SYNOPSIS

The fairy tale
"8" is based on many versions of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. These versions can differ quite a lot, but in general they are about a king and queen desperate for a child. When they finally get a child, the daughter is given a number of talents by the fairies (beauty, grace, etc). One fairy wasn't invited to the baptism and was so angry that she cursed the princess to die in her teenage years of a prick in the finger. The last good fairy converted the death curse into a hundred years of sleep. During the preperations for her birthday feast, he princess pricks herself and falls asleep. The fairies make everyone in the palace fall asleep so that the princess would not feel alienated when she wakes up. And to protect it, around the palace they erect a large thorny forest.
Many men try to penetrate this forest but they all fail. At last one of them succeeds and meets the sleeping princess. Contemporary readers may think the story ends here with a kiss of happy life ever after. Not so in the older versions of the tale. In some versions, the prince rapes the princess without her waking up. He even comes back and does it again and starts some kind of strange liaison with the sleeping woman. The princess becomes pregnant and gives birth to two children, all in her sleep. In some version of the fairy tale, she is awakened by one of the infants sucking the thorn out of her finger, in search of a nipple. Meanwhile the prince is starting to feel responsible for her and the children and he wants to bring them to his home. Much to the dismay of his wife (or mother in some versions) who turns out to be an ogress who wants to eat the children and the princess. In one version (to be found in 1001 Nights), the prince actually turns down the princess after which she seduces him and demands that he feign death, just like she did.

Prelude
"8" uses elements of the different versions without discrimination. The contradictions among these, become part of the narrative environment. To these traditional elements, "8" adds a lot of new ones, in the oral tradition of the fairy tale where the story is retold and ammended, rather than reproduced faithfully.
In our version, not one but 8 princes have penetrated the evil forest. None of them, however, was the True Prince. The magical spell was disrupted because of this unlawful penetration and the princess and her court did not wake up after one hundred years. Over the course of the centuries, every prince who enters the palace, falls in love with the princess but they don't succeed in waking her up and they cannot find a way out of the palace. So they lead the rest of their lives inside its walls. Some of them go mad, others angry. All of them die, the eigth one in front of the eyes of our main character.

The story of "8"
A young girl takes a walk with an adult woman through a present-day park. When they start playing with a ball, the girl misses it and runs after it, into some bushes.
She cannot find the ball nor can she find her way out of these bushes. She follows a path until she sees part of a small building, overgrown and deterioriated. A man (the last prince), lying at the foot of the building, tries to talk to her. The girl, however, appears to be deaf and mute. He gives her a statue of an angel before he dies, gesticulating towards a hole in the wall of the building.
The girl takes the object and steps into the hole. The inside appears to be some kind of mausoleum. There is a guard, asleep, standing in front of a door. A woman is sleeping on a platform. In the base of the platform, there are eight alcoves containing eight automatons. The girl puts the angel into one of the alcoves repairing the magical automaton, acquiring her first magical ability: telepathy.
This ability allows her to see the dream of the guard, which will open the passage into the palace garden.
From this point, the story becomes non-linear. The player is free to access the entire palace. Only a few doors are locked and can be opened by solving a puzzle.
The palace environment is mostly orientalist in style. It is very warm, enternally late morning. There is a glaring sun and deep dark shadows. The garden is an oasis but the courtyard is barren and hot. Inside the thick walls of the palace, it is cool. The forest of thorns has grown excessively and has penetrated the palace here and there, causing destruction to the building.
Spread throughout the grounds, party guests, merchants and servants are standing, sitting, lying. All of them asleep. Often they are posed in such a way as to tell a story of what happened before they fell asleep. Sometimes there are objects next to them that the girl can pick up and take with her.
Throughout the palace, remnants of the princes' lives can be found. One of the princes wrote poetry, another combed the hairs of sleeping women, one installed elevators, etcetera.
Everyone is asleep but a few insects, some birds and the children of the princess. These two, however, hide when our young girl enters the palace and will only be encountered late in the game.
Apart from these "real" entities and objects, there will also be mysterious unexplicable ones like the child-eating monster living in one of the palace's towers or the sudden fight of a stag and a bull on the courtyard.
As a thread of Ariadne, there are 8 quests in the game. They are intertwined with each other and with "dead ends" but each of them ultimately leads to one of the Automaton Objects. Putting one of these objects back in its place in the Mausoleum will give a new magical ability to the girl. These abilities refer to the talents, gifts given to the princess at birth, by the fairies. With these abilities, she will be able to change the appearance of the palace by pruning the excessive forest growth, healing the wounded, restoring the building, lighting fireplaces, etcetera, preparing the palace for the arrival of the True Prince.
When all 8 magical abilities are acquired, the final puzzle can be solved. This will make the girl fall asleep and end the game. When she wakes up, she meets her mother again and it is as if no time has passed at all.