A downloadable game

Halloween night, 1987. You slip into the abandoned Starlite Skate & Arcade. The doors chain themselves shut, the neon hums to life, and a voice speaks from the giant scoreboard: THE OPERATOR. Three kids who never went home are trapped inside his machines.

Insert a soul into a cabinet, and the game doesn't start on the screen. It bursts out of the glass and into the room.

GRAVE INVADERS: a marching swarm of bats, skulls and pumpkin ghosts under the ceiling. Hide behind the tombstones.

CANDY CRYPT: neon maze walls rise out of the rink floor while four sheet ghouls hunt you.

BONEPEDE: a centipede of glowing skulls winds across the floor toward you.

THE OPERATOR: free all three kids, and the arcade's ghost comes out of the scoreboard for the final round.

A short first-person arcade shooter with a retro light gun (about 15 minutes), made for Halloween.

HOW TO PLAY

Unzip anywhere and run InsertSoul.exe. No installation.

The zip holds two files: InsertSoul.exe, the engine that starts the game, and InsertSoul.pck, the game itself (levels, pictures, music). The .pck is data, not a program, and can't run on its own. Keep both in the same folder.

WASD move, mouse look, left click shoot, Shift run, Space jump, E insert a soul, Esc pause. Gamepad works too.

"WINDOWS PROTECTED YOUR PC"?

That blue window is Windows SmartScreen saying it doesn't know the publisher yet. It shows up for new games from small developers who don't pay for a code-signing certificate, and it is not a virus warning. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". Windows Defender finds no threats in either file. On VirusTotal (about 70 antivirus engines), 68 of 69 mark the exe clean (the one flag is an automatic low-confidence guess that new unsigned games often get): https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/aa6f2316ba11a611273819a57ba8f3c64d6cfd5991f3...

The game data file (InsertSoul.pck): all 61 engines on VirusTotal mark it clean: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/cf201e6de9f757738cae141b1dc2d69025ae4c0a9b74...

The game is built with Godot, a free and open-source engine.

REQUIREMENTS

64-bit Windows 10 or 11, a graphics card with Vulkan or DirectX 12 (roughly 2016 or newer) and up-to-date drivers. If it runs slowly, set Quality to MEDIUM or LOW in Settings.

HOW IT WAS MADE

AI agents (Claude Code) built it overnight in Godot 4.7, and then I spent a day polishing it from my own notes and paintovers. The whole story is on my YouTube channel:

Found a bug? Leave a comment. After 1,016 bot playthroughs, I want to know what the AI missed.

Free to play. Please don't re-upload the game or reuse its art, music or code without permission.

More information

Published	3 days ago
Status	Released
Author	hallucivids
Genre	Shooter
Tags	3D, acrade, First-Person, FPS, Godot, Halloween, Horror, Retro, Short, Singleplayer
AI Disclosure	AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Sounds, Text

Download

InsertSoul_v1.3.zip 265 MB

Install instructions

1. Download the zip and unzip it (right-click → Extract All). Don't run the game from inside the zip.

2. Open the new folder and double-click InsertSoul.exe. No installation needed. Keep InsertSoul.pck (the game's data) next to it.

3. Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" because the game isn't signed by a big publisher. Click "More info", then "Run anyway".

4. If you see "Smart App Control blocked an app" instead, your PC only runs programs with a paid signature and there's no way to allow it there. Sorry!

Needs 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 and a graphics card from about 2016 or newer. Slow? Settings → Quality → MEDIUM or LOW. Gamepad works too.

To remove the game, delete its folder (high scores are kept in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Insert Soul).