CreepyPasta Stories

Story 58: Jack The Ripper Game

My favorite thing to do on the internet is those item search games. You know, those ones that give you a list of miscellaneous things, like a used match, a flashlight, a lawn chair, a flamingo, a blanket, a coffee cup... Well, you have to look through this impossibly detailed scene to find them.

I think they’re known around the internet as Hidden Object Games. There are some pretty good ones, but most of them are just amusing distractions. I pirate them all, because I am not paying twenty dollars for some glorified and extended Where’s Waldo for the PC. I don’t feel bad. People buy them on the internet, and they should know that most people would pirate their games anyway.

My favorite was this one called The Murders of Jack the Ripper. My mother bought it for me when I was younger. You play Inspector Abberline trying to solve the cases, or a madam named Black Alice if you choose to play as a female, and you play through the investigation, locating all the bodies of the victims. Each crime scene was a Hidden Object Scene, you see, so there are about twenty victims of the murders. Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Kelly, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles, Marie Suttman, and others.

I can’t remember all of them; it’s been about five or six years since I played it. I used to play it in high school, before I got out to college and learned of the internet. I haven’t really had time to play them since. This was also in the early 2000s, when the internet was less prominent, and what guides one could find either had to be printed out or saved as a document. I didn’t have my own computer until I went to college, which I bought with my graduation money, so I couldn’t save any of the guides, or the game.

During the game, you have to find all the different clues that will lead you to his layer, where he’s being tortured by this thing, this giant, six foot, winged creature in a robe. She has white blonde hair covered up by a blue robe, and she has this smile on her face.

I can’t exactly describe it. It’s not too wide, but the more I stared at it, the more uncomfortable I became, and the more the smile seemed to widen. She wears a blue dress that resembles a ball gown, which poofs out at the bottom. Her skin is almost entirely covered by this dress, and I’m not sure exactly how the wings, which must be attached to her back, can exist at all with that dress on, but whatever, it’s a video game.

The things that she actually does to Jack in the game’s final scene changed depending on how many Secret Items you found. They were little artifacts that showed up briefly during the Hidden Object Scenes, like Emma Smith’s Hairpin or Mary Kelly’s Garter, stuff like that, and they were completely separate from the ten objects required to finish a murder scene. Once you found all ten objects, your chances at getting the Secret Item were gone forever (for that playthrough). There were a few checkpoints at five Secret Items, ten, fifteen, twenty, and the hidden object, twenty one. No matter how I tried, no matter how hard I looked, I could never find more than twenty. I have no idea what it was or who it belonged to, though the only major character missing in the game was Jack, so my guess would probably be that it was Jack’s Knife.

I went away to college and learned how to use the internet. It’s a wonderful thing, no? I taught myself the proper way to do Google searches and stuff, and I forgot about the game for a while. I met a girl, got married, danced with my mom at my wedding, walked down the aisle to Pachabel’s Canon, and eventually, my wife and I bought a house. We had some wedding gifts to furnish it, but we had little to no food at the time, and less money, so we’d do a lot of shopping at Walmart. This was how I was reminded of the game again. They were selling it in a bargain bin for five bucks, and I decided what the hell, I’d get it. Normally, I buy myself some sort of treat, like a bag of Doritos or a box of gourmet popcorn, but this time, I bought myself the game instead. My wife rolled her eyes and muttered something about video games being my “other woman”, and then she kissed me on the cheek.