This reminds me of the Warp Train in Library of Ruina. It can travel anywhere within 10 minutes, by jumping through another dimension, but in one incident it seems to malfunction, and doesn't arrive at its destination. The passengers are stuck in warp space, and oddly are in a 'stasis', wherein they don't need food or drink, or need to use the bathroom. It turns out they can't die either, as people start trying to commit suicide after being stuck for weeks. As the weeks turn into months, and then years, the passengers resort to brutalizing each other just to feel something, eventually turning into quivering lumps of flesh through their violence. After 2000 years, the train finally arrives at its destination, 10 minutes later in our universe. The company hits a button, and like loading a savestate, the passengers are returned to normal, none the wiser, with no memories of the 2 millenia of hell they just went through. The train was never malfunctioning. This happens every single time.

If it takes you 15 seconds to answer a question on average, it would take you 4.28 years to get through all of them without taking breaks

There's a show called Severance which is about people's memories being split between their work and private life, effectively creating two persons inhabiting the same body. Just one of them is stuck in an office forever. The show has pretty cool sets for the offices, kinda retro styled and without windows, so it feels like a different reality, too, even though it's just a regular physical space within the show.

You would think that there would be someone there to ensure the participants drink the coffee. A string of suicides after your company's test procedures would've been massively liable for lawsuits.

I see people saying that it is stupid for people to off themselves after being stuck in a cubicle for years. Cabin fever can kick in after a few days if you're unlucky here I wouldn't be surprised if it started in under 1 day. Cabin Fever causes paranoia , depression, irritability and wanting to off yourself. All of this makes it hard to answer questions, what happens if you give an unsatisfactory answer? Watchdog slaps 50000 more questions onto the tally! Take your estimate of how long you'll be stuck there and call that your best guess. You will be more likely to win the lottery before achieving that best guess. If unlucky you could be stuck there anywhere from a few centuries to a couple of millennium.

I certainly wasn't ready for un-coffee part to be 9 million captcha questions

I think there should be a third ending where if you choose all the normal answers you come out of the test like some sort of ascended deity. Because someone who can pull that off without losing their sanity would be the real horror.

Honestly that warp drive device is kind of amazing, people can have time to do time consuming thing they wish for. Like writing a book, drawing a new comic, self studying, learning new skill instead of just feeding data to the machine

Good on you mate! You always look left, look right, before crossing the road.

The question, who'd win a bar-fight between a guy with a knife, another wielding brass-knuckles, and a third with a nuclear warhead: the player supposedly answered wrongly, given a knife was his answer; how's a nuke win a bar-fight when using it is suicide, needs logistical support and its handler dies while arming it; of course knife wins, brass-knuckles would bleed out.

"Long Jaunt, Dad! Longer than you think!"

The way this is written makes it feel like the person that made it probably worked in AI training. The bit about "watchdog was present, 50,000 questions will be added to your quota" reminds me of the real life, equally terrifying "that question was a test, your answer did not adhere to our guidelines" (when said guidelines are often written in broken english or in a way that makes it nearly impossible to always adhere to them correctly) which results in you getting kicked off of the task

Okay hear me out... I'm gonna go on a little theory circle here: So what if Infineural is the tartarus engine, but they utilized it in different settings ane places throughout the decade since it was made... This game takes place in 2022 and the Tartarus engine imitated it's first preset of eternal torture in 2009 if I remember correctly. So if these two games are linked that means that Carbon Steel and the Other side is in the same universe too... Carbon steel takes place in 1998... And it's supposedly the inside of the shelter mentioned in the other side... Back then the shelter was vast and grimy making people sick and devastated to the point where they either wanted to break out ( the protagonist of the Other side with the drill) or bet their lives on a game of russian roulette with a shotgun... They were also people mentioned in the other side's introduction text that went on missing and were never seen again... One of these convicts could've been the protagonist of Carbon Steel... Now my point is... In Infineural the year is 2022... And I pretty much believe that it's inside of the shelter and the purple skies and the water are artificial illusions to make people more docile... So over the years the powers that be upgraded the shelter to it's state seen in the game but continued their enslavement protocol with the technology they already had. I'm probably wrong because these games are separate little interactive visual novels but it's cool that it makes sense when you combine the stories, well at least to me

A contract agreement that is longer than 987 pages? Even Microsoft legal team would shit in their pants.

6:52 This is a reference to another game by the same creator, "Curiosity Killed The Explorer". What the test the describing there is pretty much the premise of that game, right down to the music (which was coming from a radio).

You know I'm pretty sure you wouldn't actually be able to finish. It's basically sensory deprivation. For such a long time I'm pretty sure the brain damage and degradation would make you a vegetable.

Mental chills I'm getting from this game. Reminds me a lot of severance. Where they did a split like personalities towards people they worked on.

If you think about it, even drinking the coffee, you're still gonna pass trough all that, 50 years answering questions, you wouldn't remember after, bust still, you were tortured anyway

you know what scares me the most in this? if we ever make a machine like that, this is 100% what we will use it for

Damn, you'd really spend the whole 50 years cursing the fact that you didn't drink the coffee.

And I bet, with the anmesiac in the coffee, they would feel justified to just pay volunteers something like $60,000. They wouldn't know how unfair it is, all they'd remember is $60,000 for 5 minutes. Hell, I bet repeat volunteers are aplenty.

I appreciate you stopping to get a good view of each section of the poster on the wall :)

The concept of the horror behind this game is really similar to The Jaunt, a short steven king story. Highly recommend reading it.

6:21 interesting read if you pause at this spot. Management doesn't exist. They tried to inject you with memory loss coffee anyway but failed to refill the ampule. And you are moved to the year 20904.

So this is what they did when they trained ChatGPT with "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback".... or assembled mass amount of data workers to construct few-shot examples for fine-tuning.

"Hell only feels like an eternity."-Elaine Benes

Anyone who's familiar with the infamous Roko's Basilisk thought experiment will probably get chills from this one. I imagine this would be a perfect torture for an AI to utilize, and potentially eternally rather than "just" decades. They'd not only extract the suffering of the human, but also vital information derived from the questions the human asks, pointlessly filling out its own database with extracted human knowledge. Terrifying

Longer than you think, dad. Longer than you think.

So it’s like Stephen King’s “The Jaunt,” then

I honestly love answering questions like those though… I mean I’d definitely still go crazy after the first thousand or so but I’d probably last a lot longer than the average person lol

Really cool to see it here. Thanks a lot for sharing!

So you move 18000 years into the future through a warp drive only to find they have computers running on DOS. This future sucks!

Makes me think that the AI is gathering as much information as possible to make itself invulnerable eventually.

Honestly, this game is one of most "humanistic" among made by this developer. You are pretty much warned about that will happen, about time dilation and how much perceived time will pass if you dont take medication. You can take drink and in 5 min get rich or... Reming me of Long Jaunt story by King. Pretty much same story.

Possible connection to the tartuas machine? (Another game made by Mike centering around time dilation)

Library of Ruina has a pretty horiffic passage involving immortality and dilated time. Makes you think about stuff like "which one is your real life if you have spent more time in there than outside" ?

The thumbnail looks aesthetic tho :D I like the purple skies :)

If I got the vibes right, this is functionally the exam to reincarnate into a life as Human-Being legitimately; between lives answer the almost-repetitive nearly-inconsequential-questions from multiple-choices you'd never pick from, then live out the mad-lib-existence you filled out in advance with as much dissatisfaction as the answers you chose from.

3:49 I like to imagine what the body of ABG's avatar looks like when he looks so far back while sitting in the chair so as to twist his own neck. Or maybe he steps onto the chair and looks back crouching on it, knees pressed against the backrest.

Spending 20 seconds per question, it would take 5 years, 8 months, and 15 days to answer 9 million questions. The 50,000 question penalty added 11 days to that.

It took me a little bit (for some reason) to understand what "injecting backup memory medicine... FAILED" meant. It's obviously for people who didn't drink the coffee, but it seems like humans no longer run the company (management doesn't exist) so there's no one to refill it. Although since the coffee machine seems to work, maybe there are humans, but they just don't care. Especially since it could just spit you back out when it encountered that error. You don't drink the coffee even though we told you too? Sucks to be you! You'll just end up ruining your life so what do we care. I also think that at the end, when you can see an endless series of cubicles, those are all filled with copies of you. If they can transfer a brain, there's no reason they can't copy it and make millions of versions of you. That might also explain the weird questions. There's only so many intelligent questions you can ask before you run out and start asking nonsense.

