Occupancy.
You are somewhere dark with a lantern that reaches about five paces, and a plan in the corner that fills itself in as the light touches things. Find the way out. The complication is that something else lives here, it is faster than you walk and slower than you run, and it works out where you are by listening.
Drag to look · W A S D · Shift to run · E to hide
Contains a jump scare
Map it in the dark. Find the way out. You are not alone in here.
Occupancy
Map a building in the dark. Your lantern draws it as you go, and the way out is only marked once you have seen it.
You are not the only thing in here.
Sudden loud sound and a jump scare.
It hunts by sound. Running carries across most of the building, walking only a few rooms, standing still nothing at all. It is faster than your walk and slower than your run, so when it sees you the answer is to break its line of sight and get into one of the coral alcoves, which only works while it cannot see you.
Bench notes
- Why a horror piece
- This started as a diagram. The first version of this walker was an argument about information architecture: the same content arranged well and arranged badly, and a floor plan at the end showing the route you actually took. The argument was fine and the walking was better. Being somewhere you cannot see the edges of does something to a person that no annotated site map has ever done, so the caption came off and the building got a tenant. What survives from the original is the thing worth keeping: you cannot understand a space from outside it.
- It hunts by sound, not by cheating
- A pursuer that always knows where you are is not tense, it is just unfair, and players work that out inside a minute. This one only knows what you tell it. Running carries across most of the building, walking reaches a few rooms, standing still gives away nothing at all. Your breath runs out in about five seconds and comes back slowly, so sprinting is never free: it buys distance and spends your position. Everything else follows from that one rule.
- The alcoves
- Every building has nine to sixteen one-cell pockets punched into its walls, marked in coral. Get into one and you cannot move, you make no sound, and your breath returns faster. You can only get in while it cannot see you: try it while you are being watched and the prompt says so and refuses. That refusal is deliberate. Letting you climb in and then be dragged out is a worse death than being told no, because it takes the decision away after you have already made it.
- Two ways to feel it coming
- Most people will open this with the sound off, so the piece cannot depend on audio to warn you. As it closes, your lantern gutters and ink creeps in from the edges of the frame until you are looking down a tunnel. With sound on there is also a drone that rises with proximity and footsteps that are not yours. Both channels carry the same information, and the entrance asks which one you want before anything is built, which is also what unlocks the audio in the first place.
- A different building every time
- The plan is generated by splitting a rectangle over and over, dropping a room in each of the smallest pieces, and joining them back together on the way out of the recursion. Reachability holds by construction, so the way out is never walled off. That mattered more than it sounds: the first build placed the pursuer in the room farthest from where you start, which is the same room the exit is picked from, so walking toward the way out walked into it. Now it sits as far as the plan allows from both ends, and a bot walking the true path escapes every time in twenty to thirty-five seconds.
- The drawing is the point
- You are making a floor plan the whole time without meaning to, and both endings hand it back to you finished. Coral is your path. The pale line is where it went while you were busy, which you never saw. Getting out, that line shows you how close it came. Getting caught, it shows you how long it had been walking toward you.
- The manners
- The jump scare is announced before you go in, sound is off unless you ask for it, and nothing plays or moves until you choose. There is no ceiling and no gore. With reduced motion on, the screen shake goes and everything else stays, because the piece is tense rather than frantic and none of the tension lives in the camera.