Maya discovered Sunflower Gardens in the discount bin at GameStop, wedged between old sports titles nobody wanted. The cover art looked hand-drawn—a girl with crayon-yellow pigtails watering cartoon flowers. At twelve, Maya was tired of her brother’s shooters and battle royales. This looked perfect.

The game exceeded her expectations. Maya guided her character through meadows where sunflowers swayed in digital wind, their faces tracking the sun’s arc across a watercolor sky. She collected seeds, built tiny houses from acorns and leaves, and earned the trust of skittish woodland creatures by leaving out berries and fresh water.

She’d been playing for two weeks when she decided to look up achievement guides.

The reviews on GameHub stopped her cold.

“DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME,” read the top review, posted three months ago. “I can’t unsee what I saw. The ‘watering can’ isn’t filled with water. Those aren’t flowers. Oh god, they’re not flowers.”

Maya frowned, tabbing back to her game where her character was literally watering daisies with a little blue can. She scrolled further.

“Chapter 3 broke me. When you ‘harvest’ the sunflowers and hear that wet tearing sound… I threw up. The way they struggle as you pull them from the ground. Their faces. Christ, their little faces.”

But Maya had just finished Chapter 3 yesterday. The harvesting mini-game played a cheerful chime each time she collected seeds. The sunflowers giggled when she tickled their petals.

She found video reviews, but they were worse. A grown man, tears streaming down his face: “The rabbit scene. How do you make a kid’s game where you have to… to skin… I can’t even say it.”

Maya minimized the browser. On her screen, a white rabbit hopped over to her character and nuzzled against her leg. She’d named him Marshmallow.

Something cold settled in her stomach.

She opened her phone’s camera and started recording her screen, narrating: “Okay, so I’m in Sunflower Gardens, and this is my pet rabbit, Marshmallow. See how he follows me around? And these are my flower beds…”

She uploaded it to TikTok with #SunflowerGardens #CozygameCheck #GamingLife.

The first comment appeared within minutes: “This is sick. Reported.”

Then: “How is this allowed on TikTok??”

“The sounds… turn your volume down if you watch this. The wet sounds. The breathing.”

Maya rewatched her own video. Cheerful background music, her character petting a bunny. That’s all.

She started streaming on Discord to her three followers—kids from school. “Can you guys see my screen? Tell me what you see.”

Silence. Then Jake typed: “Maya what the fuck”

“Is this some dark web stuff?” from Emma.

Alex left the stream immediately.

“It’s just my garden game!” Maya said into her headset. “Look, I’m planting carrots!”

“Maya.” Jake’s voice came through now, shaky. “That’s… that’s not planting. What you’re doing with that shovel…”

She looked at her screen. Her character pushed seeds into dark soil, patting the earth gently.

“The breathing,” Emma whispered. “The heavy breathing. And the crying. Maya, someone’s crying in your game.”

Maya muted her mic and listened. Birds chirped. A pleasant breeze rustled through digital leaves. No crying. No breathing except her own.

She noticed Jake had started recording the stream.

That video would later spread across gaming forums, Instagram stories, even a Reddit thread titled “Girl plays horror game, thinks it’s about flowers.” Comments dissected each frame, discussing the “obvious signs of dissociation” and “trauma response” in Maya’s cheerful narration.

Her older brother found the thread two days later.

“Maya, what the hell is this?” He shoved his phone in her face, showing a Twitter thread with thousands of retweets. Someone had edited her stream footage with dramatic music and the caption “When reality breaks: Young gamer can’t see the horror she’s playing.”

“It’s my garden game,” she said weakly.

He grabbed her laptop, opened the game. His face went white. “Jesus Christ, Maya. Where did you even find this?”

“GameStop. It was in the kids’ section.”

“This isn’t… Maya, look at it. Really look at it.”

She stared at her screen. Her character stood in the same sunny meadow, same happy flowers bobbing in the breeze. “I am looking.”

Her brother took a photo with his phone and showed it to her. The image made her step back. Where she saw her smiling character, the photo showed something else—a figure hunched in a dark room, surrounded by… she couldn’t process what she was seeing. It didn’t match. It couldn’t match.

“We need to tell Mom and Dad,” he said.

The game was uninstalled that night. Her parents made her show them the reviews, the videos, the Reddit threads. They saw the same horror everyone else did. Everyone except Maya.

The child psychologist they consulted suggested it might be a severe dissociative episode. The neurologist ordered brain scans. The images came back normal.

“Maybe,” her mother said one night, when she thought Maya was asleep, “maybe it’s protecting her from something. Maybe she’s seeing what she needs to see.”

But protecting her from what? Maya had never experienced trauma. Her life had been normal, happy, safe.

She found one other person eventually, in a buried forum post from 2019. Username SunnyDay92: “Am I crazy? Everyone says Sunflower Gardens is horror but I see a garden game. Pretty flowers, cute animals. Anyone else?”

No one had replied.

Maya messaged them: “I see it too. The flowers. The sunshine.”

SunnyDay92 responded within hours: “Thank god. I thought I was alone. How old were you when you started playing?”

“Twelve.”

A long pause. Then: “Me too. My sister was eleven. She saw it different.”

“What do you mean ‘was’?”

SunnyDay92 went offline.

Maya never got the game back. But sometimes, late at night, she’d close her eyes and she could still see it—golden sunflowers under a perfect blue sky, butterflies dancing between the blooms, her character’s smile as bright as the sun.

She held onto that image, even as doubt crept in. Even as she wondered if everyone else was right. Even as she began to notice that flowers in real life didn’t look quite the way she remembered anymore.

Even as she realized she couldn’t quite recall what her character’s smile had looked like, only that it had been bright.

So very, very bright.

And getting brighter every time she remembered it, until it hurt to think about at all.