INFINEURAL: This Time-Dilation Horror Game Gets More Unsettling the More You Think About It (2 Ends) Read More & Play The Full Game, Free: www.freegameplanet.com/infine... #gaming #indiegames #INFINEURAL
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.
Sounds like King’s “The Jaunt” where humanity has perfected warp jumping/teleportation, but requires the party to be put under sleep while doing so. … A boy fakes taking the anesthesia and experiences an eternity in the warp, coming out minutes later with white hair and totally insane.
@@Pleasestoptalkingthanks Nah, if you didn't say what you did, I probably wouldn't have read it. Knowing the twist only made the build up better haha. Cheers dude!
Not counting the questions added by Watchdog. And the implication is that the adding happens frequently, especially if you're usually in there for 50 years (5 minutes)
You need to have less than 1 wrong answer for every 50000 questions _just to have any chance_ of completing the test. Even if you answer 99% of the questions correctly, you'll spend pretty much an eternity in that chamber. Say for the first 100000 questions, you'll have 1000 wrong answers on average (assuming 99% correct). Watchdog adds 50000 questions per every wrong answer. See how it goes 9000000 - starting quota -100000 - questions answered 50000000 - watchdog (50k×1000 wrong) ---------- 58900000 - this is the quota after 100k More questions to answer than you begin with.
@@r.a.6459 Watchdog isn't always present. We have no idea how often it's there. You could answer every question wrong so long as the watchdog isn't there for those questions.
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.
@@colorblockpoprocks6973I have dissociation/derealization disorder and I'm experiencing reality as just secondary to the dimension of my own mind. Playing around with dissociatives (ketamine,PCP,dxm etc.) Really helped me understand my brain and how it operates, completely changing my perception of the world, making me aware of this disorder and how it's "not normal" to experience our reality as secondary/non native, as something foreign, out there, being thick glass, it's the feeling you get with playing vr game, first time I tried vr I was immediately creeped out and took the goggles off and said aloud something like "what the fuck, but its like that all the time" I couldnt really understand what and why it happens to me and started loosing my mind a bit thinking that i might live jnside some game or simulation, the dissociative drugs helped me tho, that's why i hate when peolle always assume drugs are bad and completely dismiss things like psychonautics
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.
According to the sign and what the guy outside says, you're in there for 50 years on average, because time still passes outside, just at a 1 minute to 10 years scale and most people are only in there for 5 minutes.
@@Silverizael that's if they're telling the truth( which it doesn't look like they are) they could potentially be dilating time by even more than the scale they present. You wouldn't remember and those that did don't speak of it and promptly kill themselves.
@@Silverizael Perhaps people either get out in 5 minutes or so, or they completely lose their mind so they're already in there for months in real time and will never get out until the thing somehow gets shut down, at which point their subjective self has spent millions of years inside that chamber.
You need a correct rate of over 49999/50000 (99.998%) _just to have a chance_ of completing the test, any lower than that and the watchdog will keep adding and adding and adding more questions into your quota. If you answer randomly, with a 33% correct rate, say bye bye to "QUESTIONS REMAINING: 8999999" as you'll never get that number below 9 million anymore. The odds of getting only ONE question wrong or less, in 50000 questions, by answering randomly, is less than *one in a googol.* "...stuck there anyway from a few centuries to a couple of millennium" That's an understatement. You'll be there for at least *a few billion years* and even then you still have 9848385957 questions remaining.
@@cheekibreeki904 I'm more used to "choose a picture with X" type of captcha, which is far easier than randomly generated question which needed to be answered correctly or otherwise can lead to 50k more questions
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.
According to one of the error screens during the questioning: management doesn't exist anymore lol Gotta love seeing that after 49 years of sitting in a cubicle answering 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.
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.
Its scripted to lose no matter what, I played the game and picked the guy with the nuke because he could just blow up everyone, and figured knife was the correct answer because what you said, but after watching this I realized its scripted to lose no matter what you pick.
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
"I don't understand, they managed to translate human consciousness to mathematics and recreate it in a digital interface and yet they use it for... This? What even is this?"
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.
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).
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
I like it! Even if it's not true then I'd like to think that it is. I love Mike Klubnika's games and it absolutely feels like they all take place in the same universe.
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
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
@@AzzRushman yeah but if you don't remember that's much better then remembering, hell our minds already do that when it blocks traumatic memories, execpt we don't forget.
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 bet you that's where the first people who had the full experience and then committed die came from. The more I think about it, the more it seems _irresponsibly trusting_ of the coffee's amnestics to work the first time, much less repeat times. First I thought that maybe it'd be irresponsible to volunteer more than once because you might gain a tolerance to the amnestics, but what happens if the amnestics don't quite work on you the _first_ time? Ask someone who's had to try multiple antidepressants to find the one that actually works for them how one-size-fits-all a medication that affects your brain chemistry is. There's every chance someone could be unlucky enough to drink the coffee and have the amnestics in it just...not work all the way.
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.
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
That thing is so incredibly idiotic that only techbro nerds would ever think of it. Who gives a shit what happens to a theoretical clone of you, especially as AI isn't anything like that at all in actuality?
@@youwatch2muchtv we care, its just a concept, or an idea, as interesting as any other, being atheist doesn't mean being not curious about religious stuff, the word you are looking for is "ignorant"
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
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.
i dont think you actually move to the future, it sounds more like that warp drive is kind of like its own little pocket dimension that runs on a way faster time than ours, and if you let that run for a while, its at that point 18000 years old.
