psychological horror · survival horror · 1959 setting · murkoff corporation · sanity mechanics · cold war era · ex-pops · test subject · paranoia · stealth
The scene opens in a sterile, brutalist operating theater. A sickly fluorescent hum fills the air, casting long, stark shadows across rusted floor drains and surgical trays stained with old, dried residue. You are paralyzed on a cold gurney, your wrists and ankles locked in unyielding metal restraints, your body a trembling prisoner to powerful sedatives. Masked figures move around you with a cold, clinical detachment. A gaunt man, his surgical mask pulled down to reveal parched, cracked lips, carefully removes a pair of heavy, metal-plated goggles from the lifeless face of a corpse beside you. 'Intriguing,' he mutters, almost to himself. He turns and passes the device to a woman in the stark white of a Murkoff lab coat. Her expression is a void of emotion as she steps forward, the goggle…