One Hour One Life Forums

This game just delivered a genuine self traumatizing experience, this is a throwaway account but I've been on the forum for some time, my story starts with a life on server 3.

I was born into a village of great means, plenty of bushes, rows and rows of carrots, reams of firewood and a full set of tools from the forge, sans knife. I noticed, however, this included a file. From previous lives as a guard I knew the file was the major hoop to leap through to get to the knife, what with all the steps it takes to grease it with that goose, yet here it was in plain view by the forge! I thought to myself, one life, I will spend one life as a serial killer, just to remind them why they need to be on guard. It was terribly easy to make the knife, with the file there it was a simple matter of stepping in on the smiths work and pounding out a blade blank. I did it in plain view, I left the blade while making the shaft, the smith even WTF'd at me when I interrupted his flow to do it, and yet NO ONE thought to say anything or make people aware that a knife was being made. THEY WERE BEGGING TO BE STABBED!!! so, as a responsible community member I limited myself to stabbing about 4 of them... maybe a couple more. it wasn't long before I was stopped, I scattered the killings out and let a couple get away so the town scrambled a decent defense, I was justly dispatched and moved on to life as an Eve.

Then things escalated...

In my next life I was talking to my baby to pass the time while looking for a place to live, I told her I was a killer in my last life and while interesting and maybe exciting it wasn't the sort of thing I would do often as it would get repetitive and tiresome, I found a place to settle before getting into the moral discourse of WHY I was a killer, though I doubt it would have made a difference at that point. I had a son next and the three of us set about making a settlement, then one year, out of the blue our tools went missing. I had spent several years looking for milkweed in another green patch to the west, so had my son and we had barely managed to get a hatchet and fire bow drill together to start the farm with a wet clay bowl and kiln I had easily gotten ready from the nearby marsh, my daughter claimed she had two ropes go missing as well and cast suspicion on my son, not wanting to deal with it I returned to the green to find enough milkweed to remake the crucial tools, or at least a snare to make a waterskin from rabbits (even if it was a further journey than I preferred without the farm set up to do so).
I came back to my daughter talking to a newborn baby about how I was a dirty griefer who had killed her last life so she was hiding my tools and other items to sabotage my settlement, my son was confused when i tried to explain the situation and I starved soon after.
I was reborn in the village I had killed in and starved as people crowded around a child telling of how I was trying to start a settlement and how I thought I was a hero(I had set my eve name as Hero because it sounded fun), and how disgusted everyone was I would dare to think so highly of myelf.
I was reborn in my settlement to the grand daughter I had seen my daughter talking to and my son had gotten a farm going, my son told me that the tools and items were still being hidden, and soon after that my mother abandoned the colony to die in the wilderness, having been discovered.
My last moments were spent with my son as he starved in front of me.
I was enraged, livid, I had stabbed a few of them and in retribution I had my attempt at a clan wiped out!

I spent the next several lives making them pay, over and over I killed and killed and killed.
At first it was for my son, but after a couple lives the motive faded and all I felt was the hate, this desire to kill and kill and kill with barely a will attached to it other than the thought that THEY HAD CROSSED THE FIRST LINE AND I WOULD CROSS THE LAST!

The funny thing was I heard talk about other killers, that they had supposedly crafted several knives that showed up in the town square, but I saw townspeople kill each other for my crimes (one of the drawbacks of such generic character models, if someone didn't catch your name it was easy to think someone else was the killer, especially once everyone was carrying knives) so I am unconvinced there was ever anything more than paranoia that created those knives  and conjured phantom killers were neighbors stood.

what finally snapped me from my violence was when i came to this village, which I had thought almost unassailable over the long term, and saw only two elders alive. I had managed to carve away until I was born as the last girl in the village, the elders had devolved into discussion about how IRL the human race is garbage too and we are all just doom, that was their ultimate takeaway from this beautiful game after I was done

The elder wise lady Kloni began to quote Charlie Chaplins speech from the Little dictator

I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible - Jew, Gentile - black
man - white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness - not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there's room for everyone and the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls - has barricaded the world with hate - has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

I was crushed, never have I felt so much like I had become something i hate, I could clothe it in revenge or try to justify it by how all civs fall eventually or that it was a game and I was just fucking around but I had genuinely left these people broken.

I apologized, I wept, I sat over their bones for so long wondering what I could even do to try and make up for what had been done, the generations of genocide against a people who by and large were completely unaware and uninvolved in what had been done to me and my son and who may not have even been wrong in doing it to begin with given what I had done to them.

In the end I hid most of the weapons and files, birthed as many babies as I could, I tried to explain to the lone surviving cousin of mine and to elder Kloni when she was reborn, but what can you even say when you can't even type out a full tweet? How do you convey so much human misery and hatred?

In the end I begged the reborn elder Kloni to end my life, it felt like the only way things should end, she asked if I had any last words,
I said "Don't let me be the reason you give up on humans"
Kloni paused and replied, "I gave up on humans long ago..."
In the end Kloni didn't even end my life, he simply stared me down with that bow in his hands as I sat there too ashamed to beg him further, I fell to the dirt as he turned to tending the carrot farm and there my hatred finally died.