DISCLAIMER: DEEP-HELL IS NOT GOING ANYWHERE IN 2026. SCREENSHOTS PROVIDED BY ‘FARIS’ ‘LORE’ AND OTHERS. THANK YOU FOR PLAYING VIDEOGAMES in 2025.
The mood this year was travel and restarts, not the same website posts about how out of touch playing too many videogames had made me. I know, I know. A strange model for writing from me. I’m used to writing as Skeleton over at Deep-Hell.Com – a type of drag that includes vile things that live in my heart and bubbles them to the surface of the sludge I call a personality. That type of writing for so long Does Things to a person. Like making me afraid to reveal that I’m a person at all.
I didn’t play a lot of videogames this year, and I’m someone who generally thinks she’s absolutely addicted to the stuff. I’ve made the connection between videogames and expensive drugs before but as expensive as pop culture gets (it’s still over 40$ if you want to take yourself to the movies with snacks and popcorn requisite) videogames, alcohol and drugs stay on the non-offending course for prices.
Life on the road in August of 2025 claimed me. After three months building up to the decision. Three months where the only thing I touched was Rise of the Ronin. A scrappy game with deeply confused politics by Team Ninja that’s hailed by gamers as looking significantly worse than Ghost of Tsushima. Everything I thought repulsive about that game drew me in with the former though, and I spent hour after hour, day after day travelling Japan by foot. At the same time, I lost my job. Easy enough to chase digital sunsets over Mount Fuji during the hottest months of the year after.
Hot summer and road calling does that to a girl. I claimed misery even when people rallied around me as a floatation device. Nothing is funnier in hindsight than building your house of cards tall and wide and knowing the people who will help you pick it up still love you after.
I decayed into myself during the summer of 2025 knowing full well I was no longer as dedicated to videogames, No longer pursuing art or artistry or even wanting to know anything about the craft. My insides drew silent, and I tried to tell people with heartbroken eyes that I was nearing some kind of giving up. Social media burned into our retinas of so many causes and organizers I could not help them all.
Neverwinter Nights came out in 1998 and gave so much blood to the modern MMO you’d think this was a spooky Vampire metaphor. Sure, the meat’s there too but I’m told that’s a Deep-Hell.Com sort of thing.
An adaptation of the experience of using the rules of 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons, developed by Bioware. But Videogame companies can’t ship of theseus for very long, and the parts that made the original company had to slowly be swapped out. I’m not here for Neverwinter Nights though, just what it can do.
It’s 5am for the sixth night in a row and I cannot log off of a server called Prisoner of the Mists. I’m killing myself through late nights and short stays in bed for a videogame then. I turn a few of my friends into creatures of the night, and now we’re months into our characters’ lives. Prisoner of The Mists is a roleplaying server and sort of its own game in itself – one that drapes player interaction first over a skeleton of the Neverwinter Nights engine.
I am here for the late night walk in a silent world. I am here for strange greetings on the road with people who I can not divine the intentions of. I hear a noise or a branch snap in dark woods and retreat from the darkness, torch in hand. I can be so many faces to other people. No wonder the cave I have retreated to is painted with scratches trying to draw another world. I find myself desperate to climb out of this one, and join the markings as another
John M Harrison’s Against Worldbuilding was once shoved in front of my face by the hands of an internet forum the year it was published. Wrapped in a dying roleplaying game and my own delusions of being a fantasy novelist I seethed. Could a generational obsession with getting out of this house, out of this body, out of this mind, really have steered me into something so noxious? Little of his original article remains. Enough material there to chew on, and if you have to chew on it you’ll probably choke on it. I did, but I was young.
Group storytelling is on the minds of the videogame public again: youtube is inundated with short films and quasi documentaries from Minecraft and Roblox. The entirety of Hamlet has been performed and recorded in Grand Theft Auto 5. Elsewhere, large aggressive companies look towards any uncovered fraction of the internet to sell as a metaverse.
While group storytelling becomes a yearned for passion of multiplayer videogames again, it became funny that the novels I’d pull off of shelves at bookstores seem obsessed with the authors trying to assemble their own vacuum cleaners and show off the instructions. Search youtube, reddit, or any online trivia sharing platform of choice for ‘Magic System’ and find hours of scrolling capital C-Content to deaden brainwaves with about which author has created a Mathematically Superior Magic System to obsess over the granular details of.
I just want to cast fireball, man.
Prisoner of the Mists is something I spent 2025 reading about: a system. The system is what it does, and it pushes me and every little artist in the orchestra into open conflict with each other. Two players running past each other as the clock strikes digital night and saying a macro recorded hello is nothing in Final Fantasy XIV. A tip of the hat from one character to the next means more than the world. Ravenloft is a lonely place where dying can be permanent and the mists can steal you away.
Laughter carried by the air of the night. A trio of men in armor huddle around a fire they built with their own hands before choking their words to a whisper. The foul politic needs to be discussed, or a murder, or another Outlander (a term the people here use for those who wander in from the mists, players) has gone missing or even worse, been made an example of. A stranger wanders in and announces herself–
The first time I loaded the game I spent hours pouring over the forum before I decided to just go with what I know best: I’m pretty familiar with Elves. I know how they work and what they mean on a shorthand. An Elf is a guy who lives a long time – often depicted as eternally beautiful. I made mine short, foul-mouthed and with the vocabulary of an especially gregarious hick. Wandering through an unfamiliar city at night, they died immediately when a haunted twig cast lightning directly into my face.
