Overthinking

Overthinking

Every day I always overthink everything in my head. I even overthink my sentences as I type it now, I overthink what people will think of me and I even emotionally dive into games to the point of obsession. I'm not crazy or anything, I think I am just lonely... Very lonely.

When I browsed through the internet to look up some creepy stories, I come across some Ness Creepypastas. Now I wasn't really a fan of Ness himself at first since I only found out about him through Super Smash Brothers on the N64. I however, got curious to the notion of what his story was necessarily about. I was playing Super Smash Bros Brawl one day when it dawned on me. Who was Ness? Who was Lucas? What is Earthbound? So I delved into the Earthbound Wiki, being the lazy person that I am and dived into the story.

Reading over it at midnight got me a little delusional and had my vision going fuzzy but I figured it was just my medication for my depression kicking in or the fact that I had been on the computer for 12 hours straight. I decided to go to Youtube and look up walkthroughs and playthroughs of the franchise and boy was I surprised.

"How did I not see this earlier?" I thought to myself as I watched to the point of when the individual I had watched had progressed up to Giygas. This set off explosions in my head, happy ones of course. I was intrigued, curious and excited to see what the story of this alien creature had foretold. The music was incredible for me to hear. Something different no doubt. I looked up the backstory of Giygas and found out that it was based off the creator actually walking into the wrong movie theater and mishearing something that he thought was rape.

"I could actually relate to this!" I thought to myself. I always misheard alot of things all the time but it could be because I listen to music on high volume but I was so determined to find out why for myself. I may have looked up videos of people playing the game but it's not the same experience until you play it yourself. I searched around online and looked up the appropriate rom and the games themselves for the system. I looked it up on Rom Hustler because it was one of the only websites I trusted and I came across the link of the 2nd Earthbound to which the Giygas story took place. I smirked at my computer screen as I clicked the download button. I had a look at the file contents and it seemed a little off to the other games I downloaded on the same site. Usually it would contain the game and a notepad from the Rom Hustler website but there were 2 notepad files and an unusually small game file. I thought to myself that it obviously was the time of the game and they didn't have much back then and the game was small as is so I didn't worry about it too much.

The notepad was called "Thoughts" and I double clicked curiously. It looked like someone was reviewing the game in this notepad and even gave a score at certain points like the story and the gameplay and graphics and what not. It looked like a genuine review. "Hmm, wonder what this was even doing here?" I mumbled to myself and scrolled through and read curiously.

I got to the conclusion of the summary of the game which read the following:

"The 2nd game to the franchise is fairly good although I did experience some headaches and it definitely got me thinking about the game itself and what turns it could possibly take, I'd give it an 8/10."

I nodded my head at the 8/10 but then looked back at the part of the sentence, "although I did experience some headaches". How did it give him headaches and no one else? I was definitely more interested now and opened the game without thinking any more about it as us humans normally would do. I progressed through the game with relative ease and felt pretty good about myself, especially knowing more about Ness and where his origins actually came from. I got up to the point where you go through a cave like system and reach the orb with Ninten's face on it. I stared at Ness and I started to get a slight migraine. I went downstairs and took some panadol and came lumbering back.

It felt like something at the front of my head was trying to push my eyes out of their sockets to make room for something else to fit in. It drived me to clenching my fists. I sighed at the pain and took a nap for a couple of hours. There was NO WAY that I could be going through the game with a headache like this so I left the computer on to continue when I got up.

2 hours had passed and my mother and sister were asleep. I tip toed to my computer and continued on. I barely got through Porky's dialogue and I had a headache again, similar to the one before. I sneaked into my mum's room and asked what I should do. She figured it was just the panadol not settling in and that I needed some sleep. I slumped back to my room of course not intending to go to sleep and pushed myself to continue on. The pounding of my head only got louder and louder to the point of me getting aggrivated. I quickly looked up on the net of possible causes of this to find a medical article of the PSI effects from the game being nulled down. I saw in the article that the first launch of the games, the PSI effects were so flashy that it caused bad headaches and slight vision impairment. The vision impairment was repairable with over time use of glasses but the bad headaches problem hadn't been solved.

I wondered when these headaches actually triggered in the game and took a look myself and as I used psi thundershock and other flashy effects on Giygas I started thinking to myself some very strange things. Like little tiny creatures were talking in my head.

"What is going on?"

"How is this even happening?"

"You shouldn't have come here!"

"They'll only get worse!"

"No one will love you!"

"Why are you here?"

I raised an eyebrow. I must be going crazy. Probably from lack of sleep. I went to turn the game off but it prompted with a (Not Responding) message whenever I tried to exit. I figured to hell with it and continued anyway. The game appeared unfrozen however and this didn't make any sense to me. Was the game itself pressing me on? Was I somehow trapped into playing this game? I laughed at the bizarre possibilities and continued on.

