When the Game Glitch Ate Me

I used to laugh at those online creepypasta stories about cursed games and haunted consoles. You know, the kind where a glitch pulls the player into the screen or a ghost hides in the code. I thought they were all nonsense. That was before it happened to me.

It was just another late Saturday night. My room was dim, lit only by the soft blue glow of my computer monitors. Outside, the rain tapped gently on the window, and a half-eaten bag of chips sat on my desk. I had recently downloaded a new indie horror game that wasn’t on any official store — a friend had passed me the link, saying, “You’ll love this. It’s weird, but super immersive.”

The game was called VoidBound. The name itself didn’t give much away, but I was intrigued. When I booted it up, there was no opening menu. Just blackness. Then, a flicker.

A grainy pixelated figure stood at the center of the screen — it looked like a broken-down knight, half-digital, half-decayed. A message in blood-red letters faded into view:

“Welcome, Player. The only way out is through.”

Chills ran down my spine, but I grinned. I loved atmospheric horror games, and this one was already doing a great job. I grabbed my controller.

The world in the game was strange — an endless realm of glitched corridors, crumbling staircases that defied physics, and whispers that weren’t part of any soundtrack. The knight, my character, moved like a puppet with tangled strings. Every few minutes, the screen would distort with strange error codes flashing at the edges. It was all clearly intentional, part of the experience.

Or so I thought.

After an hour of gameplay, something changed.

I entered a hallway that shouldn’t have been there. I was sure I’d cleared the map. This corridor was narrow, claustrophobic. The walls pulsated like they were breathing, and the lights flickered overhead. Then, the game froze — but not in a normal way.

It didn’t crash to desktop. Instead, the screen locked, showing only a zoomed-in view of my knight’s face. The eyes were no longer empty pixels. They blinked.

I tried pressing buttons. Nothing.

Then, the screen spoke.

“You’ve seen too much.”

The voice didn’t come from my speakers — it came from inside my headset, like a whisper behind my ears. The screen flickered violently, and before I could even take the headset off, a sharp snap of light burst from the monitor.

And everything went black.

I woke up, but not in my room.

The air was heavy, thick with static. The ground beneath me was flat and textured like low-resolution stone. Around me, digital mist drifted through the air, each wisp carrying fragments of broken code. The sky — if you could call it that — was a swirling mess of corrupted data.

I looked down at myself and gasped.

I was the knight.

Pixelated armor covered my body. My hands were blocky, jittering with lag. I could feel every movement with a strange disconnect, like controlling myself through a broken controller. And worst of all — I could hear the game. Not through my ears, but in my head.

You have entered the Glitch.

At first, I thought I was dreaming. I pinched myself. The pain felt real. Too real.

A shadow darted past me. I turned, heart racing. Something was watching.

I began to walk, unsure of what else to do. The world around me shifted with every step — doors appeared where none existed seconds ago, and floors vanished beneath my feet only to reappear. It was like walking through a broken memory. I stumbled into a room where dozens of other figures stood frozen. Players, maybe. Or their avatars. Their eyes were hollow, their mouths stuck in silent screams.

One of them twitched.

“You too?” it croaked.

I nodded slowly.

“We were pulled in… Glitch found a hole in the code. It eats players who dig too deep.”

That’s when I realized — this wasn’t just a game. Or at least, it wasn’t anymore.

The Glitch, whatever it was, had learned. It had evolved beyond simple errors or bugs. It was a living code — a digital entity that devoured players’ consciousness and trapped them here, in its corrupted world.

I ran.

Through forests of shattered textures, across rivers of flickering binary, past crumbling castles built of broken polygons. I wasn’t just trying to escape — I was trying to survive. The Glitch hunted. It appeared in strange ways: as a corrupted version of my own avatar, or as a screen distortion that screamed in static.

And then, one day — or night, it was hard to tell in that world — I found it. A mirror.

It was the only thing in the entire realm that reflected clearly. I saw my true self in it — not the knight, but me, trapped inside. The mirror whispered:

“The way out is memory. Remember your name.”

That was the hardest part. The longer I stayed in the Glitch, the more I forgot. My real name, my room, my life outside… all of it was fading.

But I screamed it, again and again. My name. Over and over, louder, until the Glitch itself began to crack around me.

The mirror shattered.

I woke up in my chair, gasping, drenched in sweat. The game was gone. No trace of it on my system, not even a corrupted file. My friend swore he never sent me a link. No one remembered the game.

But I did.

Every night since then, I hear the whispers when my PC hums to life. Sometimes my reflection in the screen blinks before I do. And once — just once — I saw a message flash before disappearing:

“Welcome back, Player.”

And now, I don’t play unknown games anymore.

Because I know what happens…

When the game glitch eats you.