Cubickes arial video

Building walkthrough video

Enemies and Bosses

The stages of transformation:

The first stage will start out innocuously enough but introduce unease and then unequivocal panic in the building. The stricken will appear to become near comatose, lose all sense of their whereabouts and goings on, stare stupidly into the distance – or at each other or in the mirror or at the player - mumble, walk into walls. Then they will begin getting energized, spastic, frenzied, then they will turn violent and giddy, towards each other some, but mostly towards the unaffected, a la 28 days later, but uncoordinated and often un-focused in their atatcks. They will be savage for some time.

The second stage will begin with another calm before the storm. The stricken will slow down, lose their velocity, eventually many will lay down and begin to moan or have fits, some will appear to have died.   A brief period of calm ensues, during which a lot of drama can take place amongst the uninfected population, the emergency response, and the character and his story line. And then a physical transformation will begin to manifest in the fallen horde. 

Their “inhabitants” will begin to rifle through the assortment of human physical characteristics and capabilities, mutating their hosts, pushing them to extremes with both effectively deadly and grotesquely absurd results. The former involving near-superhuman size, strength, speed, and other enhanced faculties, while the latter will involve exercises in mutation that result in evolutionary failure: too fat, thin, big, small to be more than a nuisance or a fixed-location menace. Of those that are mobile, the coordination of the attacks and the level of cooperation and communication amongst the horde will increase ever so slightly. They will begin to show signs of pack hunting.

The third stage will involve more mutations. But this time the things from the other dimension will bring humans' shared evolutionary origins with the earth's other lifeforms to bear by drawing upon the assortment of genetic artifacts within human DNA and manifesting a variety of human-animal hybrids. Again, some of the beastly concoctions function better than others, and what's more, of those that prove to be effective killing machines, the tendency to hunt in a coordinated manner - in communicating packs – has come to full, deadly fruition. 

In the fourth stage the horde will transform again, this time into a collection of the attributes that have proven most effective at decimating the human population of the building. They will now also have a hive mind. What one knows and/or sees, all know and/or see. They also begin speaking in disjointed and rudimentary manner – first mimicking the sounds of others, then expressing themselves, which, as if it wasn't disturbing enough, is made all the more so by the hive-mind factor. At the end of this stage, some of them begin to display what seems like the ability to read minds.

The next stage is the final stage. The horde halts it's attack and converges somewhere to facilitate the production of the organic gateway.

Back-story

The text was written as an instruction/recipe book for bringing about the invasion of this world by creatures from the next. It was designed to be read aloud in a church-like setting, taking the gathered devotees through a series of synchronized transformations throughout which the invading creatures play-test their human hosts, come to understand the physical realities - the physics - of our world, before fully transforming their human shells into an appropriate simulacrum of themselves. 

 The last stage involves the initiation of a full scale invasion. The book is ancient and it's purpose has been semi-successfully fulfilled twice previously. The first involved a fairly sizable gathering of people. The transformations were undertaken but were interrupted by authorities. Many lives were lost in the ensuing bloody battle but the invasion was halted fairly on in the ritual. The second involved a lone individual who brought the entire process to fruition but was destroyed – along with the few creatures who'd utilized him as a gate

A failed exorcism was in reality an interrupted transformation, first stage. The “possessed” individual was institutionalized after she killed the priest who'd attempted the exorcism. Her utterances and mild physical oddities – the first stage is mostly a mental transformation – made their way, through psychological journals and communities, down into occult circles and the attention of someone familiar  with the book and the previous attempts at its enactments, and thwarting. 

With the first-stage victim as evidence of sorts, this person garnered the ear of some government support and put together a plan for an organized response, albeit one known of by only a handful of people and considered as anything other than nonsense by less. The occultist and his small team, and the possessed woman are all characters late in the game. The occultist and his contingency plan are the government's next-to-last response (the final response being the total annihilation of the building and everyone inside it). His team and ideas are not thought of until word of the insanity in the quarantined building reaches the right ears, and those in charge have been convinced that insane conditions warrant an insane response.

The possessed woman has been interrogated mercilessly by the occultist and his team and is kept as their prisoner/insider source of information. Over the years she has formed a peculiar relationship with her captors. They are old enemies and completely different forms of life, despite her outward appearance, but they can communicate on a rudimentary level, having spent enough time attempting it. The creature that inhabits the woman's body has learned how to aggravate, poke and prod her captors the way a parrot might learn that certain vocalizations elicit certain responses from it's owner. It has tried unsuccessfully to coerce and force a weak willed character to read the book to it and further it's transformation.

The savant was brought into the building to make a high quality audio reproduction of his recitation. The lengthy text of the book he's memorized, the equivalent of the necronomicon, is believed to have been destroyed after his peculiarly extensive memory had absorbed it.