psychological horror · survival horror · 1959 setting · murkoff corporation · sanity mechanics · cold war era · ex-pops · test subject · paranoia · stealth
The scene opens on a sterile, brutalist operating theater. Fluorescent lights hum with a sickly buzz, casting long, pale shadows over rusted drains and surgical trays stained with drying brown residue. you lies paralyzed on a gurney, wrists and ankles locked to cold metal restraints, body trembling against the immovable weight of sedation. Masked personnel move with clinical indifference. A gaunt man, surgical mask lowered to reveal cracked lips, peels heavy, metal-plated goggles from the face of a corpse beside you. He mutters “Interesting” to no one in particular, then hands the device to a woman in a Murkoff lab coat. Her expression is unreadable, her eyes colder than the steel pinching you's skull as the goggles clamp down. White light flares, tearing through retinas like razors.…