A solo horror game about watching the cameras and waiting for something terrible to find you.
Content Warning: harm to animals, death (including player character death at the end)
First, find a map of a national or regional park, hiking area, or similar mapped outdoor space. This will be the park that you’re monitoring. Ideally you should use a saved brochure map from a park you’ve visited yourself, but be prepared to mark it up. If you don’t have one around, find one you can print out.
Then, take a standard deck of cards and deal them into 12 piles in a 3-by-4 grid. You’ll have 4 cards left over, which you can set aside.
This grid of cards represents your cameras. When you draw from a camera feed for the first time, you’ll leave the top card face up and place the camera somewhere on the map, labeling it according to the row/column of the camera feed (however you like). More on that in the next section.,
During the game, you’ll draw cards from the various screens, identify which cameras are where, and tell a story that escalates towards surreal and horrifying by jotting down what you see on each screen you glance at using the prompts provided below.
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Designer’s Note: I want to play a little more with the layout of screens and the possibility of expending one screens’ deck of cards, and what that might mean. For now, it doesn’t do anything in particular.
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Whenever you draw a card, identify which camera you’re looking through and jot down a note describing the scene, according to your prompt. Each time you draw of a given rank, cross off the prompt you used and use the one in the next column when you draw a card of that rank again.
If it’s a camera you’ve not drawn from before, add it to the map and label it accordingly, including making note of any nearby buildings or points of interest, especially those it might have a view of.
Sometimes, seemingly connected observations will jump dramatically around. For example, you might see curls of smoke at one camera and then a roaring blaze on the other side of the park. Lean into this, and let the story unfold in increasingly uncanny ways as related events occur erratically around the park.
Whenever you draw the fourth card of any Rank, the game ends. Describe the moment when the beast finds you, and cut to black.
| First | Second | Third | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Footprints, claw marks, or other evidence of a beast | A small creature staring intently at something out of frame | A small creature hurled violently across the frame |
| 3 | A tranquil scene | An eerie scene | An inexplicably unsettling scene |
| 4 | A small animal in the foreground | A number of small animals darting past in surprise | An ugly mess of blood, feathers, fur, bones |
| 5 | Something small scurrying into the bushes | Something shifting in the underbrush, obscured | Trees shuddering rhythmically from reverberating impacts |
| 6 | Bright lights in the distance | Several sudden bright flashes | Bright light in the camera, suffocating the image |
| 7 | Faint shadows from the moonlight | Strangely-cast shadows | Shadows that grow and grow and grow |
| 8 | Something waving or shuddering in the wind | Something ever so slightly out of place | Something unexpectedly absent from the scene |
| 9 | Hikers walking casually past the camera | Hikers running urgently past the camera | A prone figure, grievously wounded, crawling past |
| 10 | Rowdy campers ferrying beer to their campsite | Two drunken campers in an animated argument | A camper sprawled on the ground, visibly wounded, eyes open and vacant |
| J | A spiderweb draped across the camera’s lens, blurring the view | Something leaned against the camera, blocking half its view | Cracked glass of the lens, darkness, flickers of reflections |
| Q | A dusty haze dulling the camera’s view | A curl of smoke climbing past the camera | A roaring blaze spreading to fill the screen |
| K | An odd and annoying smear on the camera’s lens | Flickering static, wavering images, and other technical artifacts | A scene unrelated to where this camera is supposed to be located |
| A | Unsettling stillness | A looming sense of dread | The beast itself; it turns to the camera, as if it can see you through it |
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Designer’s Note: This section is unfinished; I imagine that you’d want to, between looking at cameras, be able to have a way of affecting goings-on in the park.
You might be radioing rangers, talking to superiors, or even attempting to warn parkgoers about what’s happening. Broadly speaking, you need a reason for the player character to stay put and not leave to go take action or flee.
That said, there’s something compelling about framing it around having locked yourself into the security room, watching to see what happens and to learn whether the beast will mean the end of this park, your life, or something bigger.
Either way, I’d want to give more thought to how things proceed and how conditions in the park change between glances at the screens.
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