PACROOMS

You know the maze. The maze knows you.

A frame from a worn VHS tape: four round characters in yellow, blue, red and green wait in a field of long grass under a low sun.

A first-person horror game that runs in your browser. Play alone, or bring up to seven friends.

Noclip drops you into the game and asks for fullscreen. The first visit downloads about 170 MB, so use Wi-Fi. No account, nothing to install.

Flickering lights, tape glitches and sudden sounds. Best with headphones.

Follow the orbs

Energy

  1. You fall in

    The tape starts mid-fall. You land in a yellow office that goes on further than it should, pick a character, and walk through the dark doorway.

  1. Collect the energy

    64 white energy orbs hang at chest height along a trail through the rooms. Each one you take plays a note from whatever chord the building is humming.

Instructions on the wall of a dark room, and a trail of glowing white energy orbs leading away through a doorway.
The rules are on the wall of the first room.

Ghosts

  1. The ghosts wake at 0:24

    They leave their lairs in stages, and they need line of sight to find you. Walls are your friend. You have three lives.

Armor

  1. Armor = safety

    A rainbow orb is reactive armor. It gives every runner ten seconds in which ghosts scatter on contact instead of hurting you. Scattered ghosts reform five seconds later.

Reactive armor: ribbons of colour swirl around the edge of the picture while the runners glow inside protective bubbles.
Ten seconds of reactive armor.

The Hollow

  1. Orb 64 wakes The Hollow

    A pitch-black watcher with scanning eyes, and it hunts both sides. When its face turns red it has seen you. Sprint, break sight around a wall, and it will search where you used to be.

  1. Hit it three times

    Put on reactive armor and run into The Hollow to hit it. Every hit spends your armor, so find more. Three hits and the runners escape. Lose every runner and the ghosts win.

The Hollow mid-lunge: a black sphere whose face has turned red, its jagged vertical mouth open, tearing the picture around it as it passes the runners.
Red eyes? Break sight.

The way in

You know enough. The rooms are waiting.

Ways in

Three words float in the first room. Each one is a way in.

Enter
The hunt described above: 64 energy orbs, the ghosts, The Hollow, one way out. It’s solo, and it pauses when you open the menu.
Infinite
No walls at the edge and no finish line. Your energy drains as you move. White orbs refill it, rainbow orbs armor you, and The Hollow keeps coming back. Last as long as you can.
Online
Create a room and share its six-character code. Up to eight players split into runners and ghosts, and AI fills any empty ghost slot. Or take the whole party into a shared Infinite world of up to 16 players.

The cast

The four runners side by side in the yellow room: yellow, blue, red and green spheres with small dark eyes.
  • Pip Yellow. First through every door.
  • Moe Blue. Never goes anywhere alone.
  • Ruby Red. Afraid of nothing so far.
  • Gramps Green. Too old to be startled.
Four cloth ghosts side by side: cream, pale blue, pink and pale green, each with two dark eyes.

The ghosts Four cloth ghosts, one for each runner’s colour. Online, pick one and you hunt your friends instead of running with them. All eight characters move at the same speed.

Controls

Keyboard and mouse

WASD or arrows
Move
Mouse
Look around
Shift
Run
Hold Q or E
Zoom the camcorder
F or click
Use, or silence an alarm
M
Sound on or off
Esc
Pause and menu
AltEnter
Fullscreen on or off

Gamepad

Left stick
Move
Right stick
Look around
Right trigger
Run
Shoulder buttons
Zoom the camcorder
West face button
Use
Start or Options
Pause and menu
View or Share
Fullscreen on or off

Press any button after plugging in so the browser can see the controller. Its Start button works on this page too.

Touch

On-screen stick
Move
Drag the picture
Look around
Tap
Use, or silence an alarm
Menu button
Pause and menu

The tape

Nothing reaches your screen until it has been filmed, recorded and played back.

  1. The rooms HDR lighting baked in Blender
  1. A camcorder Lens, sensor drift, a zoom you can hear
  1. The interface Menus and the hand cursor go on the tape too
  1. VHS Real NTSC signal emulation by ntsc-rs, in WebAssembly
  1. A CRT Phosphor, scanlines, curvature and glare

The sound takes the same trip. An original score called Room Tone is built on the hum of the lights, footsteps and alarms are placed in 3D and muffled by walls, and all of it runs through a tape deck with wow, flutter and hiss.

Image settings in the pause menu let you switch tape presets, turn the CRT off, or steady the camera. If your system asks for reduced motion, the game tones down camera movement, flicker and tape effects.

You need a GPU and a browser with WebGL 2 and hardware acceleration turned on. A desktop or laptop is the best seat. Phones and tablets work with touch controls if they have the power.

Play Pacrooms

That’s the whole tape. The rest happens in the rooms.