The Scourge () is a first-person puzzle horror video game with elements of adventure, inspired by Vietnamese urban legends from the 1990s. The game was co-developed by Vietnamese company Rare Reversee – also the game's publisher – and Beaztek Studio. Set in Ho Chi Minh City between the 1970s and 1990s, the game follows Nhật Huy, a young man who is inadvertently drawn into strange phenomena at Phong Xích Lan apartment building, which then opens up a journey to investigate the mysterious death of his entire family. However, the deeper he digs, the more horrifying truths he discovers behind his family's past and the entire apartment building.
Gameplay The Scourge is an intense first-person horror game Players take on the role of Lê Đặng Nhật Huy – a young man who returns to his old apartment building to investigate the mysteries surrounding the deaths of his parents and younger sister. During his investigation, he becomes increasingly involved in a series of terrifying supernatural phenomena occurring right where he lives.
Throughout the game, players control Nhật Huy as he moves through the dark corridors and cramped spaces of the building, collecting items, reading documents, and solving puzzles to unlock new areas and gradually uncover previously hidden secrets. Without weapons for self-defense, players must rely on their observation skills, quick reflexes, and logical thinking to survive. Simultaneously, the gameplay reveals pieces of Nhật Huy's family past, leading to horrifying truths behind
Synopsis Plot Chapter 1 The game's opening scene takes place on the morning of 26 January 2009, after the parents of Lê Đặng Nhật Huy passed away in a traffic accident the previous night. At that time, in the Phong Xích Lan apartment complex, Nhật Huy is holding a funeral for his parents, ignoring the gossip of his neighbors. During the funeral, he suddenly sees an illusion of Lê Đặng Nhật Huyên – his younger sister who had passed away previously. She appears covered in blood, holding her own funeral portrait to cover her face and repeatedly reaching out for help. After seeing the illusion, Nhật Huy finds himself in a surreal hallway leading to a Medium's table. According to the Medium, to find messages from the deceased, he must enter a state called a lucid dream, a place where he can be aware that he is dreaming and actively navigate his actions within it. After she finishes speaking, he appears in another hallway to receive insurance money after his parents' death, but the money he receives turns out to be stacks of hell money. Finally, he wakes up and finds himself sitting in front of a laptop. The screen displays a Zalo chat group named "Miss Phương's Fortune Telling Group" with 29 members, in which Miss Phương is the fortune teller he had met and the Medium he saw in his dream. Miss Phương instructs Nhật Huy and the other members that they need to practice every day; before dreaming, they must set their clocks, record what they dreamed about, and most importantly, they must absolutely not touch anyone in the dream, as that could lead to serious consequences, including breaking the boundary between the real world and the spiritual world. Among the messages sent, it can be seen that Nhật Huy has dropped out of school, taken out high-interest loans, and bought medicine. After checking the Zalo messages, Nhật Huy checks the clocks in the house and goes back to sleep.
Chapter 2 In the second dream, Nhật Huy returned to his family's old house from the past. Upon entering, he uncovered a piece of his family's history. Specifically, Nhật Huy's parents had been married since 1975 but remained childless for a long time. Consequently, Nhật Huy's mother, Mrs Loan, sought out a neighbor, a sorcerer named Nguyễn Lợi Danh, to perform a ritual to conceive a child. After the ritual was completed on 17 March 1990—which is also Nhật Huy's birthday—she became pregnant and gave birth to him. From then on, the family's fortunes rose: Mr. Nhật (his father) was promoted, and their finances flourished. Not long after, Mrs. Loan became pregnant again and gave birth to a younger sister, Nhật Huyên. The scene shifts to Nhật Huyên's birthday: while preparing for the party, a neighbor suddenly bangs on the door demanding debt repayment. Nhật Huy realizes that his father is entangled in an illegal business deal, causing his career to spiral downward from that point. Burdened by debt, the family is forced to sell most of their assets and rent out part of their house. Unable to endure the life of poverty, Mrs. Loan once again turns to their neighbor, Master Lợi Danh. Master Lợi Danh sends a letter claiming that the source of their misfortune is Nhật Huyên and that he will perform a ritual to dispel the bad luck for her in the near future.
Nhật Huy later finds several drawings by his sister, including one where Nhật Huyên is playing with an imaginary friend that looks like a giant octopus. Nhật Huy then collapses, waking up in front of the altar of his parents and sister, with the floor covered in torn papers. While cleaning up, Nhật Huy discovers an anonymous letter in the funeral donation box from "T.Ư." Once finished, the lights begin to flicker, and Nhật Huy sees a pitch-black portal cordoned off with red string; a hand reaches out accompanied by Nhật Huyên's voice. Desperate to find the truth, Nhật Huy breaks the taboo of touching someone within a dream. The hand immediately pulls Nhật Huy into the doorway, causing him to fall into a deeper layer of the dream.
