Editorials
[Review] ‘No Players Online’ is Impactful Short-Form Horror About an Abandoned Game Server
There was a video game news story from 2016 that always stuck with me about exploring an abandoned multiplayer game. YouTuber Vinesauce live-streamed himself going to Active Worlds, a virtual online world from the 90s that had long since gone dormant, and he had an experience straight out of a creepypasta. It was an eerie sight to see, wandering this digital wasteland, but his journey took a turn when he was interrupted by a character named Hitomi Fujiko.
At first, he thought it was another NPC, but it quickly became clear that Fujiko was a real person when responses started to get downright creepy. After the fact, people debated the legitimacy of the stream, wondering if a viewer logged in to mess with Vinesauce, or if Vinesauce himself had set this up beforehand, but he maintained that his experience was authentic. Whether or not it was real, it was something that always resonated with me in the way that the best ghost stories do and made me yearn for a game that could replicate that feeling.
No Players Online, a pay-what-you-want game from developers Adam Pype and Viktor Kraus, evokes this feeling in a short story about the importance of letting go. While the framing story of finding a weird VHS tape featuring the footage of empty servers for a long-dead capture the flag FPS doesn’t quite match with the rest of the game’s theme, once you get started the aesthetic becomes more consistent. Mimicking the look of a 90s Quake-style map, No Players Online captures the lo-fi look that has become popular among low budget indie horror as well as any other, taking advantage of the low level of detail to let your mind fill in images in the corner of your eye. During the short runtime, you’ll find yourself asking if there was actually something appearing on the other side of the level or if that was just a graphical glitch.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a horror game if there wasn’t something that showed up. Since the game can be completed in about 15 minutes, I don’t want to spoil it, but the game uses its idea to tell an interesting ghost story with a surprisingly emotional core. Could it have been extended a bit to give it more impact? Absolutely. There’s some meat on these bones that could definitely support a longer version with a more patient build-up and bigger level to explore, but what is offered in the game works fine, even if the reveal is handled a bit quickly at the end. There was a surprisingly resonant choice presented at the end that gave me pause and had drastic effects on the game.
It never quite manages to reach the creepiness of Vinesauce’s foray into Active Worlds, but the unease captured by an empty space that’s traditionally full makes for a great mood. There’s such melancholy to a setting like this, and No Players Online crafts a story that takes advantage of that. The strong correspondence between the theme and setting helps make some of the cliché and inelegance of the storytelling more palpable. While it still feels like the start of something bigger rather than a complete experience, it’s easy to recommend No Players Online due to its succinct runtime and smart use of nostalgia.
No Players Online is available on PC via itch.io
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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