Gliched: Crossed Code

I remember it faintly.

When I was little, I was that tech-obsessed kid who'd rather take apart a console than go outside and play tag. Code made sense to me. The real world? Not so much. So I poured myself into the one place I felt like I had control-my imagination.

And out of that, Let's Play was born.

Simple name, right? Just a place where people could hang out, go on adventures, and explore limitless worlds together. That was the original idea. But even as a kid, my mind didn't exactly build "simple." I added a storyline-no, a hellscape of a storyline-that made the game more than just fun and quests.

There was betrayal, moral decisions, secret wars between AI gods and digital outcasts... It makes me shiver now how intense my imagination was back then.

I was only seven or eight when I coded the first prototype. My dream game. My everything. But dreams are fragile when you're a stray kid with no last name worth remembering. Someone stole it-my game. Took it, twisted it, and slapped a company label on it like I never existed.

I tried to forget.

But I never imagined that one day, I'd wake up inside the very world I made.

Waking up in an unfamiliar place is creepy.

Waking up inside your stolen childhood dream game? That's a whole different level of messed up.

So like any normal person faced with an existential crisis wrapped in a glitchy neon bow-I freaked the hell out.

I panicked.

Hyperventilated.

Felt the grass (yes, the grass was real) under my hands, smelled air that had no right smelling that fresh, and watched birds with mechanical feathers fly overhead. This place was too real.

Eventually, after what felt like a nervous breakdown stretched across several loading screens, I accepted the impossible truth:

I'm in a game.

An ultra-realistic game-a sci-fi and fantasy fusion zone-where every corner could be my last, and dying probably wouldn't come with a helpful respawn button.

Fantastic. Just peachy.

I started walking.

Along a dirt path that looked like it had seen thousands of player boots before mine, I trudged forward, past strange trees with neon veins and monsters that-thankfully-didn't notice me.

They moved like animals but looked like someone mashed up Pokémon with horror movie villains.

Eventually, I saw it. A small town surrounded by wooden fences and a floating sign that shimmered like pixels: