Name: White Face
Species: Digital Entity
Franchise: Imscared- the pixelated nightmare
Gender: Ambiguous

There's a way to turn an entity into data. This data then lives on in the computer, in the web, gathering bytes of information and observing our every move on the computer infected. This is a basis for how friendly creatures like Digimon come to be, but there's always a darker side to this process. Most digital entities are malicious like sentient viruses, like Sonic.EXE and give power to spirits BEN Drowned. However, there exists an entity whom, for all its dark aspects, remains on the borderline of being belevelent or malevolent. It will try to deceive you in anyway possible, so if anything changes in its game, that means it arrives. Sound alerts you to its presence. Whatever you do, don't let it deceive you.

It is White Face.

And thus is the general plot of Imscared- The Pixelated Nightmare, an indie-game originally created in 2012 by Italian developer Ivan aka MyMadnessWorks, as well as its 2016 Steam remake of the same name. Imscared makes the player the protagonist of its pixelated metahorror experience as the entity White Face plays its games, completely aware of its position as a byte of data in a random computer unfortunate enough to download the game. White Face will come off as malicious as they get, but the truth of his goals are made somewhat clearer upon closer inspection of its behavior.

Assuming you played the original 2012 version of Imscared, you're thrown completely anew in the pixelated map with nothing but your basic computer controls. You're in a room with a bed, a table, a closet, and an exit door. There should be a key under the table, which will allow you to open the closet... which turns out to be filled with pixelated blood. If you interact with the exit door, it will say that you need a heart to open, thus opening a small hall in the otherwise empty corner of the room leading to a ladder down. Go down, and be welcomed by dry blood along the walls as you check every room that is already unlocked. One room will contain a large rusty gate, and when you peek inside, you will get your first glimpse of White Face, watching you from the shadows.

Upon finding a key in one of the few unlocked rooms, you will gain access to a previously locked door that leads... to the Flesh Room. Everything up until now has mostly been mutal colors with a splash of bright blood, but the Flesh Room is a hallway of pulsating, squishy matter, albeit still pixelated. At the end of this flesh hall is a pulsating heart, the same one you need to open the exit door seen prior. However, the moment you so much as step back the way you came with the heart, White Face suddenly appears and gives you a false blue screen of death. You should find that a new document or two has appeared in your desktop, informing you that the entity is White Face and warns you to "follow the arrows". You'll also be given a text box prompt asking you "Do you know my name?", in which you must reply "White Face" to continue the game. Typing "HER" or "Take me to the door" this early in the remake will give you something along the lines of "Nice thought, try later".

Opening the game again will take you to a different sight. A sight of the words "LET'S PLAY TAG" written in pixelated blood on a white and green wall. You walk out to find yourself in a car park with arrows leading in unorthodox directions. Suddenly, you hear static, and you suddenly find that White Face was serious about playing tag with you as you race to step over every arrow in the lot. Once you mark all the arrows, an elevator off to the side will unlock and allow you access to the street level below. Following the blood trails and the cryptic line of "One of them is lying" will lead you to yet another scare by White Face, forcing the game to exit out again as you find another file in your desktop stating that it shouldn't have urged you to keep going on and that all you can do at this point is to play along until you find your chance to delete it for good. The documents will also imply heavy regret due to its heavy use of "I'm so sorry".

Play again, and you'll find yourself in a house full of doors with numbers on them. There's windows as well, but there's also a heavy white fog both outside and inside the house. The first key to the first door is easily found in a nearby dresser, and you find yourself in another basic room with a key behind a bookshelf that will require you to find some tongs or pincers to reach the key. The rooms function much like this until after the second door opens. Then the fog raises to the same pitch darkness as before, with White Face watching you from outside just as he has this entire time. The rooms will alter and change as you progress and are forced to walk outside, where White Face himself suddenly tells you that he is afraid to die and is as scared as you are. It's still unknown to this day if White is genuine in his fear or if he is saying this and similar lines like this to mock you. You make your way to the seventh room, and you find yourself face to disembodied face with White Face himself in a dark room, unable to move as White Face looms closer to you.

"This is my room. Do you see how dark it is? It's cold. Are you scared? I am scared."

After that, you're suddenly outside the room and back in the ever changing rooms. After opening a few more doors, you're allowed access to the exit and arrows leading the way out... only to come to White Face yet again. He congratulates you for reaching the "end" of his game, only to then say that he won't let you leave. Then a frightening sight appears to the left of White Face... a chair, and a noose. With nothing else to do or nothing stopping you, you are forced to approach the chair and noose, but then the game forces you to exit out of it again with one haunting line.

