I have come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to play the demo for cyber horror game Oneway.exe on my lunch break. I’m not going to tell you what I had for lunch – I think if I describe it in full, I will throw up. But I will say that it featured red peppers and purple onions, and I now wish never to see those colours ever again.
Also, it’s possible that I’m still playing the demo for Oneway.exe, because the game takes place inside an off-brand mock-up of a desktop operating system. Yes, we are in Everything Is Going To Be OK territory. Hypnospace Outlaw-ville. Pony Island, er, land. But you never saw quite such… sights in either of those games, as far as I can remember. You never saw such reds and purples. You never saw such delightful little piggies.
There is only one way to tell if I have successful exited Oneway.exe’s demo, and that is to drag random images from my screenshots folder into the middle of this screen, and see if they are eaten. Let’s try that now. Oh thank god.
Now, let me turn around slowly, just in case there is a hideously disfigured catgirl leering behind me. Ah phew, we’re in the clear. All I can see is some guy having lunch in the house across the street. Argh, lunch. Let’s not dwell upon such matters. Let’s talk about the game, I guess, now that I have determined beyond reasonable doubt that I have ceased playing it.
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Created by Disordered Media – who wholesomely describe themselves as “a husband and wife duo with a small group of friends with the shared passion of creating” – Oneway.exe is about being stuck inside another, abandoned game, Untitled.exe, and trying to work out what happened to its three developers, whose notes litter the desktop, and who are hopefully fictional.
It combines snatches of first-person exploration and puzzling with a seeping collage of impressively parodied aesthetics from across the history of the internet: gobbets of MySpace, video streams of a Minecraft-like game, discussions of “controversial indie games” on “Glitch”, you get the idea. It’s both a celebration of digital culture, and a putrid palimpsest of “the worst aspects of internet nostalgia”, to cite a trailer blurb. It is windows upon windows upon windows, incoherent and hungry.
While firing up the game within the game, you’re treated to some urban legends about a woman who had her skin peeled off. Then you’re transported to a dark hallway of locked, labelled doors, plus one unlocked “Meaty” door leading to a bedroom. One wall of Meaty’s bedroom is covered by what looks like a character editor from a noughties Barbie Flash game, which lets you toggle between dresses, hairdos and accessories in return for cake. The cake is used to feed a happy little mutilated piggy inside a virtual pet game on another wall.
A third wall carries a projection of a blog, where an unknown poster gushes in curly fonts about creativity and dressing up and did you ever think about how a blog is like a body with organs? (>w<) (>w<) The blogger boasts of having a "closet full of handmade dresses". Do not look in the closet. Lot of red and purple in there.
Oneway.exe’s body horror metaphors aren’t exactly subtle, so far. Often, it just feels like a gleeful B-movie atrocity – squirming, cackling pulp. I doubt it has the wit, eerieness and pathos of Nathalie Lawhead’s work. Still, there’s a depth to its depthlessness. All the bloody, bony objects you find in Meaty’s room are also flat images, invisible from the side. The New Flesh is still figuring out its own contours – there’s a sense that all it can be, at the moment, is skin. But perhaps if you keep feeding it cake…
The game’s first “module” is out now on Steam, and it still has a demo as of writing. If you’re interested in the demo, I strongly advise you look through the content warnings in the readme file on the game’s simulated desktop, before playing Untitled.exe.
I also strongly advise that you consider the Steam reviews before buying, and maybe wait for the first patch – right now, there’s talk of a glitch or two that blocks progress early on. As and when these technical problems are addressed, Oneway.exe has the makings of a memorable stomach-churner. If you like the premise, but need more sex in your cyborg horror, maybe check out Fucksweeper.
