Halloween Monster Hunter AR

Halloween Monster Hunter is a scary AR horror game that turns your phone camera into a monster-hunting lens. Turn off the lights, walk through your own home and hunt the ghosts, demons and vampires that come for you in the dark. A Halloween ghost hunting game for one player: offline, no account.

YOUR PHONE IS THE LENS

Point it into a dark room and the lens turns the camera, the compass, the light sensor and the step counter into a hunting kit. It reads the room you are actually standing in. It will not work in a lit one, and it says so.

WALKING IS WHAT BRINGS THEM

Steps in the dark are counted off the phone's own accelerometer. Twenty paces for the first one, twenty more for each after it. Stand still in a bright room and nothing comes, because nothing should. Keep walking, and your own hallway becomes a haunted house.

THREE WEAPONS, AND EACH THING ANSWERS TO ONE OF THEM

Holy salt is what kills a ghost, and you never run out of it, but it is a handful thrown by hand, and a ghost drifts.

Holy water reaches any distance. It burns, the thing screams and stops where it stands, and for five seconds it is open: a stake into that window goes twice as deep. The flask holds three throws and holy water can never finish a vampire.

The stake is arm's length only. At some point you have to let it come all the way in.

Bring the wrong one and the kit tells you why it did nothing. A stake passes through a ghost. Salt does not trouble a vampire.

FIFTEEN NIGHTS, FIFTEEN THINGS

A swarm of bats first. Then the ghosts: a residual echo, a cold wisp, a knocker, a shade, a poltergeist. Then two demons that answer to salt and holy water together.

Then the vampire coven, one a night: a thrall walking somebody else's errand, a newly risen fledgling, a moroi out of the wet earth, a strigoi in black velvet, a nosferatu that moves in bursts between the shadows, an elder who has kept the same house for four hundred years.

And then the Count, the Dracula of this hunt. He does not die when his blood runs out. He tears his wings out of his own back and comes at you again, stronger, and that is the fight that counts.

Each of them is a different body with its own walk, its own scream, its own way of dying, in its own voice.

THE CASE LOG

Every kill writes a page. Who it was before it was turned, the village, the year, what turned it, what it wanted, and what it said at the end. Every escape writes one too, and an escape costs you points.

WHAT IT USES

Camera, accelerometer, compass, light sensor, microphone, torch. Everything stays on the device. Nothing is uploaded, no account, no sign-in.

FREE, AND WHAT IS NOT

The field meter, the crypt radio, the night scan, the UV lamp and the case log are free forever. The AR lens is free for six minutes of hunting, counted only while the lens is open, and then a monthly subscription keeps it open. It renews until you cancel, and you cancel in Google Play.

BEST PLAYED

In the dark, with headphones, alone, in a house you know. Halloween night is ideal. Not while driving, not near stairs, not anywhere you would not walk with your eyes half on a screen.

It is a horror game. The monsters are not real. The dark is.