AR horror game turns your house into a nightmare with just a smartphone

A new augmented reality horror game called Night Terrors wants to bring ghosts, ghouls and jump scares into your house, using only your smartphone.

I’ve been pursued by a murderous alien through the steel walkways of Sevastopol Station thanks to Oculus Rift and jumped out of my skin when treading the dank stone corridors of Dreadhalls whilst wearing a Samsung Gear VR, but if ever things got really tough, I always had the option to pull the headset away from my face and immediately escape back to reality.

It appears that such a luxury won’t be available to you if augmented reality mobile title Night Terrors sees the light of day, or rather the dark of night…

The game, currently in development by Novum Analytics, hopes to raise $70,000 on crowdfunding site Indiegogo to create an ‘ultra immersive gaming experience that transforms your environment into a terrifying hellscape’. How exactly does it hope to achieve this, you ask? By using the assortment of sensors in your smartphone to map your surroundings and scare you senseless with the data.

As the game’s lead developer Brian Mitchell explains, the game is capable of mapping your surroundings and then using that data to place scares around your own house. With regards to immersion it’s even intelligent enough to recognise that if a ghost moans and it’s on the other side of your bedroom door, the audio will match the acoustics as if you were hearing a real moan under the same circumstances.

The game places you as the hero in your own horror film, trying to find and rescue a little girl lost in a house, your house. With regards to immersion, Mitchell has chosen to implement practical effects rather than CGI in order to better ground the monsters you’ll encounter in reality.

It’s an interesting take on augmented reality and thanks to Mitchell’s approach, isn’t locked down to specialised AR or VR hardware, but rather compatible smartphones, starting with the iPhone 5 and it’s on track to arrive on other platforms in the future, provided Night Terrors reaches its crowdfunding goal. The game has already been in development for 14 months and a lot of the groundwork has already been laid.

What do you think of the concept? Are you easily scared? Are you prepared to shut the lights off in your house and walk around knowing there could be something waiting for you around the next corner? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.