Everything about Prisoner of the Mists is my obsession, my need to get away from the world. The circles under my eyes have gotten darker and with close friends it’s all we talk about: and if videogames aren’t often a place of Nostalgia then they drain us of anything that isn’t Obsession like all pop culture does. Through a haze of mist I watched the things the industry reiterates I need to be interested in drift by, I didn’t play Metro 33 and now It’s been long enough I don’t care to. Like the characters I play, I feel as if I have been taken from the place I belong and left to my own devices elsewhere.
A woman has her hands broken in a public square for casting magic. A man has his head cut off by a Garda (the Barovian colloquialism for police) who refers to themselves in the third person as a licensed murderer. In all cases these punishments for lawbreaking are carried out in public spaces where spectators are free to watch, free to whisper, and to scheme. These interactions weigh heavy on the hearts of the characters and the players. Another Outlander will stumble out of the mist later that day, and be told there is no way to go home.
It’s become my warm blanket after nights of being misgendered at work.
At least one of my characters is male on Prisoners of The Mist, but unlike here it’s my choice to be him when it arrives. Another old man sits down at the bar I work at to tell me what This Town was like when he was young. He hands me a dollar for a beer and I will keep him there for hours. I joke about taking the local retirees’ money to a friend and they explain poor taste. There’s a parade of lonely old men and women and they sometimes come in Angry or Sad and Not At All. “This is a third space.” Someone says, serious, and I take them at their word.
Another night passes by and I do not choose the comfort of bed. Anxiety presses up into the roof of my mouth like a dentist’s glove and everything on my face feels tight. I’ll be a stoic elf, a duplicitous healer, I’ll be something and someone else with friends for a few more hours. We mostly don’t talk much about the day-to-day anymore as we play. I miss them.
Third Edition dungeons and dragons stacked skills and traits on top of each other, and Prisoners of the Mist uses them to effect: the first time a player character lied to me it was novel. The first time they used an obliquely high sneak-stat layered with true Invisibility to sneak up on me while I told secrets to others made my blood rush to my head and my anxiety spike in a good way. Would I end up in the town square, punished for my crimes? I wouldn’t – my character might though. The rules explicitly state that having a healthy relationship of separation from characters is important.
Play a charming Bard among friends and you might have a good time. A Dungeon Master or MPC (Monster Player Character) shows up from the mists: all of the sudden those skill points you didn’t put in Charisma hurt a little more when you’ve got to do something in front of a crowd of people navigating a DM encounter and it’s time to show the work built into your character.
Cultures become mixed by players dragging up whatever they can find online – though the more I linger in the mists the more I wonder if a Bard might not be played by a lyricist for real. Or a showgirl might not be an anthropologist riding around behind the monitor. I don’t ultimately care about Western Fantasy as an adult. I decided a long time ago that most fantasy novels are an excuse for the author to tell you about how they wished the world worked. The mists are an equalizer, and players rarely get that kind of power.
On a beach somewhere far away a Soldier with no home tells with tears in their eyes the only two friends they’ve made that they need to be away for awhile. Nothing but Work can ease their heart and so they leave to a place called Port-A-Lucine to find it. Shimmering lights in the dark, noble ivories and the working class they exploit. The Soldier will be kicked back down to where they belong, one woman will get the thirst for blood and the other will have the ability to make new memories with people from her home taken away. The mist does not give.
I see those characters walk by each other, one might write out a sad glance to the other. The other looks back like she’s seen a ghost, trying to tie the forgotten face back to some old memory that the Mist itself reached in and plucked right out of her.
Two of the friends I play with had a brief falling out over the tendency for one of them to run dungeons as if the rest of us are background party members meant to shirk extra damage off onto. This has spiraled from drama into the Cleric in question being outed as a follower of a dark god all along, the player runs with it. Our own little world spills out into so many others every night. I scroll through a playerlist running on software from 1998 for familiar names of people I only come to recognize through writing flourish and low poly model.
Maybe the need to escape everything is this year, this body, this head – maybe if I can isolate the cause the need to spend nine hours a night pretending to be an Elf will vanish. With it the strange way a moment between characters can become Real inside of this system goes with it. I spent my teenage years inside of a closed system like this for safety, and maybe it’s just the last gasps of a dying inner child I come around to one again.
I have memories I can’t tell anyone about. Memories that still linger with me that I’ve ritualized through a digital body into something I can use again. I don’t use words like abuse, trauma, grooming, because they are embarrassing. Memories that know I’ve experienced the range of human emotions pretending to be a Soldier, a Sorcerer, or anything else that comes from the pages of a brain rotted by fantasy novels and online chatrooms.
Memories as real to me as the emotion burned a hole in my chest. I just have to try to imagine what the sunlight would have felt like on the face I was pretending to wear. Or the way laughter sounds mixed with cider in a tavern after a long adventure. Or the way one of my characters felt a knife in their hand when they doublecrossed a loved one for the thrill of it.
I have, thus far, logged 400 hours in Prisoners of The Mist trying to escape the rapidly dawning end of the year. Many of my characters have started to be affected by the strange broken world they find themselves in. It is a broken world where when I reach out a hand touches mine often. I wanted to be honest with myself when I was looking for what actually mattered to me as the year drew to a close. Scrolling down lists of the things I’ve played and reviewed and finally that’s just it: The game of the year is the one we take with us. It can’t be more complicated than that.
