This Person Should Not Exist
This Person Should Not Exist is a solo artifact making game of surveillance weird horror by Speak the Sky. It can be found on itch.io. For this game you need a Where’s Waldo/Where’s Wally book from the main series that has 12 2-page spreads that contain all the nine “Entities of Power” which are people and objects you have to search for, sticky notes, a marker like a sharpie and a pen. A quick note, the book should be one published in 1997 or later, as earlier editions don’t have all the things you need to find.
You work as an analyst for a secret organization which deals with occult threats to humanity and are assigned the case of the Man Who Should Not Exist, who is a dangerous supernatural entity. Your job is to look at photographs and video stills from before a calamity happened which were caused by rituals the Man Who Should Not Exist did for an even greater being of power.
There are twelve cases and in each you find the Man Who Should Not be Named, circle him, cross out his eyes and write a different short prayer around the circle each time in the hope to stay safe. You then have to find the Entities of Power. For every three Entities of Power you locate, you draw lines between them to form a triangle. Once you find all the Entities of Power, you should have three triangles. In each triangle you will find a person of interest for the case you are currently working on and add a sticky note with a codename, answer that case’s question and include at least one Entity of Power from that triangle in the answer. The last thing is to find objects and people that the Man Who Should Not Exist has contaminated and mark them either by blotting out their face or drawing a rectangle around the objects to identify them as kill zones. Contamination can be identified by the red and white stripes that have spread throughout the area.
I really enjoyed this game. It was different from any other solo game I have played so far. I’ve actually never done a Where’s Waldo Book until this game. I used the first Where’s Waldo book. I used kraken post it notes from Muze Lab to write the case file notes. Since they had a kraken on them I decided my secret organization was called The Order of the Kraken and their prayers are always to the kraken god. I messed up while playing my game. I forgot to use codenames and I didn’t always include an entity of power when answering the questions.
My book had some spreads that had duplicate entities of power. I marked them with a question mark and wrote that maybe they were using it as a decoy or a duplicate to make sure their ritual succeeded. My book also had an extra scene on the inner back cover. It was part of the background from the first spread in the book and then people and characters from various spreads in the book. So I created my own question.
Case File #13: Has He Returned?
It seems the MWSNE may have already returned. (What did our agents observe to make them believe he has returned?)
I do think the game can be replayed a few times as long as a different Where’s Waldo/Where’s Wally book is used. Since the scenes would be different, you’d create different answers to the questions. I hope the creator will someday come out with an expansion with different cases and questions.
Below are a couple of spreads from my book. You can click on them to view a larger image.
