DONTPLAY.exe

I'm writing this to make sure this same thing doesn't happen to you as it did to me.

I was searching the Internet for free games. I came across this website that was for downloading free indie games and ROMs of homebrew games. But, when I went to the website, my laptop crashed and had to reboot. When it started back up, there was a strange icon on the desktop: DONTPLAY.exe. I decided to open the game and play it.

It looked like an early Super NES game, with rather unpolished graphics. The title screen was a sunset sky with scrolling cartoon clouds and the title was written in a blue, angular crystalline font in Kakatana. My Japanese was pretty rusty, but I knew enough to understand what it said: "Four Beast Story" or "Story of Four Beasts." It had four options: START, OPTION, TIME ATTACK, and SOUND TEST. There was no copyright information or date. I selected Start, and it seemed pretty good for an early SNES game...until I got to level 6 (more on that later.)

Here's how the game worked. You selected one of four characters at the start of each level, and could switch between them in-level via the pause sceen, like that old NES game Little Samson. There was a kappa named Nasu (eggplant), who was basically useless on land but was absolutely necessary for the underwater sections. A cat named Monica who was incredibly fast and agile, but weak. A wolf (I'm guessing it was a wolf, it had a dog-like nose and pointy ears) named Boris who was strong but slow and couldn't jump very high, and finally the monkey, Hiro, who had well-rounded jumping and speed abilities, and could take a fair amount of damage. Naturally, I usually picked Hiro. The objective of each level was to find a key and use it to open a hidden door within a certain amount of time (usually 5 minutes.) The levels were littered with koban (oval gold coins once used as currency in Japan) that you could collect 50 of for a 1-up. Oddly, though, the coin counter didn't reset when you did this, they just kept counting up as you collected them, I passed this off as a glitch left in by the developers. Some parts were really hard and I kept dying, so I found myself stocking up on coins to get 1-ups and running out of time occasionally. It was no problem though, I could just try again when this happened.

Now, about level 6...I finished Level 5 with Hiro, and when I started level 6, it skipped the character selection screen and plopped me straight into the level. I dismissed it as a glitch, but then I came to the entry to a water section and had to select Nasu. I hit the pause button to bring up the character selection screen. I wish I hadn't.

This triggered a cutscene, which showed a scene of carnage by a riverbank. It was horrible, the other animals were mutilated in gruesome ways. Boris was gutted, and his paws had been cut off. Nasu had a rope around his neck and his shell was smashed in, revealing his organs. Monica was skinned, and her eyes were missing. This horrible image remained on the screen for about a minute.

When the image faded, my character was now in a room that was empty except for the key and the door, which, oddly, was in plain sight. My sprite was no longer a monkey, but a human. The background music was the Name Entry theme from the Famicom Disk System version of Castlevania III. I picked up the key. As I touched the door, the screen turned black and the phrase "ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE" flashed on the screen rapidly for about five seconds.

Then another image came up: a large, scary-looking guy with a Fu Manchu moustache wearing a strange hat sitting at a desk. The coin counter came up on the bottom of the screen. I hadn't paid much attention to it lately, but DAMN! I'd collected a lot of them-over 4,000. A digitized voice came from the speakers. "I AM PLEASED BY YOUR OFFERING. PLEASE ENTER." Then the coin counter then rapidly depleted until it was down to 0, accompanied by the sound of coins jingling.

The screen faded, and I was in another room, which seemed to be in a red cavern. There was no background music this time. The only object here was a door, which looked different than the wooden end-of-level doors in the rest of the game. Instead it was a weird-looking gate with eyes and teeth. I went through it, thinking it would take me to Level 7. It didn't take me there...Instead, it took me to...well, basically, Hell.

The graphics were astoundingly detailed here, almost too good for the SNES. Even late-era Squaresoft games like Bahamut Lagoon, Final Fantasy VI and Seiken Dentesu 3 weren't this good-looking. This was a rather startling contrast to the somewhat primitive graphics from the rest of the game. In the background, large red humanoids with horns wearing animal skins were brutally beating and torturing people in all sorts of ways. The calm music had turned to distorted, backwards versions of the song Centerfold, punctuated by anguished screams.

I tried to progress, but one of the red creatures came out of the background and whacked my character's head off with a huge, black spiked club. That was apparently the end of the game. It zoomed in on my character's headless corpse, the creature stuck its hand on the screen, and the hand began to come into the real world. I instantly slammed my laptop shut and it fell to the ground.

Nervously, I opened it again. The oni was gone, and the emulator had closed. I breathed a sigh of relief.

I still haven't played that gruesome game to this day...

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