Sad Satan

There are no goals or win conditions. There are two prominent versions of Sad Satan; footage of the earliest version was uploaded to the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner on June 25, 2015. The channel's videos of the game were picked up by a number of English-language publications and later internationally.

• Title — Sad Satan • Platforms — Microsoft Windows • Released — 2015 • Genre — Horror, psychological horror, surrealism, postmodernism • Modes — Single-player, first-person • Engine — Terror • Developer — ZK

• Illustration — A scene from Sad Satan where a ghostly child stands before the player Footage uploaded by Obscure Horror Corner shows Sad Satan from a first-person perspective, with the player walking through dark, largely monochromatic corridors amid blurred or shifting visuals and repetitive, heavily distorted audio. Listeners have identified some samples as altered recordings involving Charles Manson, "I Love Beijing Tiananmen", the Swedish Rhapsody numbers station and The Doors’ rendition of "Alabama Song", although reliable independent sourcing for these exact identifications is limited. Images involving children, Jimmy Savile and the NSPCC led contemporary observers to interpret child abuse as one of the game’s themes. A slowed sample attributed to “Alabama Song” reportedly includes the line “show me the way to the next little girl.” While the player moves through the corridors, photographs and other images periodically obscure the screen before disappearing after a few seconds. Contemporary reports identified images of Savile with Margaret Thatcher, Rolf Harris, Japanese serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki, John F. Kennedy, and a photograph by Roger Ballen. Several publications interpreted the recurring images of children and convicted or alleged child abusers as references to child abuse. The only other "characters" in the game are children who bear a resemblance to each other and simply stand in one place and do not move or interact with the player at all. In the final video posted by Obscure Horror Corner, one of these children does begin to follow the player, causing "contact damage". Since the player has no means of self-defense or any ability to heal damage, the player will inevitably die at this point in the game. The later "clone" of Sad Satan and its subsequent offshoots closely follow the gameplay template of the original, but display different, often far more graphic, sets of images. These images include photographs of mutilated corpses and—in the case of the earliest build—an image of child pornography.

There are two prominent versions of Sad Satan; footage of the earliest version was uploaded to the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner on June 25, 2015. In an interview with Kotaku, the proprietor of the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner, identified as “Jamie”, claimed that an anonymous subscriber had sent him a link to Sad Satan, which Jamie said he downloaded from an onion site. The subscriber separately told Kotaku that the link had appeared on a dark-web forum in a post signed “ZK”. Kotaku was unable to verify this account and later expressed increased skepticism about the game’s alleged dark-web origin. The channel's videos of the game were picked up by a number of English-language publications and later internationally.