Much like the earth’s oceans, the World Wide Web is a vast and for the most part unexplored and or inaccessible place that most of us “surface-dwellers” are completely unaware of, and/or can’t fully access for a number of reasons. Much like the seas that cover the planet, the Web has a surface, a mere fraction of the overall web, where “normality” so to speak is the norm, and where the majority of people dwell searching for content and accessing services that help our everyday lives. A place where search engines like Google are able to index web pages so we can find them; where the light shines through, showing us that what is going on is for the most part “normal” and in plain view.
And then below, in the fathomless abyss of the web, there are terabytes upon terabytes upon terabytes of the unknown and the inaccessible. There is what is called the Deep Web. A place where there is no light and which is populated by unknown and scattered entities that litter the abyss, some of which, much like abyssal fish, are just weird, and others of which are plain scary. The Deep Web is a place built around Darknets (or dark net), an overlay network that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, often using non-standard communications protocols and ports. Search engine crawlers can’t access these sites, and often can’t even find them, so in essence, they are never either searchable, nor easily discoverable or accessible.
Two typical darknet types are friend-to-friend networks (usually used for file sharing with a peer-to-peer connection), and anonymity networks, such as Tor, which work via an anonymized series of connections. The reciprocal term for an encrypted darknet is “clearnet” or surface web when referring to search engine indexable content, which is where us “normal” service and information seeking individuals usually dwell. This means that most of the Deep Web can’t only not be searched with a conventional search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo!, but that for the most part no one is even aware it exists. It is like a world of its own cut away from society that we forget exists or don’t even realize it is there. We will leave it up to you to guess what type of content can be unearthed by taking the time to dive deep down into the Deep Web by accessing remote and inaccessible passcode and encryption-protected servers: weapon trading, drug trading, murder for hire, taboo pornography… child pornography. We will stop there, but it’s not hard to imagine how deep such a sealed off and inaccessible realm can dig into the obscure, taboo and illegal…
Obviously, what the Deep Web is particularly good for, however, is anonymity. Users can upload stuff to protected servers and networks – something called “Onion” sites – incognito, and anyone that accesses that content will have a harder time tracing the source. This is the case with Tor, for example. Every once in a blue moon, much like a fishing boat brings to the surface some weird and monstrous creature from the depths, something weird and fucked up will emerge from the Deep Web for all surface dwellers to see, and that is exactly what happened recently when as Kotaku reports, a dude called Jamie, the proprietor of the YouTube channel Obscure Horror Corner, says he dove into the deep web to download a mysterious game hosted on an Onion site after he got a report from one of his subscribers that some weird shit had been unearthed from within the bowels of the Deep Web. The file was called “Sad Satan,” and it was a horror game that piqued his interest so he played around with it and posted the gameplay his YouTube channel. Jamie says that he ran a quick virus scan on the files to make sure it wasn’t just some shady virus or trojan, and then loaded the game. To his complete horror, what unfolded before his eyes was something that besides having very little sense for a sane and healthy human brain, was also blood-chilling as it unfolded it’s horrific and nightmarish content…
As you look at the game play of Sad Satan, you will soon realize what a fucked, remote and unfamiliar place the Deep Web can be. The game features an extremely primitive and abstract interface, virtually no sound, except for the sound of the footsteps of the player, and in the noisiest parts, the sound of children weeping and screaming – and the game is just built around this absurd, grotesque and hallucinating imagery. It makes almost no sense, but you can feel that it has an internal “logic” or some kind of essence to it, unbeknownst to us sane people. As the player progresses through the pixelated and grainy hallways of the black and white labyrinth-dungeon they are seemingly trapped in, they make bizarre, extra-corporeal, and unreal encounters with little screaming and disfigured girls, walls with faces on them and must cope with a perpetual sense of being trapped or being part of some fucked up joke.
The walking can go on for a while with nothing happening, though the player in the video doesn’t really seem to make any progress. It almost seems as if they are walking in circles or going insane by just walking. Eventually, the player does get closer to a flickering light. This is where some strange, muffled sounds start. It almost sounds like a kid, gasping, but could be anything… Eventually the gamer ends up stumbling upon a photo of Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher for a split second before once again returning to the hallway. In the photo, the two characters are holding a badge that reads “NSPCC is Great!” The NSPCC, by the way, is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children…
We’ll leave interpretations up to you, but as you progress, so Jamie reports, you end up walking on floors covered in blood, you see 666 everywhere you look, and you even walk down interminable hallways as Charles Manson speeches keep repeating in your ears non stop, all while trying to find an exit to this nightmarish and senseless digitalized maze you are trapped in. There could potentially be an endless debate/intepretation on this game and its fucked up and seemingly absurd logic, so we suggest you read the full article from Kotaku HERE. For your viewing pleasure videos of the game play can be seen below the images. “Enjoy” the absurdity of it all.
And here is the actual gameplay:
