Ontological Bleed is an database interface simulation game, where players unravel a surreal mystery. By exploring the fuzzy boundaries between the actual world and the fictional, it explores who we are when we are not trying to be someone else.
In Ontological Bleed, the player takes a job as a research intern tasked with migrating an archive database to new software - cross-referencing mysterious physical artifacts and their metadata to uncover a supernatural mystery. They’ll interface with mysterious entities from a reality that is encroaching on our own - much like how fictional game worlds intersect with ours, with the player as pivot point between the two. The software becomes a portal - it exists in the same world the player does, but gives evidence the world is not what they thought.
Ontological Bleed includes two PC software files and a zip file of folders and media files. There is an associated but nonessential installation exhibition of the physical archive, where players will be able to see and touch the artifacts, and participate in the performance of becoming onboarded employees.
Players will be prompted at times to perform simple actions outside of the digital software, such as drawing maps or doing simple calculations, and that physical evidence of interactivity has the potential to make the fiction feel more grounded and “real” than if it were to take place entirely inside of the computer screen.
As players learn about the various events and objects affected by the phenomena the archive is cataloguing, they will get to know the previous users of the archive - it’s employees, archivists, researchers, and subjects. First through the static research notes these characters have left behind, but soon, the database begins to communicate with the player directly - these figures are somehow, impossibly, still alive in the data.
But it is not actually the consciousnesses of the human actors that are trapped in the database - instead, entities from a flatland realm are accessing our reality through the archives, using the concentration of information about themselves as something to hook into.
Players will then have the agency they’ve been granted and the fictionalized identity they’ve been established hijacked by these entities, who use them to manipulate the game world without the players input or consent, being powerless to stop it. Using narrative dissonance deliberately, as an instrument for horror.
Here are the ontological layers explored in the game:
