ECHO LOCATOR

Marchwood House is pitch dark and you cannot carry a light. Every sound you make draws the room for you, and hands the Lamplighter your exact position in the same instant.

A step lights a few feet of floor. A shrieking hinge lights a corridor. Strike the tuning fork and the whole room comes back at once — and so does he.

The one rule the whole game is built on

He hears exactly as far as you see. That is one number in the code, not two: the same reach decides how far a sound reveals the house to you and how far it carries to him. There is no setting anywhere in this game that makes a look safe.

Five systems that read each other

• Sound over a material map. Moss, rug, boards, flagstone, glazed tile and flood water each carry a different loudness and a different reach, so the route you take decides how much of the house you get to see and how loud you are while seeing it.
• His attention. He walks toward loudness and recency. His lamp is the one thing you can see without making a sound — so the safest information in the game comes from the most dangerous object in it.
• Panic. Near misses raise it. At real fear your own heartbeat is loud enough to draw the room and to draw him, which closes the loop between the first two systems. Hiding silences it.
• Seven tools, and every one changes a RULE rather than a number. Felt slippers halve how far a footstep carries. The oil can makes a hinge quiet for good. The music box sings somewhere you are not. The brass key opens the east of the house.
• Chalk memory. What you reveal is written down and kept. Knowledge is the progression, and being caught never takes it.

Being caught costs forty minutes and nothing else

You keep the chalk. You keep the tools. You keep every tile you have ever revealed. When morning comes you get tomorrow night with everything you learned still on the walls. There is no full restart in this game.

Four ways out

Out through the coal hatch. Out through the front door. Out through the front door knowing what the house was for — which takes all seven things in it that are worth reading. Or morning finds you still inside, which is not a loss, only a shorter night.

Everything you see and hear was generated by the game

Eight material plates, fifty four letterforms in four inks, and forty eight sprites — 110 distinct generated entities, all built by code in this project. No asset pack, no font file, no image model. The game never calls fillText, so not one character on screen comes from a browser font. The audio is eleven files rendered from authored scores through oscillators, which is arithmetic rather than a generative model.

Two honest notes

Nobody has heard it. The audio is tested by measurement — silence, clipping, level band, per cue distinctness, repeat safety, loop seam — because the studio has no human tester. Those are measurements and they are not the same thing as somebody having listened. If a cue is wrong, please say so in the comments.

It letterboxes on a phone. The canvas is a fixed 960x600 and scales to fit, so on a portrait phone the picture is small. It is playable — every keyboard verb is also a button — but it is better on a desktop or a landscape tablet.

Controls

Click a tile to walk. Click a thing to examine it. F or Space strikes the fork, H hides, B places the music box, O oils the nearest hinge, M opens the chalk map, S toggles sound. Everything is also a button, so a mouse alone is enough.

Free, no download, no account. More free browser games and the studio’s asset packs are at csaf.itch.io.