The prose version of a NEVER Stop Smiling solo playthrough.

[a handwritten journal found tucked into a desk drawer in a little used office]

Entry 1: When the Wall Screamed

Maybe writing this down will find you. Maybe this will help you adjust. I wish I’d had a journal to talk to me, to warn me, to tell me what to expect.

I thought promotion would feel different. But it doesn’t.

I imagined it as a kind of arrival. Deacons with stiff, perfect smiles and that gleam in their eye, like they understood the world, or at least their little corner of it. I assumed I’d feel the same when my time came, like I’d finally earned something. Like I’d finally arrived.

Instead, I’m here. Sitting in this room, holding this journal, trying to write something meaningful. Something that matters.

But the words don’t fit. They’re too tight, like a jacket I didn’t sew. They don’t feel like mine. I used to write about machines: notes, diagrams, plans. Something functional. There was no expectation in that, no one watching over my shoulder. But this? This feels like a performance. Like I’m playing a role in a story I don’t fully understand.

I was a tinkerer once. That made sense to me. I’d sit in my workshop, surrounded by cogs and gears, tools worn smooth from decades of use, scraps of old machines no one remembered how to build anymore. The space smelled of oil and burnt dust, and the rhythm of turning gears filled the quiet like a heartbeat.

I made toys, too. My favorites were animals, rats with tiny clockwork hearts, birds whose wings would flutter until the gears wore down. Some could sing or dance. I liked to think they were alive in their own way, their movements precise and predictable. Real, but not too real.

Then I heard the Wall scream.

I still don’t know what it was. Maybe a crack in the stone. Maybe the shifting of something too big to see. Or maybe it was something older, waking up.

Whatever it was, it was alive.

The scream wasn’t just sound. It pressed into me, deep in my chest, like it was tearing me apart and putting me back together at the same time. I felt it behind my ribs, in my teeth, in my bones. It was like something had reached inside me and opened a door I didn’t know existed.

I tried to ignore it. Everyone did. They said it was a glitch. A quirk of the city’s ancient, groaning foundations.

But I couldn’t ignore it.

At night, I’d hear it again, faint, distant, but growing. It wasn’t just a noise. It was a question. It was pulling at me.

So, I went.

I wasn’t supposed to. I was just a tinkerer. But I found the place where the scream had broken through, where the Wall wasn’t solid anymore. It was a gap, but not a crack. Not damage.

It was an opening.

Inside, the Wall was alive. Not alive like an animal or a person, but alive like a machine with too many parts. The air buzzed with static and the taste of metal. I found them there, the Cheerleader and the Deacons, working inside the Wall’s guts.

It wasn’t like any machine I’d ever seen. The walls pulsed faintly, cables dripped like veins, and gears moved with a will of their own. The Deacons’ movements were frantic, their tools almost useless against the machinery’s stubborn, twitching resistance. They weren’t fixing anything. They were just… keeping it from falling apart.

I should’ve turned back.

But I didn’t.

I stepped forward, my hands trembling, and I started working. I pulled wires, reset switches, coaxed gears back into place. The machinery felt wrong. Angry. Like it didn’t want to be fixed.

But I couldn’t stop.

The Wall wasn’t just behind me anymore. It was all around me. Its scream wasn’t a sound anymore, it was a feeling. A rhythm. A presence. I wasn’t just repairing something. I was becoming something.

That’s when everything changed.

I wasn’t a tinkerer anymore. I wasn’t someone who made little animals dance. I had stepped into something bigger than myself. I know what happens to “volunteers” like me. I’m not ready for this.

But now, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk away.

Entry 2: The Smile That Didn’t Reach Her Eyes

So here I am. A Deacon now.

I thought it would feel like an elevation, like I’d crossed some threshold and found my place among the bright, smiling souls who understand everything, who get it. The city’s rhythm, its pulse, the way everything fits into its perfect little gears. But instead of that sharp sense of belonging, it feels more like stumbling into a room full of mirrors, each reflecting a version of me that doesn’t belong.

The uniform’s too stiff, too clean… too much. It’s like the city’s tried to dress me in its expectations, and it’s too tight. Every fold of the fabric feels foreign, a reminder that I didn’t come here willingly. I wasn’t prepared for this. I was just a tinkerer. I worked with machines, and the world made sense then. But this? The city isn’t a machine. It’s a puzzle with shifting pieces and rules that change when you’re not looking.

When I was a tinkerer, I understood things. A cog was a cog, a spring was a spring. Machines didn’t judge. They didn’t watch me. But now, everything is eyes. Everywhere I turn, I feel eyes on me, like the walls themselves are waiting for me to falter.

I met my new team today: Isaiah and Reine. They’ve been Deacons for longer than I have, though I can’t tell by how much. They’re a bit older, but that’s not it. It’s the way they move, the way they’ve learned to navigate the maze of duties with a kind of practiced detachment. They don’t seem to feel the weight of the city the way I do.

