StrigoiLens: Vampire Hunter AR

StrigoiLens is a scary AR vampire hunting game: your phone camera becomes a lens that finds vampires in your own dark home. Walk in the dark, burn them with holy water and finish them with a stake, from bats and fledglings to the nosferatu and the Count, the Dracula of this hunt. A vampire game for Halloween nights: single player, offline, no account.

YOUR PHONE IS THE LENS

Point it into a dark room and the Strigoi 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.

TWO WEAPONS, AND ONLY ONE OF THEM FINISHES IT

Holy water works at any range. 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. But the flask holds three throws and holy water can never finish one.

The stake is arm's length only. Every vampire slayer learns it the same way: at some point you have to let it come all the way in.

EIGHT NIGHTS, EIGHT VAMPIRES

A swarm of bats first. Then the creatures of Romanian folklore, 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. 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 under holy water, its own way of taking a stake and its own death, 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 TO TRY

The field meter, the crypt radio, the night scan, the UV lamp and the case log are free forever. The Strigoi Lens is free for six minutes of hunting, counted only while the lens is open, and then a single one-time purchase unlocks it for good. No subscription.

BEST PLAYED

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

It is a vampire hunter game. The vampires are not real. The dark is.