In 2025, a video game was released by an unknown game dev, known as Starcross Adventure. It was an action RPG with several elements pulled from things like dating sims and visual novels.

  It was a pretty generic fantasy game, with a pretty bnd story.

  It also received massive clowning for its “woke” nature in the dating sim portions.

  All in all, it had a massive pyerbase in the beginning for a game of its type, but that dwindled to a small cult following.

  Some of whom loved the game to an unhealthy degree.

  They created a walkthrough to date every NPC that had a romance option.

  On how to get every item.

  On how every skill worked.

  And how to beat every enemy and boss in the game.

  If someone were to find the game even just a year after the game had released, they would have to do basically no work if they didn’t want to, other than actually getting good at the combat in the game.

  They could py any build, romance any NPC, and do anything they wanted, all guided by one website run by less than 10 people.

  The strange part of this was the massive time comment some of these were.

  Some items or romances were only obtainable if you created a whole new character.

  And thanks to the seemingly hundreds of things to do, they would have needed to finish the game no less than 100 times for even just the info on the dating sim portion.

  This was one of the strange things about the game.

  It was made by a completely unknown dev, and this was the only game they would ever release.

  All of their social media were made the same day as the game release, and all they said was “We made a game! Please Enjoy!” and had a link to the games page.

  This lead to massive specution even with the people who only ever pyed the game in the beginning.

  The game was not something somesmall dev could make without years of work for it.

  Outside of the story, everything else was amazingly done. The art was breathtaking, the sound design was amazing. It wasn’t buggy and ran smoothly no matter what.

  A technical and artistic masterpiece.

  All in all, it was a shame that it hemeraged its original pyerbase the way it did.

  ∴

  I am an average person.

  If anything, below average.

  At 23, I am still in community college thanks to my own ziness.

  I still live with my father and step-mom.

  I do have a part time job.

  But that is about all that is going on in my life.

  All of my social interactions happen at work, since I take most of my csses online.

  Even then I keep my distance from them thanks to anxiety, and the fact that I don’t want any of them to know anything real about me.

  I have never been in any form of romantic retionship.

  Outside of school and work, I mostly just py video games or read books.

  A somewhat boring life, with nothing exciting going on.

  Eventually, shortly after turning 23, I found a game online called Starcross Adventure. I was looking for something fun to py, and came across it on a list online.

  When I checked reviews it said that the story was boring and unengaging, but the gamepy was extremely fun.

  On a whim, I picked the game up and started to py it.

  At the very beginning, I was drawn in by the character options. You could py as a premade character, or make your own.

  The premade ones were the NPC’s from the game, and a quick check online, they all had unique events in the story.

  If you choose one of them, they take the pce of the pyer chector in the story, becoming the so-called hero instead of them, since the pyer character just doesn’t exist if you don’t make one.

  Since I enjoy character customisation, I chose to make my own.

  Starting with the background of my character, you could choose to make them any background in the setting ranging from several different royal families, foreign or domestic, every rank of noble, a commoner, or even an orphan.

  This was a change that would affect the prologue of the story which influenced the story going forward slightly, mostly just dialogue. The big change is the bonus skill you get during the prologue.

  BUt since it was my first pythrough, I didn’t really care.

  Choosing the child of a count as my background, I moved on to the actual customization of my character.

  This allowed me to designate what they would look like.

  I don’t know when I started doing this, but a long time ago, I started primarily using female characters in games, so that is what I did here. I made them around 5’ and average proportions.

  This was something I usually did. Since I wasn’t trying to create an ideal human body like most people, I didn't try to make them outrageously beautiful or sexy in any way.

  They weren’t unattractive in any way, but more cute than beautiful or sexy.

  They ended up with medium length bck hair and gray eyes.

  After finishing that up, I found a menu asking me something I was shocked by.

  In the brief description I read, they talked about the dating sim parts of the game, but I wasn’t super interested in that part.

  But to make my character, I needed to choose things like their sexuality and romantic interest.

  Not really caring about this, I choose to just put my own down. Romantically interested in women, mixed feelings towards sex.

  This was something that I didn’t really talk to people about, but since I didn’t really care about this part of the game, why not just be myself here.

  This also mirrors how I would view video game characters. I always saw the cute interactions between girls in the media(read anime) as super heartwarming, much more than I did with hetero couples in the media.

  And stly, I needed to name my character.

  I didn’t really have a name I normally used for game character, so I went with a random one I was using recently.

  “Nyx”

  And because I chose a noble family, it said it was going to choose a random family name for my character as well.

  ∴

  And within 6 months, this game became one of my most favorite games I have ever pyed. The combat was so much fun and engaging.

  The story was really boring like I had seen everywhere, but it was also just the first part of the game.

  Thanks to things like fvor text and dialogue in the post game, I learned that the world was far more expansive than the super cliche story the game followed.

  But the reason I pyed this game nonstop was the leveling system in the game.

  For the most part, the level cap was 100 for every thing in the base game.

  At that point, you stop unlocking new skills. You can’t even go any higher unless you get to the post game.

  But after removing that initial limit, the only limit for everything is the limit of an unsigned 64 bit integer, or (2^64)-1.

  18,446,744,073,709,551,615

  That is the highest your stats can go, or your level. Or your proficiency with any weapon.

  It was nearly impossible to get to this point, but the constant increase in levels was super fun for me.

  With the myriad super bosses in the open world of the post game, the countless quests to do and super cool items to find, I could spend so much more than just these 6 months on it.

  ∴

  One day, I was about to unch Starcrossed Adventure when I saw something I never expected to see on the steam page.

  The game had an update.

  I quickly updated the game and unched it to see what had changed.

  But right when I unched the game, I saw a piece of text that appeared before the title screen.

  *GENDER DOES NOT MATCH TARGET*

  *CORRECTION UNDERWAY*

  *NYX HAS BEEN CHANGED TO MALE*

  *ERROR*

  *PLAYER CHOICES AND BACKSTORY NEED CORRECTION*

  *CREATION OF ADDITIONAL CAST HAS STARTED*

  *FINISHED*

  *NEW GAME PLUS HAS STARTED*

  *ADDITIONAL REWARDS AND BONUSES WILL BE GIVEN*

  And the world around me went bck.