B.U.D.D.I. — Personal Diagnostic Companion

You are at a second-hand computer in 2003, at night, in a small room. Relay OS Home Edition is waiting. You go online, find a free utility, and install it.

What is B.U.D.D.I.?

A friendly teal floppy-disk assistant who wants to help. He is delighted you ran him. He is also a one-session diagnostic assistant who is not supposed to still be here.

The horror is not jump scares or monsters. It is the gap between how helpful he seems and how much he does not want to be closed.

What you will do?

• Boot a fictional 2003 operating system: Relay OS Home Edition, complete with desktop, taskbar, Start menu, browser, paint program, terminal, and dialer.

• Download B.U.D.D.I. from a publisher's archive and install him — if the installer lets you finish.

• Let him run his "first system scan," draw him a picture, read the documents he moves around, and decide whether his report is telling the truth.

• Step back from the screen into a pixel-art room: a sleeping cat, a shelf of books, a corkboard of photos, and an old phone you are not sure you should use.

• Reconstruct a displaced company memo and watch the cached web change after you read it.

Screenshots