No Players Online is a creepy little PS1 styled first person horror game set within the empty servers of a defunct Capture The Flag first person shooter.
In No Players Online you find a dusty old VHS tape with the words “Capture The Flag Project Footage 03.20/86” scrawled on it. After inserting it into a video player you find that it contains footage of an old Capture The Flag FPS, but the servers are all empty – or so they seem…
Taking around 10 minutes to play through, its a great little horror game with a clever premise and a very cool retro aesthetic. A little like Dark Forest Virtual Chatroom, there’s something inherently spooky about wandering about alone in a long forgotten virtual game world. This is made even more freaky in No Players Online as it turns out there really is something to be scared about, but it also poses you a little moral dilemma. The choice is yours, but your actions may have permanent repercussions!
Check Out a Gameplay Video Here
Download No Players Online Here (Windows)
great but the storyline ruins the subtlety of the entire thing. otherwise the first couple minutes are truly something else.
Can I offer something? I think the general sense of design and style of this game feel SUPER authentic and I think the fact this looks and feels the way it does is super impressive. Great work on this.
I have a couple notes that I think would improve the experience and it all kind of comes down to audio/visual flair being pulled back a hair. Like I said, the general design and atmosphere here is super wonderful but there are a few instances where I think you tweaked some of the presentation a little too much because it was in your tool-set and not because it necessarily made for an improvement.
The first thing I noticed that did not like is the fact the gun audio seems to be panned to the right a little bit and I assume this was done because the gun is on the right side of the screen. I just found this really aurally disorienting because stereo panning audio is supposed to indicate things around the player, and in this can the gun may be on the right side of the screen but it is directly in front of the player and should probably be centered.
The only other thing is when you’re being approached by the spirit, the whole “monitor” does this shaking, chromatic aberration thing which is a cool effect but almost physically made me ill looking at it. I know the point of the monitor view is to simulate an old boxy computer monitor and I love that, but it’s not like your physical monitor would be wobbling and shaking like that, and I think if that was pulled back a lot as an effect it would help. Like I get the point is to be scary/disorienting in a way, but the fact it was physically unpleasant to look at expressly pulled me out of the experience and reminded me I was playing a game, rather than experiencing it “for real.”
I feel it’s kind of like cooking. Sure garlic power is good but you shouldn’t pour too much of it into your dish just because putting a little bit of it in was an improvement. If that makes any sense lol.
REALLY great effort though like, it’s a really authentically eerie project. I dig it a bunch. I just think those changes would help shave off some excess to the design so the core of the game would be a little stronger.
Something that might be worth adding is, that this game was part of an ARG (Alternate Reality Game). The game itself has hidden codes, another secret room, is connected to another game and some riddles outside of both games (2 websites, a phone-number and even a hidden box in somewhere in Belgium).
I experienced the game together with a bunch of other players on the Some Players Online Discord server (The name being a homage to “No Players Online”, obviously).
We solved the main-game in under 2 weeks, solved every last puzzle we skipped in another week. Was a fun experience.
If someone here has complaints, please keep in mind, that the game had a hidden story (John is an ingame character, and the game “No Players Online” was made by him, according to the story. He isn’t a professional game-developer, just wanted to find a way to bring his wife back, which he managed to do in the end)
I think some people have already uploaded the whole story. The gameplay provided in this article only shows the surface of the game and the ARG.