I’ve hit something of a rut with the MST of “My Immortal” and have had a hard time continuing, so, while I work on getting my ass in gear, I thought I’d go back to posting creepypasta reviews. This is a story I’ve reviewed before, but it was several years ago on a now-defunct Tumblr account, so I’ve decided to review it again.
Warning for child death/gore in this story.
“Pale Luna”
PLOT SUMMARY
So, to get it out of the way — this is a video game creepypasta, and, like many other video game creepypastas, it’s written in the style of a forum post with the narrator (who is not a character in this story) recounting what they’ve heard about the video game in question. In virtually every other regard, though, this is far from being a typical video game creepypasta. I don’t want to spend too much of the summary editorializing, but I trust you’ll see what I mean.
Onto the tale. This story actually opens with the narrator explaining the concept of software swap parties. Since the eighties were a while ago now, I’ll explain the concept too. In short, before the dawn of the internet and peer-to-peer file sharing, some people would have in-person meetups to trade floppy disks with each other. This was primarily a way for thrifty people to get their hands on new software, especially video games, without having to pay full price, but some amateur game devs would also distribute their games this way. As the narrator explains, some indie games could make it all the way across the country changing hands like this… but the titular game didn’t. It never made it out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Unsurprisingly, according to the narrator, no known copies of it exist nowadays.
Pale Luna was a text adventure game (a genre already falling in fashion at the time), and, even if you’re familiar with how frustrating and obtuse that genre can be, it’s easy to see why this one didn’t take off. To explain, let’s have a gameplay summary:
You begin the game in a moonlit room. There is a shovel, a rope, and gold in the room with you, and a door to the east. As is typical for these sorts of games, you’re prompted to type a command to proceed; unlike most text adventures, however, where the game is programmed to interpret a variety of commands regardless of whether they are the correct options to advance the story, Pale Luna only lets you do the obvious thing of gathering all the items and exiting the room via the door. The game then tells you to “reap your reward,” then, in all caps, “PALE LUNA SMILES AT YOU.” With no further elaboration on what the hell that means, it then describes the next area — you’re in the woods at night, and there are paths leading north, west, and east.
Here’s the main issue with Pale Luna: due to either incompetence or active malice on the part of the developer, the game does not allow players to make any wrong moves. Here, for instance, you can only actually move north, and picking one of the other two options will not allow you to proceed down an incorrect pathway or even tell you you can’t go that way — it’ll cause the entire game to hang. This wouldn’t be such a big deal nowadays, but on an old computer, the only way to fix this would be a full system reboot. If you did head north here, you were just faced with another set of directional choices, and again had to guess correctly or else crash your computer. The game didn’t accept any of the standard text adventure commands, nor did it allow you to interact with the items you picked up earlier; trying to use the gold would tell you “Not here,” trying to use the shovel would tell you “Not now,” and if you tried using the rope the game would say “You’ve already used this.” Obviously, of the few people who actually played this game to begin with, nearly all of them gave up at this point, figuring it was too badly programmed to be worth their time.
Except, of course, one guy (a presumably very bored young man named Michael Nevins) decided he just had to see the game through to the end. After hours of trial and error, he managed to navigate through the forest area. The game displayed new text: “There are no paths. The ground is soft. Here,” broken up by the all-caps message “PALE LUNA SMILES WIDE” repeated three times. Michael eventually figured out what he needed to do on this screen was “use shovel,” “drop gold,” then “fill hole,” and thus he beat the game. The end screen simply read “Congratulations” along with two strings of numbers.
After some deliberation — and rebooting his computer again, since it froze on the “Congratulations” screen — Michael realized the numbers were coordinates, pointing to a specific latitude and longitude within the nearby Lassen Volcanic Park. Since even the narrator points out that Michael was a guy with more free time than common sense, he decided to go there himself and try digging on the spot indicated by the coordinates. As he made his way through the park’s forest trails, he noted the path he took bore rough similarities to the sequence of turns he’d made in-game, and he became more and more excited, convinced he was going to stumble upon some eccentric programmer’s buried treasure. When he reached the spot and began to dig, though, what he found instead was the decomposing head of a blonde-haired little girl.
Authorities identified the head as belonging to eleven-year-old Karen Paulsen, who had gone missing in San Diego a year and a half prior. Efforts were made to track down the creator of Pale Luna, but given the shaky legal status of the software swap community it was difficult to identify individuals involved or to get anyone to talk, and so the case went cold. The rest of Karen Paulsen’s remains were never found.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
So remember how I said this isn’t a typical video game creepypasta? Yeah. Most video game creepypastas are about games that actually exist, to begin with; a great deal of them are about popular games from the ‘90s, since creepypasta took off in the ‘00s and people wanted to read/write about games they played as kids. A large percentage are about seemingly haunted copies of these popular games (such as “Sonic.exe”), while others (such as “Pokémon Black”) describe hacked copies. Generally the horror is confined to the narrator’s experience playing the game in question — the story aims to freak out its readers by describing technology acting in a way they know it shouldn’t, or by playing on what happens in the canon game to draw alarming implications about the game world. This is one of a mere handful of pastas I’ve read that cover a game that doesn’t actually exist, and, of those, it’s the only one about a text adventure and the only one I can think of where the greater horror is in real life. This isn’t really about a video game, at least not in the way those other pastas are. My initial reaction to finding this story was to be over the moon (pun intended) that I had found a video game creepypasta that was so different from the others I’ve read, and I’m inclined to call this a favorite for that reason alone. It’s definitely a standout.
Because I’ve read a lot of creepypasta and am very familiar with what most of the ones about games are like, this story did a great job subverting my expectations. Maybe if you’re less familiar with this subgenre you’d be less taken aback by the direction this one goes in — after all, finding a mysterious dead body isn’t exactly new territory for horror stories in general — but it definitely wasn’t where I thought this tale was headed.
This story feels grounded (pun again intended) in that the events described don’t strain suspension of disbelief to the degree generally required by video game creepypastas, and the greater horror here is something tangible. The creator of this game murdered a child, presumably by strangling her (the presence of a rope in-game along with the text about it having been already used strongly hints this), then decapitated her and buried her head, then created Pale Luna as a sort of morbid treasure map — barely a game in its own right, as the only “gameplay” per se is retracing the murderer’s path to the burial site. We know almost nothing about the murderer or the circumstances of the crime, and there are few hints as to what any of the answers might be, but the game itself gives insight into the killer’s apparent state of mind while disposing of the evidence. They seem to have been under the impression that they were being watched by something or someone — the titular Pale Luna — who approves of their actions. Most likely this is in reference to the full moon that night, which I guess could be said to be the only witness to this crime, although it’s possible the dead girl is the killer’s “Pale Luna” since I’ll go out on a limb here and say that a blonde girl named Karen is probably quite pale indeed. This seems to indicate the killer was suffering from some sort of delusional thinking, which may be why the game is so badly programmed that it crashes every time a wrong choice is made… unless this was an intentional design choice to ensure most people wouldn’t see the game through to the end, which also seems likely. The way the dead girl’s head is initially described in-game is clever too; it’s referred to simply as “gold” without anything further to clarify (a gold bar? a pile of gold? gold coins?), leading one to assume it’s treasure. It seems the killer’s intent was for anyone who stuck around to the endgame to be under the impression they’d found a treasure map, and thus go dig up the head and reveal the crime. Why? Where’s the rest of the body? What is the significance of all this to the killer? Like many other creepypastas, especially those about video games, the ending of this story raises a ton of questions, but unlike most video game pastas, those questions aren’t about the game itself but rather the discovery the game led to. Maybe I’m heaping on the praise a little heavy simply because I’ve rarely seen this done, but this story is so refreshing to me. This is, at least in my opinion, leagues ahead of the stories about haunted Mario games.