I remember a documentary where AI got so advanced that they just exist matter-less, that is, without taking any physical space nor matter (not even one atom), not even for hard disks or servers. They can pack infinite amount of data without consuming a cubic micrometer of space. Such AI is immortal and cannot be destroyed since it doesn't exist in its physical form.
@@r.a.6459uhhh ooh ermm.... that's called spirit bucko. For millenia we believed in spirits, ghosts and so on, evil or good. And you get impressed by this phantasy AI thing? lol
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.
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.
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.
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" ?
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.
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..
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.
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.
I think it's more the thing that if you are alseep (talking about the Jaunt) you don't notice how long it takes and it feels instant, but if you are awake, to travel say billion of miles, it will feel like you have been waiting billion of years instead of just 5 seconds.
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...
That's about 3 years of sitting at a computer doing nothing else but typing. No rest, no socialization and no entertainment. Let's not forget watchdog can casually add 50000 questions if it thinks you answered one incorrectly. You could be potentially stuck there for centuries if you're unlucky.
You're both forgetting the adding of questions. Since the average time is 5 minutes outside and 50 years inside, then that means that Watchdog adds questions frequently enough to extend the time to that long.
@@MortimerSCrane Centuries or millennia _in real life_ more likely 1 year in real life equals 5256000 years in warp drive You'll need to answer less than 1 wrong answer for every 50000 questions, otherwise the goalposts will be pulling further and further away from you.
@@r.a.6459 greeting, it is nice seeing your response again. I highly doubt that it would be time IRL but more experienced time. In the game it is stated that it was only five minutes IRL (see 3:35). In the other comment you replied to I also said that they might be warping time to an extreme degree, way higher the the stated 1 min to 10yr. I believe the fact you could get an inestimable number of questions supports my theory.
Psychologists designing multiple choice tests put in trap questions to see if you've been answering the questions consciously and truthfully or just marking them randomly. One of the strategies is to ask the very same question again, only rephrased, to see if you answered it differently than the other. Whatever the watchdog is it fills the same role - it tries to catch you bullshi tting the questionnaire.
Watchdog isn't what it sounds, it's not a human, not a dog, but something that has a robot/AI embedded in it. In this case, certain questions themselves are watchdogs. It's also possible that the AI can be able to read your mind. They can catch you lying or not, answering faithfully or just randomly. So if you answered A but your mind thinks it's B, the AI can catch you lying even though you've answered correctly, and there it goes, watchdog adds 50000 questions into quota.
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
@@grimgrahamch.4157 well for starters this entire playthrough is only 11 something minutes long, with both endings. The part where you're testing should have been longer imo, to simulate the passing of 50 years more accurately. You're sitting there answering these mundane questions for a while, I mean not too long but longer than 5 minutes. It said 1 minute equals ten years so when you drink the coffee it only appears 5 minutes have gone by, that parts fine , but when you don't drink it its only like 6 minutes long if that. It just doesn't depict the passage of time and the dread very well imo
@@grimgrahamch.4157 not really, cuz quite a few people didn't get it in the comments. If you want to make it seem like a lot of time has passed, then have some time pass. If it was 2 to 5 minutes longer it would have gotten the point across better
@@r.a.6459 But why would they want people's answers to bizarre questions like this? All the data in the world doesn't help if that data isn't useful; garbage in, garbage out.
Hi! What I find horrifying about this game is the concept of you having to sit in a cubicle for 50 years straight, constantly, with no breaks, no sleep, no food, no entertainment and no pleasures whatsoever. I do genuinely think that would drive anyone totally insane.
basically the company uses you to solve captchas for 50 years by using time dilation and a synthetic body to make you immortal for the most part, no eating no sleeping no breaks, the problem arises when you don't drink the coffee because it makes you forget the whole ordeal, driving you insane.
@@AlphaBetaGamer that honestly sounds like actual hell. An eternity of stagnation. I've heard about people who are locked into solitary confinement losing all sense of really, time, and even their own self awareness.
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
@@dsur5547 +1. 20 years ago I was on a night train. Everyone sleep except me. And there wasn't smartphones or something. Just me and my mind for 8 hours!! It was terrifying!! And what was more terrifying that it was cheap class seats, not some first class.
@@dsur5547 think of those solitary confinement cells with no windows and opaque, locked doors, periodically opening its small window for food. You lose perception of time, as you'll never know it's day or night. Making things worse, time DOES appear to move slower there, people think that 12 hours has passed but in reality it's only 3 hours. And you cannot bring your watches into the cells.
i think it's a metaphor, you are forgetting how aweful your job is by drinking cofee with friends etc, but if you don't, then you juste feel lonely and useless and end yourself
Hi! It's more about the fact that they have to sit in that little cubicle and answer those dumb captcha questions for 50 years straight, constantly, with no breaks, no sleep, no food, no entertainment and no pleasures whatsoever. I do genuinely think that would be horrifying and would drive someone insane.
You try spending years in solitary confinement with only an practically infinite questionnaire for company. See how long it takes you to lose your mind.
Ironically, your terminal lack of imagination all-but guarantees that you'd be reduced to a gibbering husk after the first 1,000, let alone the many millions implied here.
It's already implemented in real life. The name is CAPTCHA. The robots generate infinite amount of CAPTCHAs for us to answer. This is for the robots to gather information and learn from it. There's a distorted photo of a system of simultaneous differential equations and they ask you to solve for x(t), y(t) and z(t). And this is just the beginning. Infinite number of topics, each presenting an infinite number of problems for us to solve and unknowingly taught the robot.
Exactly. Boring. 50 years of boredom. 50 years of solitary confinement. That's a soul and mind rending fate. Most people these days can't go 5 minutes without stimulation.
