", and the eponymous 2020 podcast based on it.It revolves around Alice Sharma (played by Tessa Thompson in the podcast), a journalist who comes across the mysterious Left-Right Game, a game with one very simple rule: take a car and drive along a road, at the first turn take a left, then at the next turn you turn right, and so on. She joins a group of drivers who want to try out the game, and their journey takes them to places that you won't find on any map...
This series provides examples of:
- An Arm and a Leg: Alice loses her right arm due to an injury by a monstrous creature.
- Break the Haughty: Denise "Bluejay" Carver, as described below. She comes off as a blow-hard Jerkass who wants to dismiss all of Rob's ghost stories as being fake. Even once things get worse and worse, she refuses to believe it's all real, outright causing the death of one of the convoy as a result! However it's made clear by observations by Alice that Bluejay is trying hard to rationalize everything because she can't accept how Rob was right. By the end of it, it leads to her downfall.
- Despair Event Horizon: This is what sadly happens to Clyde after Bonnie drives the car to Wintery Bay and disappears. Despite Alice's attempts, Clyde decides to go off to the Wintery Bay road to be with her, even if it means never coming home.
- Eve hits this when Lilith dies on the road and Apollo's sacrifice lead to his own death, causing her to be catatonic for a while, but decides to keep pushing forward to survive.
- Eldritch Location: The world once you begin to play the Left-Right Game, filled with very odd towns and locations. All of them with set of rules, and if you break them, well... it does not end well for you.
- Gainax Ending: Alice is the sole survivor of the game, but realizes there's no end to it. However, the ending comes off as sort of open ended as it implies that she will become the entity of the game and will set the wheels for the Stable Time Loop that lead to her learning about the game in the first place.
- Heroic Sacrifice: After Alice and Rob end up in a strange city inhabited by zombie-like people, Rob stays behind to distract them so that Alice can make it to the end of the road.
- More Hateable Minor Villain: The closest things the story has to a Big Bad are the road itself and the mysterious entity that led the narrator to the road, heavily implied to be her distant future self. However, both are so far beyond human comprehension that it's hard to truly hate them. This is not the case for Denise "Bluejay" Carver, a chain-smoking, unpleasant, unflinching skeptic who is widely hated among paranormal enthusiasts as a huge killjoy and who joined the convoy purely to expose the titular game as a hoax. She refuses to take the dangers of the road seriously (except for when they could potentially put her own life at risk), and when her actions end up getting one of the party killed, she goes so far as to mock the others for mourning him, accusing him of being a paid actor who isn't really dead, and everyone else of being idiots for falling for it. As the story goes on and the party continues to dwindle, despite the blatant supernatural phenomena happening right before her eyes, she only grows more entrenched in her belief that it's all fake, unable to accept the possibility that she's wrong and rationalising away all evidence that she is as everyone being in on the hoax. When she's attacked by a monster that cuts her and draws blood, she finally snaps, since in her mind the rest of the party is now willing to hurt or even kill her to make sure their "hoax" is never exposed. Right after she's saved from the monster, she steals her saviour's gun and shoots him with it (non-fatally), then holds the remaining two survivors (including the narrator) at gunpoint, attempting to take the last working car for herself and leave everyone else for dead. This culminates in a showdown betwen her and the narrator in which she shoots and kills the other remaining survivor before being killed by the narrator. During the showdown, she is legitimately confused to the point of anger as to why the narrator still won't admit that it's all fake even with a gun pointed at her, and her dying words are even, "I was right."
- My Greatest Failure: During the final stretch of the road, Rob reveals his son died after the two got into a road altercation since his son wanted to close the gate between the real world and that of the Left-Right Game. Rob admits he didn't want his son to destroy the connection, even if he knew his son blamed the Road (and by an extent, Rob) for what became of his wife and unborn child, but still feels remorse for what happened.
- The Needless: The road has this effect on the members of the convoy, who after a day find that they don't need to eat as much, and eventually don't need to eat at all. Even their cars become this, able to drive indefinitely without burning any fuel.
- Nothing Is Scarier: Much of the locations and events within the game are left off to the imagination of our characters (and our audience), with only tidbits explained by Rob:
- It's never explained what is happening in Jubilation, nor is it explained what became of Ace after he was captured.
- What was even at Wintery Bay that obsessed Bonnie so much that she'd take hers and Clyde's car to the path?
- How did Rob's son became that... thing within the woods?
- Race Lift: Alice was originally of Indian descent in the original creepypasta, with her full name being Alice Sharma. She is Afro-Caribbean in the podcast.
- Road Trip Plot: The entire story revolves around the protagonists' road trip as they follow the rules of the Left-Right Game.
- Stable Time Loop:
- As a young man, Rob encountered a strange creature that was humanoid in shape, but made of TV static and missing an arm. He runs away scared of it, but the encounter fuels his obsession with the paranormal, which in turn leads to him eventually discovering the Left/Right Game and organizing the road trip that Alice joins. During said trip, many years after Rob's initial encounter, Alice ends up losing an arm, and soon after encounters a TV static creature of her own, except this one has both of its arms, and runs away scared of her. It doesn't take her long to put two and two together.
- While talking with Alice, the Entity casually opens two rifts in time to previous moments in her journey. At those two moments in prior entries, Alice heard snippets of the Entity speaking, which encouraged her to keep going even when her life was in danger, eventually coming to that moment where she could have the full conversation.
- Stepford Suburbia: Jubilation, a Sickeningly Sweet American town that looks like it came right out of the 1950s, full of beautiful houses and happy citizens... Who will stop at nothing to prevent the main characters from leaving.
- You Can't Go Home Again: By the end of the story, Alice accepts she will never be able to return back home and is stuck on the road, only being able to send her message to the world.