Turn your home into a haunted house with AR game 'Night Terrors'

04 May 2015 • engadget.com

You’re home alone. It’s the dead of night and all of the lights are off; you creep down the hallway with one hand dragging along the wall, your phone serving as a makeshift flashlight. You hear a young girl’s voice whisper from the bedroom in front of you and the hair on the back of your neck stands up straight. You pause. Your heart pounds. A dull ringing assaults your ears. You creep forward, holding the phone higher, when suddenly – a high-pitched shriek as your phone’s light starts rapidly flashing and a deformed, undead monster barrels down the hallway directly toward you. You drop your phone. Game over.

That’s basically the premise of Night Terrors, an in-development, augmented reality game for mobile devices that maps out the entirety of your house and fills it with terrifying creatures, turning a home into a real-life survival-horror game.

I’m not sure if this is brilliant or terrible. I do predict nightmares from any young children playing stuff like this. It’s bad enough when scary things are restricted to the TV screen in their own fictional worlds - but games like this would bring the “terrors” into a child’s own home - their hallways, their bedrooms. It might just prove to be a little bit too real for some players.