Hollowfield

Overview

Hollowfield is a five-minute descent from a farmhouse kitchen to a cornfield, and the house does not want you to leave. There are no jump scares. The fear comes from accumulating wrongness: lamps that flicker a little more each minute, a shadow at the edge of vision that is gone when you turn, a rocking chair that has moved since you last looked, a scarecrow slowly coming round to face you. Find the keys, read the notes if you dare, and make it out. Three endings, depending on how you play.

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Highlights

• One director for all the dread. A single tension value climbs over five minutes and every system reads from it: flicker, ambient volume, desaturation, grain. Nothing escalates on its own, so the piece has a real arc instead of a Christmas tree of separate scares. Unlocking a door bumps it, so progress raises the stakes as much as time does.
• Seen only sideways. The shadow figure fades in at the edge of your vision and vanishes when you look straight at it. The same trick drives the scarecrow that turns to track you.
• The house changes behind you. Step into a new room and the one you left goes dark, a candle goes out, a note appears where there was nothing. Cross into the stables and the door slams and locks behind you for good.
• Keys you have to earn. A drawer to open, a grandfather clock to wind, a television that only gives up its key once you have read the right note.
• A flashlight that dies. Two minutes of charge, five batteries hidden in dark corners. Burn it carelessly and you are in the cornfield blind.
• Something in the corn. A pursuer moves through the maze toward you, one cell at a time. You hear rustling, you catch a shadow at an intersection you just passed, the exit light flickers as it closes in. It never catches you. It does not have to.
• Eight notes and a photograph. A fragmented story of the Mercer family, sparse and out of order. Read all eight and the ending changes. Look at the photograph four times and it changes too.

How It’s Built

Three.js and vanilla JavaScript, with nothing loaded from outside. Every texture, wood grain, wallpaper, dirt, straw, ceiling stains, is drawn in code. Every sound, footsteps, wind, creaks, whispers, thuds, is synthesized with the Web Audio API and run through a generated room reverb so it stops sounding synthesized. The whisper is filtered noise pulsed at speech rhythm: you cannot make out words, but the cadence reads as a voice right at the edge of hearing.

The world runs along a single axis, so knowing which room you are in is a chain of comparisons. That one constraint simplified collision, fog, footstep surfaces and event targeting at once. Collision is eight raycasts against flat wall meshes, so doors collide correctly as they swing. All the UI is HTML and CSS over the canvas, and mobile gets a joystick that appears wherever your thumb lands.

What I Learned

Atmosphere beats threat. The pursuer never catches you, the trapped ending is avoidable, and the house mutations cannot hurt you. Horror that punishes exploration teaches players to rush. Horror that rewards attention teaches them to dread what they notice.

Hollowfield began as a copy of this site’s gallery. A walking simulator and a horror piece share most of their engineering: first-person controls, collision, spatial audio, atmosphere. The remaining part, pacing, peripheral tricks and environmental storytelling, is where the horror lives.