“Players are still trying to find the alternate reality that might be hidden underneath.”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Boku No Natsuyasumi (“My summer vacation”) was a 2000 PlayStation video game, exclusive to Japan, which portrayed a nine-year-old boy on his vacation in the countryside. The game was meant to be calm, relaxing, open-ended, and without specific goals, focusing more on the atmosphere set by its hand-painted visual style and calming music. The story started on August 1, and the game had a fixed ending at the the month’s conclusion. However, its code came with a user interface bug which – under some conditions – allowed players to progress to the next day. Since the game didn’t even anticipate another month, the following days were referred to as August 32, August 33, and so on: After loading a “clear data” save file, players can back out from a menu they’re not supposed to, which confuses the game enough to load the final day as a normal day, allowing the player to go to bed and save as usual.…