe it was.
But I think the game absolutely should have been a Spring Thing entry instead of an IFComp entry, since the timing mechanic works against the 2-hour rule in every way. The game is categorized as 1 hour, which is completely untrue in my view: you have to wait an hour to even start playing the fictional game-within-a-game, The Playground, and then gameplay is limited to short bursts that exhaust the cartridge and make you wait for it to recharge before playing more.
I didn't manage to finish the full thing before I had to submit my IFComp rating. By some standards, I ran out of my "2 hours of gameplay" before even starting the game proper, since I made and ate my dinner while the package got delivered, but I figured long breaks from the game don't count and paused the timer for that. I was taking short breaks for The Playground, though, to do other stuff like laundry, and didn't turn the timer off during those.
The forced waiting is an unusually player-unfriendly choice. In context, it's fantastic: the entry barrier makes the game abrasive towards the player in a way that perfectly dovetails with the tone of the story. It lets people know what they're getting into. Having a limited amount of time to explore The Playground also forces people to make judicious use of their time; the environment acquires that blurred quality I love, since you're forced to look at everything in a wide sweep and not spend too much time on any particular detail. You collect impressions.
The author has made a few games for Ectocomp with stream-of-consciousness writing and long, winding text. I bounced off those games sometimes, because the writing could be overwhelming and I felt obligated to read it all even if it was scattershot. But scattershot writing is great for scattered NPC dialogues, and here, the timed format allowed me to skim through those long text blocks and take in their contents through a kind of visual osmosis, absorbing the feelings behind each location and dialogue box more than any specific words. I didn't feel too guilty for missing anything.
The pixel graphics strike a great balance between being detailed enough to be evocative and simple enough to leave much to the imagination. The lack of detail works to the game's advantage because it contributes to the retro aesthetic and ensures you aren't missing too much by traveling quickly from room to room.
I have no clear interpretation of the story, but I do have some thoughts.
(Spoiler - click to show)As you go through The Playground, you descend through layers of the main character's existence. I didn't realize this until halfway through, but the numerical setting you change on the cartridge before each playthrough seems to correspond to the protagonist's age. Since you get to up the number by three every time you restart The Playground, each new playthrough represents three more years passing in the protagonist's life. At the age of 3 he's happy, playing with his toy duck. At the age of 6 he enters school and begins a series of progressively more miserable experiences there, until at the age of 21 he's kicked out into the adult world, taking a miserable office job that he apparently leaves 3 years later to work at a factory instead. The "paint" in the office might represent the protagonist doing something that gets him fired, forcing him to take a factory job. The hospitalization at 18 might be a mundane hospitalization, or potentially a suicide attempt; I wasn't entirely sure, but to me, the protagonist's growing despair and the bleak imagery seemed to darkly hint at suicide.
The ending represents a complete merging of the in-game and out-of-game worlds. The protagonist of The Playground and the protagonist playing it seem to be the same person. Some of the basement boy's dialogue alludes to the afterlife: is this a vision perhaps witnessed during or after a suicide, before the soul passes on to the next plane? The digging could represent digging a grave. Or potentially it's symbolic of "digging yourself a deeper hole", being trapped in a life you hate and can't extricate yourself from.
It's alternatively possible, though I think improbable, that the two protagonists are different people and not one person at different points in their life. Perhaps playing the cartridge game summoned the main character into existence? Or perhaps Rupert was so miserable in his life that his misery somehow got impressed into the cartridge itself, creating a semblance of his consciousness. From the start of Violent Delight: "They'd talk about storing brains one day on a cartridge. Imagine that. Living forever on a piece of crappy plastic. What a trip." But I feel like this theory holds less symbolic potential than the above one.
I wasn't completely sure the ending screen is an ending screen. The white bar in the bottom right made me think I might need to wait another hour to see more. But I waited a while and saw nothing, and the other reviews indicate it's really the end of Violent Delight.
The ending leaves a lot of questions unanswered, but that's fine. I feel like this game operates on a heavily symbolic level. The depictions of The Playground's protagonist being miserable in school reminded me of my own school days. The "real life" protagonist's ennui, solitude and boredom reminded me of certain periods in my own life too. The lonely winter night came through clear to me - the descriptions of the snow are evocative.
Two more things:
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At the start of the game, there's a parody version of IFComp featuring such excellent titles as "Chanandler Goofer's Superb Man" and "Cartographic Adventures of Stiffkey Miltonkeynes". But you can't play any of the games since the protagonist of Violent Delight is British and fun has been made illegal in the UK. I thought this was hilarious. It also explains why the protagonist bought a cartridge game online: physical games are more difficult to censor.
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Did I mention this game is made in Decker? It's one of the longest and most in-depth Decker games I've played, probably the most in-depth Decker game I've played. I tried Decker but bounced off it since the UI was unfamiliar and "I might as well just use Twine and JS/HTML5"; I didn't even know it was possible to do some of the things this game achieves. It's impressive.
