Deadplants.exe

Once, when I got bored on my computer, I decided to play a game that I haven’t before. I had heard great reviews for Plants vs. Zombies, so I decided to check it out. I searched for a torrent, and I found one that seemed like the kind that I wanted to use…

I could only get 1 seed for the torrent, so it took about a whole day to download. The next day, after it finished, I opened it. It was in a folder named “ZPlant.” Rather than being named “PlantsvsZombies.exe” or “PvZ.exe”, the application was called “deadplants.exe.” When I opened it, it seemed normal, except for a few minor differences, such as how the music sounded a bit off key, higher than usual. When I clicked on the button for Adventure Mode, it never showed the animation of the hand rising up from the ground, nor did it play the sound effect that goes with it. The call played at the beginning of the stage was replaced by a scream, which made me jump at first. Other than that it seemed normal.

The first level seemed harder than usual, even with only one lane to defend. The zombies ended up eating one of my peashooters. The next stage seemed a bit difficult, too. The zombies came a bit early, and one of them actually got two of my sunflowers. I wondered why someone would make a game so much more difficult like this. Despite the raised difficulty, I pushed on.

While playing through the first few night stages, I noticed a few weird things. The sky was dark and stormy, rather than clear. The graves, rather than having silly or comical inscriptions on them, it had names of celebrities that died recently, such as Amy Winehouse. I wondered if whoever hacked this version of the game put that up as a joke, because I didn’t find it very funny. Whenever I used a grave buster, a message popped up that said, “Why?” Was this game trying to teach kids a lesson?

Later on in the game, the music seemed to be messed up. In the fog levels, the pitch of the music got higher with each level, until in the last level it was almost unbearable. Then, it the first roof level, in the place of music was a faint static. With each level, the static got louder and louder, until it was so loud that I had to turn off the music.

Instead of the last level with the Zombot, when I finished the last roof stage, it went to a black screen with white text on it saying, “Why did you do this to us?” I wondered what that meant…

After that, the game went to a level that looked like the lawn at the beginning, except it was half as large and there was another lawn on the other side of the screen that was an exact mirror image of the lawn I was planting on. In the beginning when it showed the zombies that I would encounter in the level it was empty. I selected the following plants: sunflowers, peashooters, repeaters, twin sunflowers, magnet-shrooms, coffee beans, torchwood, and pumpkins (I still had only 8 slots.)

I turned the music back on from before, but it appeared that this level didn’t have music anyway. The level played out normal at first, and I could only plant on the lawn on the left. I got the chance to plant 5 sunflowers before anything happened, and then, on the other side, a peashooter appeared, except this peashooter looked really creepy. In the place of eyes were dark, soulless voids. Unlike with most creepypastas I read, the eyes didn’t have a red pupil in the middle or anything- just dark, soulless voids. It started firing peas at the sunflower that I had in that row, except the peas that it fired looked old and diseased. It ended up killing my sunflower like in ZomBotany. Then, after that, two sunflowers were planted in the lane above it, and they had the same dark, soulless voids for eyes. It was then that I realized that these were the plants that had been eaten by zombies. Whenever one of the plants on the other side was planted, the screen grew a bit darker and less saturated.

The plants’ numbers were getting overwhelming. All of my plants were dying quicker than I could plant new ones, and I was barely able to kill any of the opposing plants. I knew that this wouldn’t go well.

When the screen was about twice as dark as it should be, the saturation had already been reduced to grayscale. After a while, the screen was almost too dark to see. At that point, my plants had been weakened to just a few sunflowers in pumpkins. The screen was starting to blur itself, and it stopped at the point when I could barely even see what was going on.

Eventually, the scene kept deteriorated to the point where the whole screen was just black. At that point, I could hear the crunching noise that plays when a zombie makes it to your house. Instead of the normal shout that plays, the screen just turned white for about 7 seconds. Then, the screen turned vertically striped red and white, and I could hear a HORRIBLE DISTORTED SCREAMING NOISE THAT ALMOST FREAKING POPPED MY EARS. Then, the application just terminated, and it just went to my desktop. A message popped up that said some random characters with no particular pattern to them, just leaving me startled thinking, “What the heck was that?”

Now, whenever I try to open the application back up, it just goes to a black screen, then a white screen, then the red and white stripes and plays the same distorted scream, and then closes itself, leaving the same nonsensical error message. After that experience, I’ve never pirated another game. I’m very angry that any sick idiot would make such a thing, because that screaming noise will forever be stuck in my head.

I hope that some day the plants in our neighborhood will stop dying.