Short, hand-inked pings about delightful apps and indie VR games.

ping #18 · tiny delights

The Phone That Crawls Closer: A Ping About the Rotary Phone

In the prologue of HAUNTED, a rotary phone rings behind you. Ignore it, and impatience itself becomes the scare.

The InkyPing Editors · · 4 min

An old rotary phone alone on an empty wooden floor

There’s an object in HAUNTED: Are You Alone? that isn’t a monster and still becomes the first character in the game: an old rotary phone. It sits on the floor, behind you, in your own room. And it has a quality we’ve rarely seen in a game. It doesn’t wait forever.

Ten quiet seconds, then it rings

The prologue opens with about ten quiet seconds. Through passthrough you see your normal room: your couch, your wall, your floor. Nothing happens. Then a rotary phone rings on the floor behind you. With every ring it gets louder.

That alone would already be a good opening. A ring behind your back is a sound everyone knows and everyone wants to react to. But HAUNTED adds another layer on top.

What happens if you don’t pick up

If you ignore the phone, this is what happens: it doesn’t just get louder, it crawls closer. And if you still refuse, it eventually picks up on its own, on speaker. So the conversation happens either way. You just don’t get to start it yourself anymore.

What we like about this is how much personality such a simple behavior gives an object. The phone has no eyes and no mouth, but it has impatience. It reacts to you. It notices your hesitation. In a horror game that’s a pretty elegant trick: the threat isn’t even here yet, but the phone alone shows that this house is paying attention to you.

Impatience as a scare tactic

Many games solve the problem of “the player isn’t doing what they’re supposed to” with an arrow, an overlay, or a voice saying, “Go to the phone.” HAUNTED solves it in the room itself. The phone comes to you. That’s help and threat at the same time.

We jotted down three reasons it works so well:

  • It stays in the world. No hint text, no button. Just an object that moves.
  • It escalates. Louder, then closer, then it answers by itself. Each step is a little creepier than the one before.
  • It works for both kinds of players. If you’re curious, you pick up. If you don’t dare, you get the call anyway. Nobody gets stuck in the prologue.

That fits an attitude that runs through the whole game: according to the game’s description, every chapter has hints and fallbacks so nobody gets stuck. The phone is the first and friendliest of those fallbacks, so to speak, even if it doesn’t feel friendly.

What happens on the line after that

Without giving too much away: on the other end is a little girl whispering that you should be quiet. And then something happens that makes the prologue special. Footsteps that were first shuffling through the girl’s room on the phone suddenly start in your real room, in sync with the call, and come closer behind you. So the phone isn’t just a conversation partner. It’s the hinge between the story on the line and your own room.

The sound comes from real positions in the room. HAUNTED uses spatial audio so that footsteps behind you, knocking in a wall, or voices under the floor really seem to come from there. With the phone, that means: you hear pretty precisely where it is, and you hear that it’s coming closer.

A small tip for the play space

Because the prologue gets you to turn around, it’s worth clearing the area beforehand. HAUNTED is played in your own room as scanned by the Quest Space Setup, standing or room-scale. A quick spin after a ring behind you is exactly the movement where you’d otherwise find a table edge.

Three tiny delights

  1. The ringing gets louder. A simple escalation that builds pressure right away.
  2. The phone crawls. A piece of furniture with a will of its own.
  3. It picks up by itself. The game doesn’t wait for your permission.

What we’d steal for our own projects

  • Objects with patience. An item that changes when you ignore it explains itself.
  • Help that looks like a threat. The player gets a nudge, but the mood stays intact.
  • A sound behind your back. A noise behind the player is the cheapest and most effective way to make them turn around.

For the doodle page, a rotary phone with three little motion lines behind it is enough. You don’t need more to draw “it’s coming closer.”

HAUNTED: Are You Alone? is a mixed-reality horror game for Meta Quest, PEGI 18, and explicitly not intended for children. More info is on the store page in the Meta Horizon Store.

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