#eptg summary | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

campyvillain · 3 years

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so you want to get into nerves/eptg/“the tumblr beabigshot arg”

so some of you might see me posting about something called ever play this game, which is an unfiction arg type thing i started when i reached 10k, but the thing about args is that not a lot of people can be there for every drop of info on them.

so i’ve done the job of compiling every major story beat up until the most recent update - the “ranvier blog’s unread messages update” (december 4th) that broadly sums up the story so far just so ppl who aren’t caught up can get the gist. it’s pretty long but it does do a good job catching you up to speed if you missed most of the updates and just want to be in on kaz’s weird game story.

PROLOUGE

the story is at first framed through the lens of everplaythisgame, a blog run by someone named ron.

after his mother passed under undisclosed circumstances, ron found a mysterious old game in the attic of her house. the only device he owns with access to the internet is a computer.

ron also states that he doesn’t remember much of his mom, only that she was there. ron’s mother is pretty much a mystery to him.

the game itself has no presence online, and it appears that there is only one copy of it. when ron asked about it to a lost media forum, he was ip banned from the site.

ron made the original everplaythisgame with the intention of seeking down any user on the site who had info about the game. the game itself goes by the name of Nerves, and is described as an archaic point and click adventure game. when the blog was originally made, ron had only gotten a little bit of the way into the game and described it as “weird”.

Nerves also takes a lot of time to run on ron’s computer, more than a game of its type should.

when persuaded to show visuals from the game, ron opens the game, reaches the main menu, but when he presses the “continue” button, an error screen shows up.

the error screen is a crudely drawn picture of a new character called ranvier (he/she/they/it). ranvier’s name is plastered all over the error, and they mock ron. shortly after, a blog in ranvier’s namesake, ranvieranvieranvier, is made, and ranvier escapes from the limits of the game’s code and becomes a sentient being on ron’s computer, as conveyed by her having her own blog.

the game crashes, and ranvier starts posting to her aforementioned blog.

ranvier’s posts consist mostly about bragging about herself, trash talking ron, and drawing crude picture of herself in mspaint. ranvier types frantically and in all-caps, and cycles through emotions unpredictably. she seems to think she is above everyone. she particularly likes going on long tangents about how much she hates humanity and hates everything in general, specifically ron and someone named “axon”. hate is deeply tied to ranvier’s character. she also likes hot weather and talks at length about liking “hot things”. in addition, she is heavily linked to the color pink, and whenever pink text comes up, it has something to do with her. ron finds out ranvier gained sentience after a picture she made of herself gets cross posted from her blog to the everplaythisgame blog, and after ron’s computer overheats, ron talks to ranvier directly.

in this conversation ron threatens to put ranvier in the computer’s recycling bin, and he soon enacts this threat.

while the action made ron’s computer stop overheating and stopped his computer from lagging, ranvier still has access to his own blog, ranvieranvieranvier, from inside the recycling bin, wherein he posts about feeling “cold”, and feeling in pain in general. after askers tell ron that ranvier appears to be a living being going through actual agony, ron relents and offers to let ranvier out of the trash can.

at first ranvier promises to help, saying that they’ll aid in the process and become apart of the game again. while ron isn’t convinced at first, he ultimately decides to let her out. ron then goes to sleep.

the next morning ron awakes to find ranvier has posted more on her own blog, talking about how she feels restricted in a poem and having made a weird video. knowing ranvier promised to behave and said she’d let ron put her back in the game, ron does exactly that - placing ranvier back in the game’s files as she said she would allow him to do. it soon becomes apparent though that ranvier only said this to save face, and it turns out that the act of putting ranvier back into the copy of nerves ron owns has adverse effects on ranvier, mainly removing a major aspect of her sentience as she’s been “reincorporated” into the game, and oddly enough, totally wiping her presence from the game itself. ranvier posts about how she knows she’s being erased, but ron can’t seem to see her posts anymore. it’s also alluded to that ranvier’s character being wiped shouldn't be something that happens in the game normally, and according to the posts she makes, someone is behind her removal.

but in the end, ranvier being reimplemented from ron’s pc back into nerves seems to be a success. so much so that ron can’t find her character file anymore. ranvier stops posting to their blog.

soon, we get introduced to a new key player - someone by the name of alex (he/they).

alex is not a character in the game, but someone from the outside world. another human being like ron. they reveal that they “know what’s going on with the game”, and while ron is suspicious at first, his doubts are quelled when he reveals that he actually playtested it himself in the year 1989, but was sent a copy with no return address and doesn't know what happened with ron’s mother. however, alex does say that he’ll be willing to help ron in navigating the game, and that he has notes on how it works lying around somewhere, but that he needs to look for them.

