The Strange Story Behind the Best Game of 2020

Certain things blur the boundaries of reality. Like a phone that can only connect to one number. Like the number that phone dials, which is also listed as the phone number on the TripAdvisor page for Echo River in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park. Like the prerecorded message that plays when you dial that number, which says, "If you don't remember dialing this number at all, press 5," before launching into facts that all sound like thinly veiled urban legends. Like a retrospective for an artist who seems to have never existed, or a community television broadcast that seems to end with a ghost in the machine. This web of ephemera, which extends from the world we live in to the one on the other side of the screen, would seem to be the work of a major company, like the alternate reality game that accompanied the release of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight and sent 11 million people all over the world in search of the Joker.