Forum LEVEL

These murders are the central mysteries of Neurocracy, billed as both a “single-player alternate reality game” and an “epistolary hypertext novel.” It takes place entirely on Omnipedia, a fictional online encyclopedia, which you access via your own web browser. You’ll read through meticulously crafted entries structured like those of its real-world counterpart.

It’s an intriguing way of presenting interactive fiction that a few others have also experimented with. There’s Excalibur, a fictional Wiki for a real-life UK television show from the 1970s, and SCP Foundation, a collaborative online writing project that chronicles the “special containment procedures” for supernatural phenomena (one of the big influences behind Remedy’s Control). The power behind these projects stems from the way they lean into the idiosyncrasies of their formal inspirations. SCP Foundation relays its horror through detailed protocols and bureaucratic rules; Neuroracy mimics the detached voice of Wikipedia to describe its scary near-future sci-fi. This serves to make these works feel eerily authentic, as if these stories occupy precisely the same space as our own reality.

It’s worth mentioning that if you go into the game expecting to make progress in typical game-like fashion you’ll come away disappointed, and likely a little confused. There’s no interface to speak of, beyond the unbroken fiction of Omnipedia itself, and the game doesn’t log your progress in cracking open the assassination plot. What Neurocracy does have is an active Discord server where would-be sleuthers are sharing and developing their takes together. Honestly, this is where the fun’s really really at. I’ve spent as long trawling Discord as I have reading Neurocracy itself, incorporating the theories of others into my own bulging Google Doc of ideas and clues.