Nightmare Fuel / Distance

WARNING! SPOILERS ARE UNMARKED!

The Video Game

"Lea▄▀rn fr┌▌om Her"
"O▐┌▌bey ┌Her"
"Dev▄█▀our Her▀"
"Tra▄nsce▀▌▀▌nd H▄er"
"Ext▌▄▀▌▐inguis▐┐▀█h Her"
"Re▀m▄ember He▌r"

Distance is no ordinary racing game: since the beginning of the Adventure Campaign, there's a vague aura that something is wrong. And it is.

• It begins straight with the intro cinematic: you hear an ominous music playing as the camera slowly pans along what appears to be a laboratory. Meanwhile, a map of the Array appears on screen after about 20 seconds which, however, glitches in red (as to indicate corruption). Shortly after, the pan shifts to a glass road set in what appears to be space, with wreckages floating in a dark red sky. Then, a countdown of 4 hours appears and finally you get a view of the Archaic in a dormient state at first, but then it "wakes up" and menacingly glows red, glitching the screen. Finally, your car turns on and the title appears.
• During gameplay, mostly when a straight road is ahead of you, the game will suddenly glitch into a view of the Teleportation Room, everything bloody red, with the Archaic in front of you. A male intercom voice speaks, mimicking something the normal intercom said during gameplay, but twisted to reflect the anomaly's purpose.
• Abyss, the 11th Sector, is the turning point for the game from just a Platforming Racing Game to a Platforming Horror Racing Game. The stage is relatively simple too, since it's mostly to deliver story content.
  • For the entirety of the stage, there's no music, it's pitch black, and everything looks abandoned. Your car's front lights even flicker from time to time, as it can't keep up with the engulfing darkness.
  • The infamous cutscreen that happens during the 2nd tunnel.
    • First of all, you can already tell from the entrance that something is not right, because there are tentacle-like structures trying to obstruct it.
    • As soon as you enter, the text "remember" flashes on the rear window and all your devices (boost, jump, and wings) are disabled. As you advance through the darkness, everything slowly tinges red, and the sound gets more and more distorted as the screen glitches heavily while a woman's voice, crying, whispers "wake up".
    • When you leave the tunnel, the male intercom starts talking again but the voice, this time, sounds heavily corrupted. It talks about obeying, devouring, transcending and extinguishing Her (the Earth). Meanwhile, in the distance, you see a small red light but you can't quite make up what it is. As soon as you get closer, however, it becomes clear: it's you, trapped in what appear to be cables or tentacles!
    • At this point, the screen's pixels bleed onto something else, but you can't make up what it is for a few seconds. When it clears up, you're facing the Archaic once more... except this time it ATTACKS you with a scream-like sound and sucking you inside!!
    • This sequence ends with another pixel bleeding and your car facing the wrong way. So, you turn back, go ahead, and... the tunnel is gone, replaced by the stage exit.
• Mid way through Sector 03, "Research", the screen starts glitching again. You expect to face the Archaic once more... instead the music stops and environment suddenly shifts to ruins, in complete darkness with a reddish smoke. It happens in the span of a few seconds and you can't tell if the change happened because of the anomaly or it was like that all along, and what you were seeing was just a façade.
• As you proceed through the stages, the female intercom voice messages becomes more and more ominous, describing what's happening on the Earth (before the infection, mind you) and giving away some info regarding the anomaly arrival, spreading, and behavior.
• At the end, after you (apparently) defeated the Archaic, you seem to return to Earth and back to the base. As soon as you cross the final door, however, the game freezes for a moment, then your car levitates towards four mechanical arms, two of them being a buzzsaw and a laser, but the door closes before you can see the outcome.
• Lost to Echoes ending: after you defeat the Echo Engine, the entire ECH_OS ends up crashing and the disk is formatted. You, essentially, end up erasing the entire world.