Castlekid
Written on 9/16/2024. Take everything here with a grain of salt!
The 2022 Test Build
Your first encounter with Restorer is inside the 2022 Test Build, where upon entering a password in a .txt file that sneakily appears in your "imscared" folder, you are able to enter a previously locked door, leading to some sort of staircase with light fog covering your field of view. After completing your given objective of finding moons scattered throughout the map, your vision turns dark and dithered and you are guided to the door of The Archive.
The Archive is a sort of museum, displaying items, furniture and discarded ideas from the main IMSCARED game. A file appears in your "imscared" folder once again. This time, rather than asking you to input a password, it presents you with a riddle you must solve by turning off the lights in The Archive in order until it is fully dark. Upon doing so and heading to the darkest room in The Archive, you are greeted by a few lines of dialogue...
"This place is so lonely."
"I missed you so much."
"Let's play, one last time."
"So... Do you know my name?
You are given room to input a name. Here, you have one of two options that will be recognized by the game as valid; "White Face" or "Restorer". No matter which of the two you input, you'll eventually get to meet... The Restorer.
The Restorer appears as an anime-looking sprite of a girl, with a bright smile and closed eyes. Her hair is black and short, with a "hair drill" on the side. She appears to wear a pin of White Face on her suit, hinting at her status as an IMSCARED superfan. In the 2022 Test Build, you only really get to see the top part of her sprite, but eventually her fullbody sprite would be revealed.
She immediately comes off as playful and friendly, telling you all about how she wants to show you more stuff, but needs more time to do so. As much as you might want to spend time with her, shortly upon her introduction she sends you off back to the reproduction of the game you were playing. This encounter will be the first of many others to come!
Back to the Main Game
If you go back to the Steam version of IMSCARED, you might be able to see a strange figure in the distance, beyond the gates of the Street. Checking your "imscared" folder, you'll notice a little file called "drift.ini" inside it. If you alter the numbers in said file you are able to move out of bounds and walk towards the far away figure... That turns out to be none other than the Restorer again! She tells you to press ESC and, if you do so, she'll tell you to read a file called "shore.txt", once again found in your "imscared" folder.
She tells you that we're just in time for the decennal, referencing IMSCARED's 10th birthday at the time of the file being written. Restorer gives you a short exposition speech, about the world of IMSCARED, White Face's death and how its curse was broken years ago. Here, she finally introduces herself, calling herself by the name we all know and love her for, and gushes about how big of an IMSCARED fan she is, enough to study the game so intensely to the point of breaching its canon.
Back in-game, she now begins talking to you through altering the pause menu's text, giving you the ability to move with the game paused so you can follow her as she talks to you about the dead, digital world she finds herself in. As you follow her to the parking lot, she guides you towards The Archive once again (Though be careful! If you follow her instructions wrong she might get mad at you...), this time, a much barren version of the room found in the 2022 Test Build.
Here, she introduces you about her plans, and gives you a special card depending on your answer to a very simple question... "What do you want most? To scare or be scared?". Her plan consists of three phases; The first one is to create mobile and console versions of IMSCARED, bringing new players into the game and making its popularity rise. The second phase involves the mysterious "attraction". She wants to be a tour guide you see, IMSCARED's tour guide! She claims this was her original intent when breaching the games canon but...
Then she came out with the Plan.
And then she came out with phase 3.
Restorer claims its too early to talk about it, and leaves you with a final remark about turning entity into data, making reference to one of the game's very first and most memorable lines.Rooftop
For a while after that encounter, there was silence. Nothing to be done while the playerbase waited for Restorer to give us another sign of life- that was until, in one of the patchnotes for a new update, a secret message could be found. It said to meet her at the rooftop next month. Sure enough, next month, in a localization update, she was there.
From now on I'll be documenting the Worker route of the game, it slightly differs from the VIP route in content and dialogue and such. To become a VIP or a Worker, it all depends on what answer you gave her when she asked if you'd rather scare or be scared. Anyways, she talks about how progress in The Archive is going, and leads you downstairs where you're able to see a distant location- That is the attraction, she says, though she reveals to you how in reality its just a flat sprite, placed there to fool VIP players.
Before leaving, she makes a comment about "filthy peepers" and how the playerbase is good at entering areas they shouldn't have been in. Restorer orders you to put your brain to work in fooling the VIPs into believing something is really there and says she's going to "touch grass."
Labyrinth
Following her hint that she was "going to touch grass", you enter the labyrinth, which now has an unlocked gate. The area appears slightly glitchy, with a mirror shard seeming misplaced. If you get close to it, a smaller gate opens. While making your way trough the maze you get interruped a few times by Restorer's monologue.
"Oh dear..."
"Looks like someone has borrowed the pretty red leaves statue!"
"Who could possibly have been?"
"Me"
"It was me"
You may find a strange statue hidden in the corners of the maze, depicting a faceless version of Restorer. If you interact with it, it gives you a game error. This game error actually contains a bit of a Youtube link, and following it leads you to a video titled "Hijack". The description tells you to go to The Archive and so you do. You get some quite... moody dialogue from Restorer, asking if all of this bores you and how she wishes to be more present as she moves into the world. Soon, she says, only VIPs and Workers will have access to this place and their reality will become even more secret than it already is.
Hijack & Blind Game
"Hijack", the video you were given, contains a strange noise playing troughout it. Putting it trough a spectrogram, you discover a phrase within it. Checking IMSCARED's Steam folder for any clues, you discover a file within it called "doesit" which at first appears as a completely black square. Editing the image, though, reveals a QR code to a locked itch.io page. Putting in the phrase discovered in the "Hijack" spectrogram unlocks it.
inside are a few downloads which together are able to open a previously locked door in The Archive, revealing the pretty red leaves statue Restorer mentioned she "borrowed". Interacting with it gives you access to... the attraction..?
Not quite.
"You should know by now that this is a game of wait"
"So keep waiting"
"Meanwhile, we can play a different little game"
"One in which you won't be able to see a thing"
From here you are thrown into what the community collectively calls the "Blind Game". The title is pretty self explanatory. You are stuck in an old, damp cottage and completely blind, only being able to feel and interact with the things around you. Your goal is to find passwords that will be given as you progress trough the game. It's still unsure why Restorer subjected you to this. Maybe she's just buying time for the release of the next update, or maybe she's just some sort of voyeur. Either way, this is where your journey ends... for now.
As of writing this, IMSCARED has been without an update for around a year, but that doesn't mean the game or its ARG is dead! Ivan Zanotti, the developer, has been sending small teasers in Discord servers and slowly working on a mobile build of the game, just as Restorer promised she would do. There is also a sequel to the game planned, called "REMNANTS", but that's a story for another day...