This has probably happened to you. You wake up in the dark. You are awake. And you cannot move anything.
In Brazil that has a name, and she has been up on your roof the whole time.
She spends the whole night watching you from a distance. What she looks like changes from region to region, so nobody agrees on her shape. What everyone agrees on is that at night you are never alone.
You have probably had her visit. You wake up. You are conscious. And nothing moves.
It does not last a fixed amount of time. Seconds, or an hour.
And they say she eats the fear, so the more frightened of her you are, the more often she comes.
Cornélio Pires wrote her down in Conversas ao pé do fogo. She also turns up as Pesadeira along the São Francisco river, and as Pisador in Ceará.
Everyone in Brazil knows what the Pisadeira is before they know her name. It is sleep paralysis. You surface in the middle of REM sleep, while your brain is holding your body still on purpose so you do not act out your own dream, and the part of you that should wake up with you does not. Weight on the chest, no air, and you lucid enough to watch all of it.
The good detail is that the science agrees with the legend on one specific point: sleeping face up really does make it more likely.
In 2023 a study out of UFRN, published in USP's Revista de Estudos Culturais, went and looked at the Pisadeira as sleep research, because until then she had only ever been studied by anthropology.
Every other creature in this game attacks because it is there. The Capelobo hunts hunters, kills them and drinks the blood. That is simply what he does. The Pisadeira does not work like that. She chooses, and she waits.
Her behaviour on the table changed in the second build, and we do not know yet whether we got it right. It is the thing we most want to hear about from anyone who has faced her.
She works your nights. Has she visited you?
See you in the dark,
The Wild Pepper Games team