Isaiah’s different. He looks at me like he’s trying to figure out if I’ll break in half if he pushes me too hard. There’s no warmth in his eyes, just calculation. He’s already sizing me up, looking for weaknesses, testing if I belong here.

And Reine? Reine doesn’t even bother looking at me. She doesn’t need to. She knows everything already. When she looks at me, it’s like I’m invisible… or worse, like I’ve already failed. Her eyes don’t meet mine. They glide over me, and I feel smaller with each glance. It’s like she knows things about me that I don’t even know about myself. The air around her is thick with it.

The hardest part of all this? The fear that lingers in my stomach, like an anchor I can’t shake. I keep thinking of my workshop, of the machines I could fix. They didn’t demand anything from me. They didn’t have rules for me to follow. But here? Here, it’s all rules. It’s all roles.

Today, they gave me my first real task: Silver Throat. I’d heard the name before, but it felt like a rumor, something whispered behind closed doors. It’s the part of the city that nobody talks about, where the smiles have all gone sour, where the people are too strange to fit into the city’s neat little corners. Some say they forgot how to smile. Some say they weren’t needed anymore, like the city just cut them off. I don’t know if I believe that, but I’ve heard the whispers.

We’re going in through the tunnels beneath the city. Beneath the skin of it all. The old city that nobody remembers anymore. I’ve heard stories about what lies down there, about the things that wait, shift, when you’re not looking. I’m scared. I’m so damn scared. But fear doesn’t matter. I’m a Deacon now. It’s my duty to smile. To fix things. To make the world right.

But then there’s her.

The Cheerleader. Andra, they call her. But I don’t think her real name matters. She’s a thing unto herself now. A symbol. She has that same smile that never fades, never wavers, even when it feels wrong. It’s like she’s too happy. Like someone gave her a happiness pill that never wore off, and now she’s stuck in that permanent state of glee.

She gave us the pep talk before we left.

“You’ll fix them,” she said, her voice too sweet, too syrupy, like a song stuck on repeat. “You’ll fix them, just like we fix everything. You bring joy, and the world will be right.”

Her smile stretched unnaturally wide, but her eyes? Her eyes didn’t change. They were hollow, almost too focused on us. Like she was measuring us for something, sizing us up like livestock at market. It made my skin crawl.

I’d heard the rumors about her, of course. Everyone has. People say she once made an entire gathering of citizens party for days straight, against their will. They couldn’t stop laughing, couldn’t stop dancing, even though their bodies screamed for rest. They say she has a way of bending people, forcing them to smile until they lose themselves. One story I heard was about a festival where she danced without music. Her body moved in time with something other, something that wasn’t the city’s rhythm. Something… older. Something that made the crowd follow her steps as if they had no choice.

I don’t know if I believe all of it. But when I looked into her eyes today, I understood something. I understood that she’s not normal. She doesn’t work the way we do. She isn’t bound by the same rules. And I think that scares me more than anything.

But I’m here now. I’ve been handed my part in this play. I’m supposed to bring joy, to make the broken things right. I’m supposed to fix them.

But what if fixing them means losing myself?

Tomorrow, we enter Silver Throat. I’m not ready. But I’ll smile. I have to. It’s all I have left.

Even when I don’t know what I’m fixing.

Even when the city’s walls are closing in.

Entry 3: The Hollow Carnival of Silver Throat

Silver Throat wasn’t what I expected. But then, expectations didn’t seem to hold weight there. It defied the stability and laws of The Happy Place.

We entered through the forgotten tunnels beneath the city. These were not the clean, polished veins of The Happy Place’s inner workings, no. These tunnels felt alive, as though they breathed and throbbed with the weight of centuries, each pulse a slow, patient thrum that seeped into my bones, making my skin itch and my pulse race. The walls weren’t simply covered in the dust of abandonment; they were cloaked in something that had festered and aged, an oily sheen that shifted and shimmered like the ripples on a pond just before you can’t see your reflection anymore. The air was thick with something else, too: the scent of forgotten things, and the ever-present, nauseating taste of metal.

Every step we took felt wrong. The echoes of our footfalls bent back on themselves like the tunnels were mocking us, warping the sound until it was no longer clear whether the noise belonged to us or to something else, something lurking just behind us. But it was the pulse beneath it all that unsettled me most: a deep, rhythmic thrum that seemed to match my heartbeat but also felt… off. As if the city itself was breathing in sync with us, pushing and pulling at something inside me. It was like we were walking through a machine, a machine that wasn’t built to understand us, and one that we weren’t built to understand either.

Emerging into Silver Throat felt like breaking through the surface of a dream, or a nightmare. The sunlight barely touched the edges of this place, and the grayness seemed to seep into everything, as if color itself had forgotten how to exist here.

