Hollow Hall

Inspiration

Hollow Hall A tiny flashlight survival game built in a single evening for Pixel Forge Jam #2 (Haunted Edition). Premise Something lives in Hollow Hall. It can't see you — but it hears everything. Sneak through a dark, half-forgotten house, light five scattered candles, and get back out the front door before your flashlight battery runs dry or the thing in the dark catches your scent. How it's made Hollow Hall is built entirely in vanilla HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript — no engine, no external libraries or assets, just the Canvas API. The whole game lives in a single self-contained .html file.

Rendering: The house is a tile-based grid drawn each frame to a . Lighting is faked using layered radial gradients and destination-out compositing — a full-screen black overlay gets "punched through" by a soft ambient glow around the player and a directional flashlight cone that follows the mouse, which is how the game achieves the sense of near-total darkness without ever hiding actual DOM elements. Movement & collision: Simple AABB-style tile collision checks four corner points of the player's circle against the wall grid, letting the player slide along walls instead of getting stuck. Stealth AI: The Presence tracks a hidden "awareness" meter that rises when the player moves quickly nearby and decays slowly over time. Cross a threshold and it commits to an active hunt toward the player's position for several seconds, mimicking a creature reacting to a sound rather than seeing through walls. When idle, it wanders to random reachable tiles to feel alive rather than static. Line of sight: A basic ray-marching function samples points between the Presence and the player to check for intervening walls, so it only "notices" you visually when there's a clear line — sound is what really gives you away. Battery/tension system: The flashlight cone's length shrinks as battery drains, and the screen gets a faint red tint below 25%, creating pressure to move efficiently rather than creep forever.

How to play WASD/arrows to move, mouse to aim your flashlight, hold Shift to sneak quietly. Collect all 5 candles hidden through the house, then reach the door before your battery dies or the Presence catches you. Moving fast is efficient but loud — moving slow is safe but burns your battery. Every run is a trade-off between speed and stealth. Why this fits the theme Hollow Hall leans into atmosphere over jump scares — the horror comes from restricted vision, an unseen threat that reacts to your own choices, and the slow tension of a draining light source rather than scripted frights.