HAUNTED: Are You Alone? – a chamber piece of terror for £3.99

The British ghost has always preferred small rooms. M. R. James let his ghosts appear in studies and inn chambers, The Woman in Black ran for decades on a stage that showed little more than a few boxes and a curtain, and the best episodes of Inside No. 9 manage with a single room. The lesson of all these works is: the more familiar the room, the worse what happens in it.

HAUNTED: Are You Alone?, a mixed-reality horror game for Meta Quest, takes this lesson literally. The room is not just any room but your own. The Quest scans walls, floor and ceiling, and these surfaces become the play area. According to the store, the game is by developer Special Games and published by ThreeFlavors LLC. It was released on 9 October 2026, cost £3.99 in the British Meta Store on 10 October 2026, and is rated PEGI 18, quite rightly.

The premise: a witch with squatter’s rights

The story can be told in one sentence, and the game tells it in one sentence too: a witch has lived in this house for a hundred years, every family that moved in kept her, and now she has found you. A little girl makes contact through an old rotary telephone that rings on your own floor and guides you through the night.

What follows is divided into a prologue, seven chapters, a finale and an epilogue. According to the studio, the story lasts about 25 to 35 minutes. There are also three endless arcade modes and two secret chapters. That sounds like little, and it is little. The question is what the game makes of those minutes.

Staging: a new trick in every chapter

HAUNTED’s greatest strength is its stage economy. Each chapter has exactly one idea and plays it out. In the first chapter the witch stands in the furthest corner, and if you look away you find her closer. So you fight her first with your gaze, not with an axe. In the second chapter there is knocking in the walls, and then arms three to four metres long break out of your own masonry. In the third, a porcelain doll sits on the floor and imitates your every movement, without the game explaining what you are supposed to do.

Later a hole opens in your real floor, a wall breaks open onto a moonlit graveyard, a mirror becomes a shield against the laser gaze of a nun with a sewn-up mouth. It is a revue, in the best sense of the word: number follows number, and none outstays its welcome.

Your own room is the cheapest stage set in the world, and HAUNTED has grasped that it is also the most expensive.

What is remarkable is how consistently the body is involved. You duck, lean over a hole, crawl on hands and knees through a tunnel and finally grab hold with your own hands. You can play with either hand tracking or controllers, and the camera is never moved by the game. The store lists the modes as ‘Room-scale’ and ‘Standing’; there is no seated mode, and the game needs some free space.

Pace: the art of the pause

Horror is rhythm, and HAUNTED knows it. The prologue begins with ten quiet seconds in a perfectly ordinary room before the telephone rings. In the second chapter, the hammering in the walls is followed by six seconds of dead silence. After the graveyard chapter, the screen stays black for four seconds. These are not accidents but directorial decisions, and they are mostly right.

The sound carries much of it. According to the studio, footsteps come from real positions in the room, so behind your back; knocking sits in a particular wall, voices come from under the floor. Add to that strong haptics with every scare, grab and hit. The effect is simple: you hear where the fear lives before you see it.

Does action dilute the fear?

Here lies the core of our objection. From about the fourth chapter the weight shifts. Revolver and torch against skulls, pistol against the undead in the graveyard: it is well done, but it is a different evening. Whoever has a weapon in hand fears differently, namely less. The graveyard is the game’s most spectacular image and at the same time its least eerie.

In its honour, one must say that HAUNTED evidently takes this curve deliberately. The seventh chapter takes all weapons away again, and the finale leaves you only a lighter and your bare hands. The dramaturgy thus goes from creepiness to action and back to defencelessness. That is cleverly constructed, even if the middle smells a little of a shooting gallery.

The extras and the back doors

Anyone still in the mood after the credits will find three endless modes under ‘Games’: Grave Rush, Arm Cutter and Skull Hunt. They turn monsters from the story into wave-survival games with combos up to ×8, three hearts, coins and a shop called Bone Market. There are also two secret chapters, unlocked by marks on your own floor, plus New Game+ with altered dialogue. As for the arcade modes: they are an extra, not the main work.

Also worth mentioning is what the game does for people who get stuck. After every death it offers ‘Help’, and from the third death in a chapter, ‘Skip chapter’. Purists may regret this. We consider it polite. A theatre that does not leave anyone stranded in the second act is not a worse theatre.

What is missing

The game is short, and it is available only in English. It is a single-player title, with no co-op. The version number in the store at launch was 0.2.0, which sounds like a workshop stage, even if it is not an early-access title. At the time of this review there were no ratings yet. And anyone looking for horror with a long breath, with exploration and creeping paranoia, will not find it here. HAUNTED is a series of blows, not a slow poisoning.

Also important is the warning the game shows on every start: sudden loud noises, flashing and darkness, blood, violent jump scares. It is explicitly not intended for children, pregnant women or people with epilepsy, heart conditions or anxiety disorders.

Verdict

HAUNTED is not a great work, but a well-made small one. It understands that mixed reality’s task is not to show another world but to betray your own. The wall where the holiday photos usually hang knocks back. The floor where you spill coffee in the morning has a hole. That is the punchline, and it works for long stretches.

The page in the Meta Horizon Store lists Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3 and Quest 3S. Anyone who owns one of these headsets, is of legal age and wants to be afraid of their own living room for half an hour will get decent value for their money. Anyone who would rather have a ghost train with a long corridor should keep looking.