The last time I rotted in bed for a weekend, I told everyone I had a cold, which was a lie; what I actually had was a phone, a charger long enough to reach the mattress, and a deep refusal to rejoin the world. The internet calls this bedrotting, and Ixa Sigler has wrangled it into a survival horror game.
He builds it solo under the name IXAVON while studying computer science at Duke. You play eighteen-year-old Sadie Bryggs, alone in a moldering apartment, hunting for a best friend named Sarah who has vanished and left only a contact in your messaging app reading “sarah (MOVED).”
Across ten worsening nights, you barricade doors, rig traps, scrounge cash speedrunning dodgy games, watch your sanity leech away, and try to stop your long-distance e-girlfriend Zoey from dumping you. Honestly, at this point, the demons feel like the least scary part of this game.
Ixa and I met on Reddit, where I sent him a pile of questions. When I asked why Sadie and Zoey’s romance is so central and so queer, he pointed at himself. As a queer man, he said, he tries to “bolster underheard voices.”
“I think horror is often at its strongest when the relationships at its center feel genuine,” he told me. It “isn’t there as a gimmick or a label,” he added, “but serves really as the emotional anchor of the entire game.”
Plus, Sadie is not a new character. She first appeared in his previous game, Until Oblivion, a 2024 game at a show-offy 97 percent positive on Steam, where he had already written her as queer.
The apartment, and I mean this fondly, is profoundly unwell. Its walls seep chromatic aberration, every edge fringed red and cyan, the whole place nursing a hangover it won’t discuss. The kitchen throbs a nuclear teal, the fridge gaping open over green tile while a coffee maker waits on a morning that may not come. After dark, the rooms marinate in arterial red. Raise your phone and one of the apps glaring back is named “ADHD trap,” a dial and two little hearts pulsing under the label.
You spend the game toggling between that phone and a computer, mining unhinged social feeds for clues and cash. In one chat, Zoey’s bio reads “U THOUGHT U THE SH** U NOT EVEN THE FART!!!! married to sadie.” Elsewhere, she opens with “is it ok if i vent rq?” then spirals about a fight with her grandmother over a show called jikan no muda, Japanese for “waste of time,” because of course it is.
Anyone who grew up online has sent a message that shape, usually at 1 AM, usually to someone they weren’t technically dating. The comedy, Ixa told me, comes from “fandom culture and therapy-speak infested relationships, fluency in predatory websites, and of course a deep cynicism around everyday life,” which doubles as a forensic readout of every group chat I belong to.
Making all this run at once nearly finished him. “The core loop of multitasking a monster in your apartment and your relationship has been the single hardest game design problem I’ve ever tackled,” he said.
“The hardest part of being a solo dev is just spending so much time in your own head,” he confessed. I found that devastatingly relatable, having once rewritten one text eleven times before declining to send it. The reward is a task system that opens innocently before the jobs “quickly devolve into pure madness,” sliding into “weird reality-bending puzzles” he loves watching testers flail. There is also a “hide the body” task, which he is “not sure people are ready for.”
Zoey is the heart of the thing. She started as a bit, a composite of Discord archetypes and codependent fandom energy, and then her maker went and fell for her. Against the armored irony of everyone his age, “Zoey is the opposite of that, completely sincere and slightly cringy in everything she does,” he told me. “Ironically, I think her character represents a path away from the rot and towards being an actual human.”
A girl too earnest for embarrassment turns out to be the least haunted thing in a building trying to kill her, and I did not expect a bedrotting horror game to leave me envying the emotional maturity of a teenage e-girlfriend, but here we are.
The scaffolding comes from Welcome to the Game, a clammy deep-web simulator with something at the door, but the tenderness is imported. Ixa read This Is How You Lose the Time War mid-development, “a great lesbian epistolary romance,” and let it coax the Sadie and Zoey correspondence somewhere tender.
The scares are inherited: “The apartment is modeled after my childhood home,” he said, “and many of the enemies are directly based on my biggest fears as a kid,” a sentence that makes you want to shut the laptop and phone your mother. The game comes straight from his life, he says, “this is my life, these are our lives,” and he warns its back half curdles into something he expects will “resonate with many people living in 2026, not just Gen Z.”
Bedrotting Simulator has no release date yet, which leaves you time to do the brave thing, peel yourself off the mattress, and wishlist it on Steam. Then, with my blessing, climb right back in.
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