First Night
I don’t like waking up like this.
I don’t remember my dream, but one thing is certain.
I died.
Corrin wakes up knowing one thing for certain: he died. When the day resets, the pain doesn’t fade, nature continues to swallow the city, and something unseen follows him from one death to the next. As each loop tightens, Corrin slowly suffocates under the rain, concrete, abandoned rail lines, and forest that seeks to reclaim the city.
Yet, when night finally comes, his watcher reveals itself. It believes him. It loves him. And as the world bends around their intimacy, Corrin must choose between protecting the last person he cares about, or surrendering to the being that has waited for him all along.
First Night placed third in Peliplat’s Editor’s Pick Award and ninth in the Community Award for the November 2025 challenge.
Editor’s Comment: ““First Night" is Peliplat noir excellence: strange, emotional, and relentlessly character-driven. Ryan takes a busted post-quake city, a time-loop death trap, and a maybe-not-so-imaginary companion and turns it into a haunting spiral about guilt, survival, and how far love will bend before it breaks. It’s ambitious storytelling that isn’t afraid to get weird—and that’s exactly the direction we want Peliplat stories to go.”