The first thing I heard was laughter. No one was laughing, not in the way people laugh in happy memories or bitter jokes. This was something else, a high-pitched, manic sound that seemed to come from the air itself. It bounced off the crumbling, half-formed buildings like a phantom, growing louder, thicker, until it felt like the city was laughing at us. At me. There were people out there, somewhere, but I couldn’t see them. Their presence was in the laughter, in the air, in the tremors that shivered down my spine.

And then, I saw their faces.

The people of Silver Throat didn’t just smile. They grinned. But it was more than that, it was a contortion. A grotesque twisting of the flesh, a trap set too perfectly to be real. Their faces were masks, but not of joy. These were the faces of people who had forgotten how to stop, who had learned to smile until their muscles burned, until their eyes ached with the strain of holding it in place. It wasn’t a smile that welcomed you. It was a smile that demanded something. A smile that wanted you to join in. To break.

As we passed them, I could feel it. Their smiles tried to stretch into me, wrapping around my neck like a vice. My own face twitched, like a reflex. I couldn’t help but mirror it, even though I knew it was wrong. Reine saw it, too. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pressed thin, like she was trying to hold herself together, trying to fight the same thing that was sinking its claws into me. I wanted to scream, to tear away from the pressure building behind my eyes, but I couldn’t.

That’s when we met Gil and Lena.

They were standing in front of their home, a leaning structure that looked like it had been forgotten by time. Their smiles were different from the others in Silver Throat, more controlled, more deliberate. They weren’t like the wild, untamed grins that spread across every face we passed. These were practiced, sculpted. As if they had spent years perfecting the mask they wore, and now it was nothing more than part of their skin.

But it wasn’t the smiles that made my stomach twist. It was the eyes. Gil’s were hollow, sunken, like a man who had long since abandoned any hope of finding anything beyond the surface. Lena’s were worse. They darted nervously, constantly shifting, like they were looking for something, someone. She wasn’t looking at us. She was looking for a way out.

But there was something else in their eyes, something deeper than fear. It was the look of two people who had done something. Something terrible. And it was gnawing at them, hiding in the corners of their smiles, lurking beneath the surface of their syrupy words.

“Stay happy,” Gil said as he handed me a cup of tea, his voice slick with false warmth. “That’s the only thing that matters. Nothing else matters, just… stay happy.”

His words wrapped around me, but they didn’t comfort me. They ensnared me. It felt like a command, like an order, but not one that could be refused. It was a law I couldn’t see, but I could feel it, the weight of his expectation sinking into my chest.

Lena’s voice cut through my thoughts, trembling under the weight of her own smile. “It’ll all be fine as long as you’re happy. Happiness is the answer, you know? It’s the only thing that can save us.”

The house was a strange thing, too. Sweet and sour in equal measure, it smelled of rot, subtle, hidden, but there. The kind of rot that isn’t loud, isn’t stinking, but waits. The kind that creeps in until you can’t remember what it was like before it took hold.

When they showed us to the door, their smiles never faltered, but their urgency was clear. Their happiness was too much for me, and I couldn’t breathe in it anymore.

The laughter followed us out, warping, stretching into something cruel. Each echo felt like a threat, like the city was trying to pull us deeper into its belly. And Gil’s words kept echoing in my mind: Stay happy. But what if we were the ones who needed to stay happy? What if we were the ones who needed to be fixed?

Silver Throat doesn’t just want to be forgotten. It doesn’t just hide its secrets. It wraps them in its smile, in its laughter, in the promise of joy that hides decay beneath the skin.

And the deeper we go, the less I believe we can fix anything. The less I want to.

Entry 4: The Happy Death

I should have known things would escalate.

After Gil and Lena’s brittle cheer, we ventured deeper into Silver Throat, a labyrinth that seemed to change as we moved. At first, it was the little things: laughter too loud, smiles too wide. An old woman darted past us, dragging a strange toy on a string. Not a doll or stuffed animal, oh no, this thing had feathers, broken wings, and glass eyes that stared at nothing. She cackled as if she’d won a prize, her glee as hollow as the glassy orbs of her plaything. Someone nearby clapped, and another burst into peals of laughter that went on too long, splintering into gasps.

The streets narrowed as we walked, the buildings leaning inward, their warped walls blotting out the sky. The air thickened with a cloying mix of sweetness and decay. It clung to my tongue, an invasive taste I couldn’t swallow away.

And then there were the crowds. They gathered in squares and alleys, clapping and cheering like children at a carnival. But it wasn’t celebration; it was something darker, jagged. Their laughter came sharp and frantic, as if it were a shield against something unbearable.

In one square, a man stood on a makeshift stage, his face painted with a grotesque grin that mimicked joy. He held a long, thin blade that shimmered like it was alive. Kneeling before him was another man, shoulders trembling, head bowed low.

