The Children Under the Bed

CONTROLS

WASD - Move

J - Sic Peanut

K - Read walls

SPACE - Advance Dialogue

ENTER - Pause / View Progress

===========================

Follow me on BlueSky to stay up to date with my projects:

https://bsky.app/profile/chris.newgrounds.com

===========================

In October 2023, I put a game up here called Stay Indoors. As you might remember, it was a game I’d rediscovered from my childhood. One that caused some pretty strange occurrences in my home.

I couldn’t find anything about the game or its developer online, so I suspected it might have been the work of a bedroom coder and had only a very limited distribution. We got it, like most of our games at the time, through the piracy scene that was prevalent in the UK. Pre-internet, if you wanted to "acquire" something by less than legal means, you had a guy down the pub with a big printed list of what he had available. You’d pick things off the list, and he’d go away and make you a copy. Theres a good chance this game was only ever distributed through those networks.

I asked if anyone else had played it or knew anything about it and didn’t get much of a response… until now.

I recently received a cassette tape in the mail, wrapped in a messily handwritten note, which I’ve scanned and included below. I have no idea how the sender got my details, but the package appeared to have been hand-delivered. It wasn’t in any kind of envelope, and there was no address or anything written on it.

The note read:

The cassette did, in fact, contain another game that appears to be by the same developer. Stylistically, they are very similar, and the player sprite matches Stay Indoors. This second game, The Children Under The Bed, seems much more ambitious. It features more monsters, more traps, and a more in-depth story. It also contains mysterious messages that appear to be written in some kind of code. Hopefully, we can crack it together.

Most troubling of all is that the writer of the note mentions Mr. Bradbury. You might remember that name. My brother used to claim he spoke to Mr. Bradbury at night when he was a child. We assumed he was just an imaginary friend, but now I’m not so sure.

Could Mr. Bradbury be our mysterious game developer? Or is he something much more sinister? The investigation continues...