Two days ago, after getting home late, I booted up Enlisted shortly past midnight to get a head start on the next days Lunar New Year event. However, after starting the game, something was off; the menu music was distorted, and the soldiers in my squads looked different. Rather than their usual poses, they were staring directly at me with hollow eyes. I chalked it up to a graphical glitch, since games like this always had their quirks.
I entered a BR III US match, expecting the usual chaos of Enlisted’s battles. But when I spawned in, the map was different. I was on the familiar Normandy beach on attack, but everything was… wrong. The sky was a deep, unnatural red, and the ocean had turned black, its waves eerily still. There were no gunshots, no planes flying by, no artillery—just a low, guttural hum that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Graphical glitches in this game aren’t uncommon - I’m sure you all have seen some of the weird, stretched out ragdolls. But this was different. The game wouldn’t let me leave the match. The escape key was unresponsive, and my computer seemed locked into the game. With no other choice, I pushed forward.
My squad of AI soldiers followed me, as usual, but their behavior was off. They didn’t speak, not even the standard canned lines. Their movements were jerky, almost unnatural, like puppets being yanked on invisible strings. One of them, my gold order engineer, kept glitching out, his head twisting at impossible angles as if watching me.
Then I saw him.
A soldier, alone on the beach. He wasn’t part of my squad or the enemy team. His uniform was tattered and covered in black stains, and his face… his face was a void, a black hole where eyes and a mouth should have been.
He didn’t move like the other characters in the game. His animations were fluid, almost lifelike, as he walked toward me. My squad suddenly opened fire, but their bullets passed through him as if he weren’t there. Then, one by one, my squad members collapsed—no blood, no gunfire, just a soft thud as they hit the ground.
The soldier with the void face stopped a few feet from me. He raised his hand, and the game froze. For a moment, I thought my computer had crashed.
But then text appeared on the screen, written in a crude, jagged font:
“THE DEAD REMEMBER.”
The game resumed. My character was now alone. The squad was gone, and my weapons had vanished. The only sound was the crunch of my boots on the sand as I wandered aimlessly.
The match timer at the top of the screen appeared, but was glitched, freezing at 1 second remaining. No enemies spawned, and no objectives appeared. I thought about shutting off my PC, but something compelled me to keep going.
Finally, I found a bunker at the edge of the map. Its door creaked open on its own as I approached, revealing a staircase descending into darkness. Against my better judgment, I entered.
The bunker was impossibly large, a maze of tunnels that didn’t match the game’s normal layouts. The hum grew louder, inside resonating in my skull. The walls were lined with names—thousands of them, etched into the concrete in that same jagged font.
Some of the names I recognized. Some had familiar clan tags. Others were usernames of players I’d seen in the leaderboards or on the forum. Others were gibberish, or perhaps foreign scripts I couldn’t decipher.
At the end of the tunnel, I found another message scrawled in blood-red letters:
“LEAVE. OR JOIN THEM.”
Suddenly, my screen went black. My computer shut off entirely. When I turned it back on, Enlisted was gone - not uninstalled, just… gone, as if it had never been there.
I tried re-downloading the game on Steam, and then even resorted to trying the Gaijin launcher, but the game wasn’t listed. I checked forums and social media, but no one else seemed to have experienced what I did.
I gave up and went to bed, but the names from the bunker still haunt me. I’ve tried checking the account names I recognized on the forums, and discord, but they’re all the same: accounts that haven’t been active since that night.
But tonight, I think I hear that ever-present hum again.
And I wonder if I should have joined them.
