The video began in a first-person perspective.
Right at the start, the options for Race selection appeared.
Then, a cursor could be seen clicking on the Human Race option.
Afterward, subtitles appeared on the black background.
[Congratulations, Player! You have received the role: Prospective Saintess of the Storm Church Court.]
As the subtitles appeared,
The entire style of the video changed completely.
The video adopted a cinematic style, with scenes centered around the Saintess controlled by the Player.
It showed a scene of a manipulative girl climbing into a prince's bed.
It was obvious what her goal was: to get the prince to help her become a Prospective Saintess.
In total, the video was about an hour and thirty minutes long.
Like a story unfolding, all the scenes were set in a medieval world. A tag in the top-left corner of the video also displayed the in-game day.
This video was a highlight reel compiled from one hundred days of the game's story progression.
The video was also quite popular; it had over 30,000 concurrent viewers, and the screen was filled with scrolling comments.
However, Lince was in no mood to pay attention to the comments right now.
He just skimmed through the first video compilation by dragging the progress bar, then continued to scroll down and browse the rest.
The further he scrolled, the more he found the situation both funny and exasperating.
The reason was simple.
He discovered that in this damn game, the other Players had pulled off quite a few outrageous stunts.
Some were successfully advancing the game's story, while others had already been forced to call "GG" early on.
For example, in the second video, the Player had also chosen the Human Race.
Unfortunately, his randomly assigned role was quite miserable—he started as a Peasant Slave.
The opening story quest involved him being bullied by the Militia of a certain territory.
Seizing the moment, the guy killed the Militiaman and even awakened his Tier One Extraordinary Bloodline.
It was a classic case of the tables turning.
Unfortunately, this guy acted exactly like you'd expect a Player to.
Not only did he not flee, but he even tried to incite the surrounding Peasant Slaves to rebel against the Lord.
As one might expect, failure was inevitable. Not only did no one follow his call to rebel, but in less than two hours, the guy was cut down by Knights led by the Nobility. The game ended with a "GG."
The entire video was only twelve minutes long before the screen went black.
A final game prompt appeared: "The Player's character has died. You have lost your closed beta access."
Seeing this, Lince understood.
The game was indeed just as he had suspected.
Character death really did mean losing your access to the game.
Lince then fast-forwarded through dozens more videos and discovered a pattern.
For any Player who was still alive and eligible to play, their video compilation was almost always an hour and a half long.
But for the Players who had died and been eliminated, none of their videos reached that length.
The videos of the failed Players ranged from a few minutes at the shortest to an hour at the longest.
With this in mind, Lince carefully checked the displayed lengths of the first three hundred video compilations.
He found that out of three hundred Players, only eighty-eight had managed to survive and advance their stories to the hundredth day!
'So the elimination rate for this game is pretty high.'
However, Lince breathed a sigh of relief.
This was because the videos didn't contain the kind of damning information he had feared.
Namely, the video compilations didn't expose any of the Players' real-life information, not even their in-game usernames or account details.
Furthermore, the data panels that Players could see in-game were also hidden. The entire compilation was presented as a cinematic, story-driven movie.
While scrolling through videos, Lince made his way back to his apartment.
After quickly washing up, Lince didn't go straight to bed. Instead, he started searching for his own video.
A hundred thousand videos!
Even if he only looked at the title and thumbnail of each compilation, finding his own would still take a significant amount of time.
In the process, even late at night, "True Game" shot to the top of the trending lists on many platforms due to its massive, viral "game promotion."
...
[Can You Believe This is a Game? Movie-Quality Graphics and Effects, Story Feels Like a Live-Action Drama!]
[True Game? Just What Kind of Company Is Behind This Groundbreaking Game?]
[Holy Crap, on a certain short-video app, I swipe past two videos and the next one is ALWAYS a promo for this game?!]
[Epic Gaming Masterpiece? Multiple Platforms Issue Urgent PR Statements! This Game Paid No Promotion Fees! They Strongly Condemn This Game's Widespread Hacking!]
[...]
The game was trending everywhere.
And the comment sections under each trending topic were exploding!
Chen Xia Muwanqing: "Holy crap, it's not even morning and I feel like I'm dreaming. Are these really game graphics? What kind of rig do you need to run this?"
Blue Star Online's NPC: "Dude, stop freaking out. Did you see the statements from the platforms? They can't even take the videos down, let alone ban the account! All I can say is, this game is something else! I bet you could run it with these graphics on a total potato PC. Take my advice: keep a close eye on the game's official page on whatever platform it's on, and get ready to snatch a spot in the next test phase!"
Devil President's Great Intelligence: "The guy above is right, but when are they releasing the next wave of spots?"
Wind's Big-tailed Fox: "Hah, so what if you get access? I was in the closed beta. I won't deny this game is mysterious, but let me tell you, you can't play it without a ton of luck. I mean, everything was fine when I f*cking logged off, but then in the middle of the night, my computer screen suddenly turns on, and a message pops up on the game interface telling me my character died on day thirty-two! Son of a bitch!"
Mint Cat Meow Meow: "My condolences to the big bro above! But hey, can you tell us more about what the game is actually like?"
Dili She Master: "I agree with the guy above. Hey bro, you should do a livestream! We'd all tune in. This game has my full attention now. I can't even sleep, I'm just staring at its launch page."
"Same here."
"+1"
"..."
At that moment, the entire internet was in an uproar. Many people found themselves in for a sleepless night.
...
"Found it!"
Late at night, Lince, who had been engrossed in digging through the videos, finally found his own.
'That was seriously difficult.'
He had no idea how many videos he'd gone through. Even just clicking on each one for a split second had taken him over an hour.
By now, it was already past two in the morning.