after they talk privately, ron reveals to the people following the everplaythisgame blog that alex has befriended him, and that alex even made his own blog to make the flow of information between them easier to exchange. alex’s blog goes by the name of alex198932.

in his writings, it’s apparent that alex is new to the internet. he types in the same way an older person would, capitalizing the first letter of every word, speaking in a generally kind if hard to understand way, and using emojis frequently, often followed by some kind of variation of “peace and love”. he doesn’t understand a lot about how the internet works, making typos frequently and having to ask ron for help sometimes. he says he made his own blog to “look at pretty pictures” too, and seems to like horses a lot, as well as animals and other kinds of nature. he has a heavy connection to love, and is associated with the color green, with green text being linked to him.

ron also reveals that alex has allowed him to share the chat logs between them to the everplaythisgame blog so that the game may be found easier. however only one of these logs ever gets shown.

in this log multiple things are revealed - that alex is still looking for the aforementioned notes, that alex has “weird hands” making it harder to type, how alex lives on a farm, that ron isn’t exactly 100% trustworthy of alex, and that alex - oddly enough - has no idea that ranvier exists, and has no clue that any of the games characters can be sentient at all. ron still doesn’t really trust alex, but goes along, as he doesn’t have any other substantial leads and is clearly desperate.

then, things take a turn.

later on, on the everplaythisgame blog, ron states that everything alex told him was a lie. alex was never a real person and was instead another sentient character in the game. there were never any notes, and there was never a second copy of nerves in existence. essentially, alex lied about just about anything, though as of this point alex’s intentions for this were unclear.

unexpectedly, ranvier comes back.

ranvier starts posting again for a brief while, telling of how alex is a “liar” and how she had to fight to get her sentience back. during this, ranvier still has some consciousness of the state they're in remaining, but as they post, whatever erased them before is doing it again. ultimately, they get wiped and their blog goes dark, but not before they hint that the “axon” they so vehemently hated before and the “alex” ron mentioned before are one in the same, and that alex/axon “gave ranvier something” that negatively impacted their existence, but what exactly this is isnt clear.

but then, something happens to ron. this event changes the entire trajectory of the story majorly.

at first ron’s frantic posts seem vauge and indecipherable, but through clues he gives us it’s determined that ron, somehow, is inside the game. exactly what happened beforehand to make this happen isnt known, but alex, or axon, too, has begun wiping him from his last existence and reincorporating him into the game just like ranvier. in the end, axon wins, with ron being trapped in the game with his memories reset, and the main area of the story kicks off - the story of the game these blogs have all been centered on.

NERVES GAME ARC

the story of the game nerves itself begins not focusing on ron or ranvier or axon, but on an entirely new character named within the game called cerebelle (she/her). cerebelle wakes up in bed, and doesn’t seem to have the self-awareness of axon or ranvier. the arc of the game itself takes place on the everplaythisgame blog in place of ron’s individual postings.

cerebelle is young, 13 years old to be exact, and sees the world through a positive lens. here she introduces us to some major components of the story - that she lives in a place called wheresville, that her mother is the mayor - calling her “mayormom” - and that her mom has never let her leave beyond the town’s walls (something she expresses she wishes she could change), that she plans on going to a place called “the zone” within wheresville on that particular day, and that the world of nerves has a defining mechanic all beings residing within it follow.

every character in nerves has what’s called a “gimmick”. cerebelle explains that gimmicks are core emotions that define a being's presence, for example those with happy gimmicks are ruled by their happiness and those with sad gimmicks have the same apply to them and so on. gimmicks will often impact a being’s existence severely, but cerebelle doesn't have a gimmick at all - at least not yet. this is something she takes great issue with as even all the younger kids in wheresville have gimmicks, and somehow she doesn’t, and for this she considers herself a bit of an outcast.

it’s also worth noting that this is why ranvier is so intertwined with the concept of hate and why axon is intertwined with the concept of love - even though they may be sentient, the rule of gimmicks still apply to them.

but cerebelle doesn’t know who either of those characters are - nor does she know who ron is - and when asked about their existence, she just insists the askers are “asking some pretty weird questions.”

then, while the everplaythisgame blog is on hiatus for a bit, ranvier’s blog is updated, but not by ranvier himself.

instead the posts are in the format of a message inbox, stating that whoever owns the inbox has 10 unread messages.