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that."

That's honestly where Imscared ended until the 2016 Steam remake, but before we go there, let's take a step back.

White Face itself is exactly what it sounds like. White Face is a disembodied head, clearly pixelated, with pitch black eyes and a mouth of uneven teeth as well as a black scar going down the left side of its face from its left eye. As you may have noticed, I have been going back and forth with calling White Face male or non-binary in gender. Well, it was never confirmed if White Face was officially male or female, as it was always referred to as "it". This only got more confusing with the 2016 Steam remake, as it focused more on White Face's ability to change appearance as it pleased, which included feminine forms of appearance. This is most evident in White Face's second main form in the remake, HER, but we'll discuss that in due time. The game itself displays a theme of loneliness all around. Even the infamous noose and chair imply loneliness, for it is said that hanging oneself is a "lonely" form of suicide. White Face itself doesn't seem to honestly be that malevolent, especially compared to other digital entities. Sure, there's pixelated blood and a couple of corpses, but they're nothing more then pixels and a part of this game of White Face's. It is also polite when it speaks to you and honestly doesn't seem to deceive you despite what the game tells you.

In the remake of Imscared, the game technically starts with a brief tutorial of the controls. Towards the end you are given the instructions to crouch and take the small red flower on the ground, and immediately after picking the flower the tutorial text will suddenly say "and now you'll give that flower to me", signifying White Face is in fact active here. The next portion of the game functions very much like the original 2012 game with a couple of new things sprinkled here and there in the form of achievements, like the Peek-a-boo achievement where you must look through a peephole which gives you a glimpse of the ending- the chair and noose. There's also a chance that, between the house and the area where White Face ends the game, that an area will appear that contains a phonograph, a feminine body hanging by her arms and legs from an unseen ceiling, and a sign saying "You should not see". Coming to this area will give you an achievement as well, and playing the phonograph will make music play, which causes the feminine body smile down at you as it plays. Assuming you were lucky to get this area to appear during your first play of the game, you will later learn that the female is none other then HER, and the document following the end of the game will tell you that one of the names White Face uses is HER. Typing HER into the box where White Face asks you if you know his name will take you into the game where things reveal that it's far from game over.

The main menu of the remake displays a parlor room with a paino playing. However, after choosing to play the game after typing HER will take you to this exact parlor, and you must explore it much like White Face's house area. The entire building is a maze filled with cheap jumpscares, but once you solve the number based puzzle the bookcase next to the piano will open up. Entering this new area takes you to a balcony where the female from the secret area from earlier is looking out into the black void as it rains. There's also a door, but it's locked, so you must approach the female. She'll suddenly turn on you and screech as she floats toward you, eventually ending your game. Returning to the game will return you to the parlor with the bookcase still open, and the balcony has no sign of the female aside from the blood going off to the side, but you need a rope to climb down. This is your next objective, and so now you must beware the sudden appearances of HER as you seek the way down the balcony. And White Face himself is honestly nowhere in sight, suggesting either he truly has taken the form of HER or that he is letting HER run loose in his game. Either way, HER obviously takes this game more seriously then White Face did before.

After taking advantage of the false achievements and finding the rope, you'll climb down into the garden area where there's a large bush maze to traverse. In here you'll find HER again, this time hanging by her leg and beheaded. Interacting with HER here will cause you to see a seemingly drug-induced sight. After which HER will thank you for the time and you'll gain an achievement. You'll need to pay close attention to traverse this bush maze. Fortunately one of the new documents is a map of the area as well as a multitude of textcodes (tho most of these textcodes are likely jokes considering many of them are song lyrics and even Bill Cipher quotes.) You are also given a link to a video explaining how to find a secret area in the maze, but following the instructions to this area will only give you a sign saying "You fell for it", showing it was a hoax by HER. This shouldn't be the first video you'll be given to watch, the first being one that "explains" how to obtain the pulsating heart from earlier and the third... well, that'll come eventually I ensure you. There's also a broken mirror that must be repaired by interacting with statues of HER. The repaired mirror is HER once again, holding up a sign saying "HELP ME", and it's required to repair in order to precede forward.

