If you're of a certain vintage, you may remember 13 Sins, a film about a hideous game, which challenged its players (primarily innocents who are reached out to by the mysterious game masters) to commit horrible deeds. Starting at killing a fly and working up to familicide, people who completed these challenges were rewarded with lots of money. Simply because the game masters wanted to show that humans were possible of monstrosity.
Now, imagine the people running the game, instead of simply being horribly wealthy and powerful because of that, were inherently powerful due to access to tools that are essentially magic. Think of something along the lines of Stephen King's Word Processor of the Gods, or Master PC. And so the game involved rewriting reality to eliminate winners or losers of individual challenges. That's what woe.begone is.
Mike finds it accidentally, by spending a little bit too long on Reddit, looking initially like just another bit of creepypasta , but immediately finds himself involved in something nasty, with the promise that if he follows through with the gruesome challenge, the rewards will be worth it. They are, as he finds that one of his close friends is back from the dead. This is both excellent, and an excellent source of extortion. Would you stop playing if you thought to do so might kill your friend?
Which leaves Mike trapped in the game. Thing is, he doesn't have to be trapped for very long. Think about it - the game masters have demonstrated the ability to change the world. Bring back the dead, make incredible changes - what would you do for power like that? Killing a couple of people doesn't seem like too terrible a deal. Perhaps that's why he ends up with competition, who want to take his place as the most successful player.
It's all a single narrator show, presented as Mike giving after-action reports on his trials and tribulations, which does present the usual difficulty of building tension when you know he's obviously okay to upload episodes (without the trick of the "automatic upload"), but there are a couple of nice instances of playing with that that give it some interesting depth.
There are some tweaks to add to the presentation, but if you stick around, it'll be for the story, which is pleasantly grim - think of things like Ostium and Gone.
One I've enjoyed, and I'll be interested to see where it turns to next, as it gets to the end of this first series.
Tagged: Audio fiction Drama Single narrator Fictional show Thriller Serial