these messages are all written to a “president” of some kind from the hand of someone named mr. maxilla (he/him), another character in the game itself, but unlike cerebelle, mr. maxilla’s story is extremely grim and disconcerting.

from his writings to the “president”, it’s revealed that mr. maxilla is an entrepreneur of some sort, a kind of willy wonka walt disney esque individual, who was doing menial job-hopping working on machines before the president he speaks of found him, and partnered with him to allow him to build a presumed theme park. mr. maxilla writes at first with the typical theme park tycoon grandiosity while still being apparent that a part of him is insecure about his place in the world. but as the messages go on, mr. maxilla loses every part of his former self leaving him a shell of who he used to be.

to start, mr. maxilla thanks the president for their camaraderie and friendship, thanking them for the business opportunity they’ve given him as the owner of a successful theme park. the second one is mr. maxilla briefly apologizing to the president for seeming too eager to call him a friend.

on the topic of the president and mr. maxilla’s exact relationship, the specifics of it aren’t known as of yet, but from what maxilla states, he considers the president to be his friend, and will do practically anything for him at any time, expressing a distinct amount of fondness and dedication to him that certainly leaves it up to interpretation if mr. maxilla considers his relationship to the president as something more.

another thing is that “guilt” is mentioned a lot in these messages, and a lot of things occur that lead mr. maxilla to having to carry a massive amount of guilt with him. the relationship between mr. maxilla and his own guilt correlates to what we’ve been told from cerebelle of how gimmicks function, so going forward keep in mind that guilt is, in fact, what mr. maxilla’s gimmick is.

but besides that, in the next few letters, the president goes missing, causing mr. maxilla to begin his slide into insanity, as without the president’s guidance he has no idea what to do with his life. he locks himself in an unspecified secluded area of his own theme park, believing the reports that the president has gone missing without a trace to be “bullshit” as he puts it, believing that he is still out there. his writing style starts getting downright indecipherable as he spirals, but the course of events he alludes to go as follows.

after feeling consumed by guilt over the possibility that he could have resulted in the president’s disappearance - though he had nothing to do with it directly - using his knowledge of machinery, mr. maxilla builds an exact doppelgänger of the president that looks like him, not with the intentions of using it to “replace” him, but so mr. maxilla can pretend he’s still there. the body double is capable of replicating the sense of organic life, but even so mr. maxilla, not even in his state of mental instability, cant fool himself into thinking he’s brought the president back. the whole time throughout the message, he begs for the president to come back, pleading with him by saying he will gladly welcome him back and profusely apologizing in case something he did lead to his disappearance. before he closes, he says he’s going to try to tell the employees that work at the park of his plan to ultimately use the body double as a stand-in for the president.

then, in the next message, it’s told that something went horrifically wrong in the debriefing. the body double of the president attacked every cast member of the park aside from mr. maxilla, with the body double “unhinging it’s maw” and literally eating every staff member mr. maxilla had to the bone. while mr maxilla never said how many cast members were killed, it can be presumed that the incident resulted in a massive amount of fatalities, only worsening mr. maxilla’s prexisting guilt.

in the next message mr. maxilla says he managed to overtake the body double, saying he hid away the body double “somewhere”, but refusing to elaborate, not even to the president as he states he can’t risk anyone finding it, not after what he’s allowed to happen. he urges the president to come over and fix this, having resigned himself to close the gates of the park.

the second to last message contains mr. maxilla’s recounting of how he was horrifically battered and disfigured by someone who he “couldn’t find the face of”, aka someone he didn’t know, who trespassed upon the closed-down amusement park. even though the injury at the hands of this unknown attacker is described to be excruciatingly painful, with mr. maxilla likening how his body now resembled an animal tangled up in barbed wire and how “bodies aren’t supposed to bend”, he survived the attack and now has to live in a body that to him no longer resembles a human like form, but a puzzle.

the last message is mostly made up of the ramblings of a madman, mostly consisting of the phrase “happy birthday president” but throughout the tangent, there are letters highlighted in pink. and when put together, the letters spell out the name of a pre-existing character: the pink letters spell out the name of none other than ranvier themselves.

then, the inbox is emptied and its said that mr. maxilla “ceased conversation”, but if he is still alive or not has yet to be determined.

and there you have it - a summary of ever play this game’s storyline up to the most recent update. of course i missed some little things for the general purpose of broad summarization and so things didn’t get confusing, but as you have it, that’s where we are right now, with the unread messages plot point being the most recent update. but do keep in mind, this is only the beginning.

#eptg summary #eptg

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