Nhật Huy wakes up and finds himself lying in his room, but everything is very strange: the "Co Phuong Fortune Telling Group" now has chaotic chat bubbles, the group members have increased to 666, the "Ph" in Miss Phương's name is blurred, and all of Nhật Huy's family members are in the group. Additionally, there are messages from others stating that Nhật Huy's family is waiting for him and that taking medicine is useless. The funeral photos in the house have also changed, all featuring a gruesome smile. Nhật Huy then goes to adjust the clock; when he returns to sleep, he sees Nhật Huyên crawling out of a drawer, weeping as she moves toward him. The house is now filled with the words "I'm sorry, sister," even on his ID card. Nhật Huy steps outside as the scene shifts to the day of the ritual.
While witnessing the ritual, he discovers Master Lợi Danh molesting his mother in a private room on 2 September 1998. Three days later, the ritual begins. As Master Lợi Danh pours chicken blood over Nhật Huyên's head, Nhật Huy feels as if he is drowning in a sea of blood. When he wakes up, he enters a maze and must flee from Mr. Nhật, who is hunting him down.
While on the run, he discovered more truths about his younger sister: although she didn't do well in school, she had a talent for painting. However, Mr. Nhật had forbidden her from drawing and destroyed all her paints by flushing them down the toilet. Nhật Huyên was also forced to drop out after finishing 9th grade because the family couldn't afford to send both of them to high school. Furthermore, her mother forced her to chant sutras and strike the wooden fish to pray for her father and brother's career success. Yet, when Nhật Huy was little, seeing his mother brush his sister's hair and say those things, he didn't realize how much she was suffering.
Then, Nhật Huy discovered Nhật Huyên hovering over the graves; so he went to find her belongings and placed them in front of those graves. Afterward, a sudden supernatural phenomenon occurred. Nhật Huyên's soul transformed into a giant ghostly entity. Terrified, Nhật Huy was forced to flee. While running, he found a motorcycle and hurriedly drove away, witnessing the true cause of his parents' death—they had been "blinded by ghosts and led astray by demons."
Immediately after, Nhật Huy appeared in a room covered in talismans, facing a cabinet sealed with four nails. At this moment, a mysterious voice echoed from a jar containing a pickled human head on top of the cabinet. The person identified himself as Trần Đại Cường—a sorcerer who had been secretly watching him for a long time and had revealed secrets about the Phong Xích Lan apartment complex in general, and Nhật Huy's family in particular, through radios in his dreams. Master Đại Cường asked Nhật Huy to pull out the nails so he could give him a bag of exorcism powder labeled "Phương," warning him to stay calm when entering the Calamity Hell, because "Calamity Hell is the hell within the mind." When Nhat Huy opened the cabinet, he saw a massive, headless cockroach body inside, its legs twitching and holding a bag of exorcism powder.
After obtaining the powder, Nhật Huy entered the Calamity Hell.
Chapter 3 Upon entering the Calamity Hell, Nhật Huy finds himself in front of a ticket booth for the Water Gate at Đồng Sen Cultural Park. After handing over his ticket and signing in, a bamboo ladder drops from the ceiling, leading Nhật Huy to the first floor of the Water Gate; this floor consists of a warding Banyan tree and a red elevator leading to the rooftop. As he approaches the elevator, there is a face-washing area to exchange tickets, forcing Nhật Huy to wash his face before he can enter the elevator. Once Nhật Huy finishes washing his face, all the teeth in his mouth fall out, and Mother Puppet rises from the water. Nhật Huy uses Mother Puppet to reach the 2nd floor and enters the Kingdom of Sewing machines.
Entering the Kingdom of Sewing Machines, Nhật Huy discovers a spider-like monster crawling on all fours on the ceiling, forcing him to constantly hide inside large jars. After escaping the monster, he enters the Hell of Lies. In this hell, after solving a maze, he reaches a fairground shooting gallery and receives a letter from his grandfather—Mrs. Loan's father-in-law—inside a funeral donation box. In this letter, his grandfather tried to cover up the fact that Mr. Nhật was having an affair. After walking a long distance, Nhật Huy reaches the Kingdom of Illusions. Here, he realizes that the monster is actually his mother—whose eyes have been gouged out and tongue cut off—crawling and sprawling on the floor. He takes his mother's eyes and tongue and puts them into a pepper grinder to exchange for Mother Puppet after being punished, then enters the Garden of Truth.
Stepping into the Garden of Truth, Nhật Huy wakes up in his old room. At this time, his mother had bought him a new pair of shoes. He also finds evidence showing that to buy these shoes, his mother stole 13 batches of autumn-model black jackets from the company to sell outside, and forced his younger sister to sell her long hair. Nhật Huy then sees his sister—now with short hair—mopping the floor while instructing him how to mop, and then receives a star sticker. Through a letter from Master Đại Cường, we learn that these are fragments of memory, and Nhật Huy needs to destroy them immediately after collecting all 3 pieces.
Nhật Huy takes the scissor to cut through the hair barrier, finds his sister's grave, and solves a puzzle. But after finishing, he realizes this isn't his sister's grave, but the grave of someone named Phạm Phương. Ms. Phương grabs Nhật Huy's hand, mistaking him for Lợi Danh—her younger brother. Frustrated, Nhật Huy asks Ms. Phương for information about his sister, but Ms. Phương says that the person who brought Nhật Huy here wasn't her, but rather Calamity using her identity to lure him in. Ms. Phương then spits out some bone powder for Nhật Huy to disguise his scent as a living person.