Once you get passed the gate, you'll see a couple of signs as you approach the final area. One sign will say "BURY HER", a reference to the channel name where the previously mentioned videos are found, and the other sign saying "Six will do", a reference to a phrase that was stated in promotional work leading up to the Steam remakes' launch. These are in fact vital clues as to what you must do later on. During this part of the game, you'll also find yourself in a train station where you must change the time on your computer in order to precede, much like how some Pokémon players obtain special Pokémon by changing the time in their consoles (for shame cheaters!😡). Changing the time to the ones listed in-game for "work" and "home" and obtaining the tickets for both times will earn you the Lucky Tickets achievement. You must change the computer time to 00:00 as listed in-game for "truth", and after gaining the ticket for this time, the train will finally appear and you'll board it to advance. You'll have to go back and forth pressing buttons inside the train before you'll then be able to step out of the train and out of bounds to see HER up close... before she ends your game again. Oh, and there's also a section prior to the train where you must go back and forth in and out of a grocery store to boot up a computer, or something. There's also a document that talks about a story where someone's brother getting horribly killed by an appliance in an appliance store, but then they deny that the person was their brother at all. I'm sorry, it's just been so long since I've played this game. I forget how it goes from time to time. It's the confusing grocery store part with the bottle breaking in the dark after the parlor and maze sections, then the train which leads to the finale. I think.

Anyway, you'll come to an open field with dead trees abound and the pitch darkness enveloping the backdrop as always as pixelated blood rains from the sky. HER herself will confront you here, once and for all. Here she'll speak to you about how she didn't want to be the monster she's been acting like this entire time and how she didn't have a choice...

Then suddenly, you're given a pixelated gun.

That's right. A gun.

"You want the nightmare to end? Then kill me in front of my birthplace!"

Suddenly HER screeches, giving chase yet again as you now must end HER in a mercy-kill. Assuming you haven't already, you must quickly type "six" into one of your documents, giving you the six bullets needed to end HER. Once you fire the sixth shot, HER's bloodied body will freeze and glitch slightly as she frowns and stands there, accepting her end. If you are quick enough, you can move your character and turn around to find an entity in similar appearance to White Face holding the gun, suggesting you have been playing as White Face at least for the finale portion. The creator of the game, Ivan, has stated that this portion was basically White Face's way of discarding HER as a form of his since he figured HER had taken up too much of the spotlight already, which suggests that HER somehow became her own entity over the course of the game.

With HER gone and you eventually finding all 11 achievements the game has to offer, White Face's games are officially over, right? Well, yes but actually no (Such a fun phrase to use!). See, you are given a link to the third and last video, which gives you one last frightening reminder of what HER once was. She gives you a supposedly random bunch of numbers before screeching at you briefly, ening the video. Use these numbers along with the document that gives you letters and the corresponding numbers to obtain your next message, "Take me to the door" (if the numbers and letters give you trouble, don't worry. The commenters in the comment section of the video were nice enough to decipher the numbers for you😊). Play the game again to where you enter the Flesh Room (thought you were done there, didn't you?) and type in to the text prompt "Take me to the door" to make a door appear in front of you in the Flesh Room. Go through the door to enter the basement level, where you must pull a BATIM and find three valves while avoiding another game over by White Face, who suddenly seems serious about ending your game before you end his. At one point there is an area with a fan that you become trapped with, and behind the fan is White Face. He'll start to tell you what he wants, but then the game will glitch out and you are suddenly free to leave to find the first valve, albeit you are treated to a cheap jumpscare at the hands of a pipe blowing steam at you as you leave.

After going through the puzzles and finding the valves, you're free to precede to the truly final area. That is, if you've gotten all 11 achievements. If you don't, you'll to restart the game and play until you achieve all the achievements through and through before you can advance to the true end. If you do have all your achievements met, then you may precede through the door. Once you go through, you'll find yourself in a familiar area- the house. You go through the exit door and see the chair and noose for what must be the hundredth time already when you notice there's more behind it. Approach and you'll be able to read a sign PLEADING to you to take the flower (the same red flower from the tutorial). It's clear the sign is from White Face as he states he'll reset everything in the game as long as you don't choose to take the door to the left of the sign.