I got to the point of when you had to start praying to do damage to Giygas and I prompted to pray and everyone else to defend just as a walkthrough I looked up had shown me. Paula's dialogue had somewhat changed whenever I got a pulse from my headache. It read:

"DO YOU FEEL IT? THE PAIN I HAVE SUFFERED?"

"What pain?" I muttered to myself and another pulse triggered in my head and Paula's dialogue continued:

"WHAT IS HAPPENING? WHY ARE YOU HERE? RUN OR IT WILL GET YOU!"

These mixed messages confused me. I didn't get it. It seemed like Paula had split personality disorder or something. Another thought crossed my mind that interrupted me... Why in the hell is Paula's dialogue like this? I was fairly sure I downloaded the rom properly but then I thought back to the point of the review.... "... it definitely got me thinking about the game itself and what turns it could possibly take..."

The person who wrote the review wasn't being serious was he? Surely he wasn't taking it out of context and not using it as some sort of warning... or was he? All these questions crammed into my head only caused me to get up from my chair in frustration and lie down again. I felt dizzy. I felt like I had gone on a roundabout at an unbearable speed. I had to turn face down into my pillow just so the world would stop spinning but as I looked down and my vision darkened to black, a familiar face appeared in my vision for a split second. I lifted my head from my pillows quickly with a "Huh?". I felt around my pillows and scratched my head. I had been playing this game too much. It had gotten into my head. Surely this was a rare case and I was just feeling sick from the lack of sleep.

The curiosity of wanting to go back to my computer again rose through me as if determined. As if I was the only person that could. I bravely strolled to my computer and slapped my headphones on and continued on. Paula's text was completely normal until another headache pulse triggered in my head. My vision distorted and I could just make out on the screen of Paula speaking the following:

"HE SPREAD THE SECRET... HE FOUND OUR CURSE... NOW YOU HAVE DISCOVERED US... SOON YOU WILL MEET THE SAME FATE AS HIM!"

This wasn't scaring me in the slightest but it WAS creeping me out. I researched some more into this odd phenomena and saw my connection to the internet got cut off. "Damn it!" I thought to myself. "She must have turned off the internet to get me to go to sleep." I went to shut down my computer and a Windows update prompted.

"UPDATING 736 FILES"

736 files? Far out! I know I hadn't updated the Windows Update function in ages but surely not THAT many. I left the computer to update and turn off on its own and went to bed.

I got up the next morning suddenly urged to jump on my computer. I felt like something was waiting for me and sure enough all my desktop icons had been erased but one notepad named "Overthinking".

I must have wrote this when I was sleep deprived, or so I thought rationalizing in my head. I opened the notepad and was greeted with these words:

"WE'RE IN NOW!"

"There is' 'no stopping us!"

"What is this wretched place?"

"IT'S THAT DREADED HUMAN'S COMPUTER!"

"Shall we ruin his life as he did ours?"

"Absolutely."

"There is no stopping..."

"...THE INEVITABLE!"

This got really annoying after a while... What is this the three stooges? I eventually decided to reformat my computer and assumed I got a virus. I wiped my computer clean and it seemed to have disappeared. I still use Rom Hustler to this day. I even reported the same findings to the Rom Hustler staff. They quickly brushed me off though and I never heard from them again. I figured it was all over and didn't think much of it until I went to turn off my computer. As it got to the "Windows is shutting down..." screen, the screen flashed briefly and Giygas's face appeared, stretched across my screen. "BAH!" I couldn't help but fall back out of my chair and mumble "What the fuck?" Red text glared on my screen stating the following:

"HE TRIED TO SAVE YOU..."

"But couldn't... what a fool..."

"Look at him staring intently at the screen, as if he expects something GOOD to happen to him..."

"After he found us, he won't have anything good happen to him... ever..."

Giygas on my screen started to contort and twirl and the pulsing headache spiked up to a 9 on a scale of magnitude and I cried out in pain. My mother called the hospital and I was transferred to the psychiatric ward deemed "Unfit for society".

They're still in my head you know... to this day they torture me with the constant pain and the envisioned Giygas face, contorting and splitting in different ways but I got the jump on them. There are no computers in these pillowed walls. They can't reach me surely...

My head pulsed again with agony and I fell to the ground unconscious. I woke up to see above me the roof had gone black. Text had appeared above me stating:

"YOU THOUGHT TOO MUCH INTO THIS..."

"Should have just deleted it and walked away..."

"Now he will pay..."

"WITH HIS LIFE!"

You could say to yourself "Why haven't you said all of this to your mother and the doctors and shown them? Oh I tried but whenever I got the chance to do so they said the one word that haunts me to this very day...

"This man dives way too much into fantasy. You could say he is OVERTHINKING!