I mean yeah, I wanted to kill myself just from having to sit and take the SATs. And that took slightly less than 50 years.

4:52 you ask your self not what happened exactly but what those money are given for. And somehow it's more correct that any other question

_I shoulda just drank that fuckin' coffee..._ -ABG

Even if you do drink the coffee, everyone experiences the quiz. I feel like even if I did forget, I would still feel some kind of liberation, even if I couldn't place why. It would be like my brain knowing what it experienced, but being unable to find any memories associated with that experience, like the ghosts of the memories are still there. Idk, just a theory.

I guess a little weird coffee is worth the price of not dying of boredom.

This is kinda like the Japanese game show where a guy was locked in a room for years with no supplies and forced to live off the prizes he won from online surveys and lotteries and stuff..

that 4000 degree fov

how are you supposed to use a nuclear warhead in the middle of a barfight

In the warp drive this video takes almost 120 years to finish.

Maybe inspired by Stephen King's "The Jaunt"? Really interesting short story with a similar concept, except the "warp gates" are used as "common" long distance travel. Only people had to be unconscious when they entered or they would come out the other end either dead or old and stark raving mad due to the accelerated rate of time and their consciousness being flooded with information.

6:22 ahh.. I get it. It's talking about a captcha code, when you've been _captchad_

ABG!!! NooOOooo. No, you cannot explore the dark scary, old-timey music playing cave at night! lol I was like: Nah, you won't choos..... YOU CHOSE IT!

Inspired a lot by Stephen King's short story The Jaunt

Interesting premise

Now that’s terrifying

There's a sci-fi crime thriller movie with this same concept named *“OtherLife” (2017)*

A lot of people talking about TV shows or other games this reminds them of while the closest work I can think of that utilizes this idea is a porn comic...

I hope we wake up and it was all a dream

There was somewhat crude, japanese dubbed 3d animation with this same premise in youtube but I can't find it.

Prrtty cool concept

After all those questions, you'd probably have thought yourself to enlightenment.

It's 23.10 here at my place and I nope'd like hell once I heard the sounds at the title screen.

RIP epileptics!

Horror and good design need not use monsters or nightmares. For humans are the most monstrous thing even God regretted creating.

Question 4 A stranger offers you a seat on the bus. Do you accept the offer? - You are lonely - There are no other seats - Your stop is in 45 minutes - The stranger has no eyes What would you answer? > Yes No This is hell

If 1 answer takes you around 10 secs - its only 1100 (around that) days for you to work. So... Maybe its not this bad?

I don’t understand the watchdog thing. What does he mean it was present in the question? Why was it wrong? The guy with the knife wins lol

I thought about it. It didn't get any more unsettling.

Creepy

Oh, OK, so it's a combination of "The Jaunt" by Stephen King and "Lena" by qntm?

“Management doesn’t exist” that’s pretty terrifying.

Why does this scream “Half-Life 2 mod”? Lol (Btw I love hl2 mods)

That was really cool.

Is there any hint at what the "watchdog" is?

Great concept but implemented kind of poorly.

Minor typo at 1:52 "transferred"

Yessss! ANOTHER VHS HORROR, THERE NEVER BEEN THESE AND HERE AGAIN!

Is it me or are you just a horror channel now? :c

jinn has no games bro🎭

Who designed this crappy experiment? And why would they want you to answer endless numbers of stupid questions?

Huh!?

Well...i didn't get it.

Boring ahh game

oh hey another 1:1 interactive art piece about real life capitalism

Yeah, no. Telling by the looks of the interior of the place it is definitely not innovative.

I get what they're going for here but I can't say decades of tedium is especially horrifying, nor do I think it would drive someone to suicide after leaving. Solid effort, but this needs a tiny bit more IMHO to be truly scary

It wasn't creepy at all. The volunteers go crazy cause they have to answers millions of question? That's stupid.

honestly, that was garbage!

Not gonna lie, pretty boring "game".