This truly is the end. If you choose the door even after being told this is an irreversible act, the game ends itself again. Return, and the game starts back at the first room you started in. Go down the hall however, and before you can go down the ladder, White Face suddenly appears and screams into your earbuds or earphones, glitching like absolute H*ll as the walls suddenly have a distorted message on them. As you back off from White Face, he'll head-rush you as the game ends yet again. Go back in, and the room is suddenly inverted to black and white colors alone as messages such as "It is your fault" and "I begged you, and you still refused!" are displayed along the walls. And again, White Face ends your game repeatedly. Until finally, there's nothing left but the room and a floating white heart. Not a pulsating one, just... a heart. And you can't pick it up. Exit out of the game and you'll find two new documents. One document simply is titled after the heart in the room, and the other document is White Face telling you that it was in fact him writing every single document the game has been mysteriously giving you this entire time and essentially gives you the "reason why you suck" speech while calling you out on you denying him and that you should just go ahead and delete his heart to kill him from your computer once and for all. With nothing else that can be done, you may delete the heart document and, should you choose to, return to the game. Suddenly the entire house and bush maze is open to you and free of blood of any kind, and the sky is sky blue in what is supposed to be cheerful. White Face... is no more.

However, there is a happier ending... the flower. If you feel sympathy for White Face and pick the flower instead of the door, White Face will suddenly appear and approach you calmly. When you say yes to giving him the flower, he'll don a friendly face and express genuine appreciation to you.

"You are so kind... So kind... Play with me forever... I love you."

Suddenly the game ends yet again. When you enter the game again, you find that White Face truly did reset the entire game down to all 11 achievements being unmarked again. White Face remains in your computer, ready to play the games again whenever you're ready to play. You still have all the documents from before, so now you know what's coming and how it's done. In other words, White Face lives.

Once again, the remake keeps the original game's theme of loneliness right down to the piano music of the main menu/parlor level, for in Italy (the birth home of creator Ivan) the piano is symbolic for loneliness. White Face's darker and more malicious behavior from the first game has also been toned down in the remake, letting more of his more playful side show more. According to creator Ivan, White Face also can't feel or properly express love in a romantic way, which honestly makes his message of appreciation in the flower ending all the more heartwarming as he is outright saying that you are loved as a friend to him, something he is hinted to not have on a daily basis like most people.

However, even if you did delete White Face from your computer for good, he isn't exactly gone entirely. See, he made a grand return... in Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion! Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion is a game where you must traverse the vast interior of an old mansion filled to the teeth with horrid monsters and experiments that make SCP look cute and cuddly and it's run by the spirit of a little girl, Spooky herself. In the game's Endless Mode, there exists exclusive monsters only encountered in Endless Mode, and one of them is none other then White Face himself! He chases you around the mansion in glitchy Imscared fashion as he attempts to end your game yet again. When he catches you and kills you, he'll show you a bloodied bag hanging from a noose as he states that you're "all closed up" as a similar text box to the "do you know my name" prompt requests you type something. If you type "open" in response to White Face, you're suddenly given a gory, gutted, and bloody sight of the contents of the hanging bag. Suddenly you're taken to a realistic version of the Flesh Room (aw s**t, here we go again) as a realistic version of the disembodied head of White Face chases you through it. Rarely, some of the other monsters- or Specimes as Spooky's Jumpscare Mansion refers them as- can appear and give chase to you as well in the flesh halls as White Face chases you. However, survive long enough and you'll be given a second chance as White Face lets you continue your Endless Mode playthrough where you left off (how nice!), making him the only Specimen in the entire game that grants you a second chance. If you don't type "open" in the box, the game will end there without a second chance and your taken back to the main menu... with White Face itself in the menu in place of Spooky!

Despite the horror elements that White Face incorporates into his games, he manages to delight players as well. Many Let's Players, such as Jacksepticeye and Markiplier, remember playing the original Imscared during their beginning as YouTubers, and many players were met with a happy surprise at seeing White Face in Spooky's cast of scary creatures, delighted to see him again. As for HER, she didn't fail in taking many players by sympathetic surprise as she continues to be a large portion of the game's fame and "fanservice". On DeviantArt, one person commented in response to the "Six will do" phrase with "Six will do? How about sixty!" The comment not only made Ivan reply back in delight but he also made art of HER being certainly displeased and mad at the prospect (Ha!😂). It's also well known that Imscared served as an inspiration to later pixelated horror games such as I See You.

It's no doubt that Imscared definitely leaves an impression on anyone and everyone to this day. Whether that impression be a terrified one or a sympathetic heartbroken one, White Face can definitely be said to have stood the test as one of horror's most interesting and fascinating entities. Whether you think he is just a lonely entity trapped in data, or a malevolent entity mocking you, he definitely is an unforgettable part of horror game history. To this day many of the Imscared's mysteries remain just that- mysteries- and the game's secrets may never be fully known in its entirety.

That hasn't stopped die-hard fans from keeping White Face company yet. 🌷