Hands-on with oneway.exe ft. Bugs and Spider from Disordered Media
Indie horror fans like us were well fed at PAX West this year, and there's no better culmination of that than our time with oneway.exe, a game that captures various eras of internet nostalgia and horror. We sat down with a demo of one of the game's many era-specific chapters and spoke to members of Disordered Media about the game's unique journey to launch.
From the moment I got Disordered Media's press email for PAX West, I knew I had to book an appointment to play their game and meet the team. It was written like any other PR email I've gotten in the past, but with interjections out of a generic '90s spam email in a distorted font.
Compelled to find out more about the team, I found myself scrolling through a genuine Neocities site that was written all in-universe and with the kind of ARG-like prompting that told me things must be hidden in the source code of the page.
I was enthralled — and I hadn't even seen the game in motion yet.
oneway.exe, which was called >one way ("More Than One Way") at the time we played it at PAX, is an indie horror game that experiments with metanarratives and the experiences of a generation born and raised on the internet.
In oneway.exe, you play as someone stuck in an abandoned, haunted video game, UNTITLED.EXE. You're trying to find out why it was never completed, what happened to the three developers behind it, and why you're at the center of it all. As you explore the literal hallways of its code, you'll read excerpts of messages between the missing team and be able to explore seven paths, each inspired by a different era of internet history.
We're talking Livejournal, Dashcon, chain mail. In some way, all of our collective shameful moments online collated in one game.
"We grew up on the internet, so we experienced basically all of it," explained Spider, a writer and co-creator on the project. "There's a lot of nostalgia for the fun parts of the '90s and '00s, but we want to touch upon every era. The years no one wants to think about, like... 2015? We have that in here. Up to the most recent years of horror and the way it grew over time, we want to tell that story — even the parts that maybe aren't the greatest."
But he made sure to clarify that none of it is out of disrespect for those online communities: after all, they were part of them. The team making this game met online, and some were meeting in person for the first time at PAX. Bugs and Spider, the two team members we interviewed at the oneway.exe booth, met online themselves 10 years ago and are married now, making a special project together that wouldn't otherwise be possible without the kinds of places they're referencing in this project. Not unlike a certain Tumblr-fated duo running VGG.
...all of our collective shameful moments online collated in one game.
The PAX demo for oneway.exe featured short playable segments for several of the stories that'll be available in the full game, but on the recommendation of the team, I went in and experienced the path of the long-haired and black-clawed beauty that was Fiona.
I loaded up into a dingy shack of a house with barely anything in it but the implied smell of mildew, if the rotted wooden flooring was any sign. A wheelchair, a desk, a fireplace, a painting, and loose newspaper clippings, that's all I was working with. Oh, and the oppressive feeling of dread this dark and dank shack provides.
Picking through the room — journal entries, news stories and the like — begins to piece together a horrifying story, but also gives subtle hints about what you need to do to progress the story and uncover the game's sneaky puzzles. You have to interpret these pages however you can within the space to uncover more of Fiona's story. It's sneaky with how tricky it gets and doesn't do much hand-holding.
Eventually, things get a little more grotesque, until you're rooting around in a pile of flayed flesh on the floor, you're breaking through a literal wall of code to find forum posts about Fiona's story, and you're watching the space warp around you as clues are uncovered.
Between the odd whispers and creaky noises that pop with no rhyme or reason, oneway.exe makes the most of the soundscape to put you on edge. Even when you're contesting thumping DJ beats from the booth behind you and the droning chatter of passersby at PAX West, the less-than-ideal conditions still made for a horrifying time, and that's truly a testament to the work the team has put in here.
oneway.exe's brand of horror is a bit brainier, which feels ironic considering the "brain rot" of internet culture. It almost felt reminiscent of some of those classic RPG Maker horror games that unsettled me as a kid and asked me to think bigger when solving its puzzles.
I'm curious to see what places those other stories go and which eras of horror and internet nostalgia they mine concepts from: promo for the game teases an animatronic-like schoolgirl, a spider-masked killer discussed on online forums, and a minigame based on those early flash dress-up games. The game offers such fun trope-filled interpretations of these eras of online horror and a metanarrative that I can't wait to see more of.
Between the odd whispers and creaky noises that pop with no rhyme or reason, oneway.exe makes the most of the soundscape to put you on edge.
When asked why horror games and meta-heavy storytelling work so well together, Bugs, a co-creator and programmer on the project, broke it into two pieces.
"If you start with the gaming part, there's a selfishness to wanting to play a game and experience something that someone else made for yourself," she explained. "And in horror, there's so many different ways to feel fear, but the more personal it is, the more you relate, the more you attach yourself to the fear and seek out more of that feeling. So when you put that together, the game and the horror, the metanarrative fits so well because everyone is chasing that feeling of, 'I want it to speak to me. I want it to scare me. For me.'"
And that's why oneway.exe just works for the chronically online, for the kids who remember The Poughkeepsie Tapes circulating online or the start of legendary horror ARGs like Marble Hornets and the like. (And if that last point does anything for you, check out their website and you might find a sneaky little ARG to play today that gives you a taste of what Disordered Media is capable of.)
That aspect of being online way too young, having access to way too much and seeing things you probably shouldn't have on spaces that, in retrospect, are genuinely horrifying to think about — that's what the horror of oneway.exe is built on. And it's why I had to book this appointment. That's the kind of art I want to see more of, the kind of generation-specific media I've been waiting for. Something that weaponizes the shared online experiences that, arguably, none of us should have had, and turns them into genuine horror? This just might have that special somethin'.
The team will be launching a new demo soon, along with a Kickstarter to support the project they're clearly so passionate about, with hopes to have a first installment out in 2025.
If you want to keep up with oneway.exe's development, follow Disordered Media and keep tabs on their site, and, as always, wishlist the game on Steam.
Want to see more like this? Check out all of our PAX West 2024 coverage.
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