The blade came down, and the crowd erupted.

I turned away too late, the image seared into my mind: the bright spray against gray stone, the way the man crumpled like discarded paper, and the crowd’s roars of approval. It wasn’t just applause. They laughed too deeply, the sound warping, splintering, until it became a primal scream, clawing at the very air.

“Look,” Reine whispered, her voice trembling. “They’re still smiling.”

Even the victim’s face was locked in a rictus grin, as though his last moments had been a cruel joke.

We pressed on, trying to blend into the madness. The further we went, the worse it became. The city seemed to warp around us, a shifting maze that played tricks with the senses, like a fevered dream that wouldn’t end.

In one alley, two women stood over a man tied to a chair. They were painting his face, their brushes dipping into jars of garish colors. His eyes darted wildly, pleading. When they stepped back, their work revealed a caricature of joy, smeared and grotesque.

“He’s beautiful!” one of them cried, clapping her hands.

The man said nothing. He couldn’t. His lips were sewn shut, the threads pulling his smile taut.

I tried to look away, but the walls around us seemed to press in, forcing my gaze back to the scene. I could feel the pressure building inside me, inside all of us. The laughter, the smiles, the constant, overwhelming force pushing us toward something dark and inevitable.

We quickened our pace, but the city twisted around us. The streets shifted, narrowing and bending, as though they wanted to trap us. Laughter chased us like a living thing, bouncing off the walls and crawling into my ears, trying to weave itself into my thoughts.

Then the people came, spilling from doorways and shadows, their arms outstretched, their faces alight with that same sickly glee. They surrounded us, closing in, their smiles stretching grotesquely wide, mouths peeling back like the skin of a fruit.

“Come join us!” one cried. “Don’t you want to be happy?”

Another reached for me, her fingers cold as they gripped my arm. Her nails dug into my skin, her voice syrupy and sweet. “We’ll show you. We’ll show you the happiness inside you.”

I yanked away, but the movement only drew more attention. They surged toward us, their voices a cacophony of laughter and pleas.

“Don’t run!” “You’ll love it here!” “We’ll make you happy!”

I fought to breathe, but the air felt thick, heavy, like it was closing in on me. My chest tightened, my vision blurred as their smiles stretched further, until it felt like the entire city was one giant, gaping maw, ready to swallow us whole.

Isaiah shoved someone aside, and we broke into a run. The mob followed, their footsteps a frantic drumbeat, their laughter sharp as knives. The pressure was unbearable. It was all-consuming, the weight of their smiles pushing down, a constant reminder that we weren’t meant to escape. Not here. Not now.

One of them grabbed Reine’s coat, and she spun out of it, her breath hitching as she stumbled forward.

“Keep going!” she shouted, her voice cutting through the chaos, raw with panic.

We turned a corner and found it, a narrow passageway hidden in shadow. Without hesitation, we ducked inside, the walls pressing close, the laughter fading into the distance. But not for long.

A shout echoed, faint but growing louder. The sound split, twisting like it was multiplying. And then… then I saw them.

The crowd had begun to turn on each other. It wasn’t just that they were chasing us anymore. No, now they were chasing their own. One woman held a knife to her neighbor’s throat, her smile now twitching, almost desperate. “Show me your happiness,” she hissed, her voice thin and frenzied. “Let me see it inside you!”

Another man held a maniacal grin, clutching a broken shard of glass, screaming at the people around him to show him what was inside, to prove they were truly happy. The air was thick with the scent of blood and desperation, the smiles no longer just masks of joy, but marks of something deeper, darker. They weren’t smiling because they were happy, they were smiling because they had to. Because if they didn’t, they would be lost.

In the madness, I realized what this was: a ritual. A twisted, perverse ceremony of happiness, one that demanded submission, one that required you to give everything. They weren’t after our joy, they were after our soul. If they couldn’t find happiness inside you, they’d carve it out, shred it from your flesh until you were nothing but a hollow smile.

We didn’t stop running. We couldn’t.

The sounds of chaos echoed in the distance, but we didn’t dare look back. The laughter, the shrieks, the howls, they were all part of the same symphony, a song of madness that reverberated through Silver Throat, and I knew, deep in my gut, that it would never stop. The laughter would never stop.

Not until they had taken everything from us.

We didn’t stop until silence enveloped us, thick and suffocating. My breath came in shallow gasps, my heart a thunderous drum in my chest. We were safe, for now. But the grins would always be out there. Always waiting.

Reine leaned against the wall, her face streaked with sweat. Her smile wavered, but she held it, clinging to the safety it promised. “What the hell was that?”

Isaiah didn’t answer. His fists were clenched, his smile trembling as though it might crack.

I didn’t have an answer, either.

But one thing was clear: Silver Throat isn’t just sick. It’s dying. And whatever is killing it… is smiling.

Keep reading: Part 2 and Part 3.