Leo froze. How did it know his name? He tried to Alt-F4, but the screen stayed locked.

The game started, but there were no "Peashooters." Every time Leo took damage, his real-time PC clock skipped forward an hour. The fan on his laptop began to scream, a high-pitched whine that sounded like a tea kettle about to explode.

Suddenly, the Isle began to collapse. The ground beneath Cuphead turned into a digital void of static and broken code. A boss appeared, but it wasn't the Root Pack or Goopy Le Grande. It was a distorted, towering version of the "Highly Compressed" file icon, its edges sharp as razors.

Leo pressed the arrow keys. Cuphead didn't move. Instead, a dialogue box popped up in a font that looked like jagged ink: "You wanted it small, didn't you, Leo?"

Cuphead was there, standing on the map of Inkwell Isle, but he wasn’t idling with his usual bounce. He was looking directly at the screen. His gloved hands weren't pulsing; they were shaking.

The laptop died. When Leo looked at his own hands in the reflection of the dark screen, they weren't skin and bone anymore. They were white, circular, and shaking—sketched in rough, charcoal lines.