The Virtual Stage · Review
Curtain Up in the Living Room: HAUNTED Read as an Evening of Theatre
An overture on the telephone, seven acts on your own wall, a single scene change: we review HAUNTED as one reviews a premiere.
By The Editors · · 5 min read
A theatre review traditionally begins with the auditorium. How many seats, what the acoustics are like, whether the view from the circle is good. In HAUNTED: Are You Alone? the auditorium is your own living room, the audience consists of exactly one person, and that person is also on stage. That is, for all the modesty of the format, a beguiling starting point for a review.
We have therefore decided to review the mixed-reality horror game for Meta Quest not as a game but as a performance. With overture, acts, set design and final applause. The piece is rated PEGI 18; children belong neither in this auditorium nor in front of this headset.
The Auditorium: a set you bring yourself
Every production begins with the set, and here it is provided by the audience. The Quest scans the walls, floor and ceiling of the room, and the game plays precisely to those surfaces. Any room size works, the studio says. A cosy terraced-house room in Leeds and a period drawing room in Edinburgh therefore get the same piece, but in a different staging.
That is dramaturgically shrewd, because it saves the work every other horror game must do: familiarity. A virtual manor house must first teach us what normal looks like before it can become eerie. We already know our own living room. Any change in it is immediately a disturbance.
The Overture: ten seconds of silence and a telephone
The prologue plays the role of the overture, and it does what a good overture does: it sounds the themes before the play begins. Ten quiet seconds in the normal room, then an old rotary telephone on the floor rings behind the player. On the line a little girl whispers: ‘Shhh. Don’t talk. She’ll hear you.’
What follows is a piece of audio theatre that grows into the room. Footsteps that shuffle through the girl’s room on the telephone suddenly begin in your own room, in sync, behind your back. The instruction ‘Don’t turn around’ is repeated three times. At the end a bloody axe falls to the floor behind the player, the title burns itself into the floor as ash, and the curtain is open.
An overture that does not entertain the audience but silences it: that is the rarest art in horror.
The Acts: seven numbers, seven tricks
What follows is divided into seven chapters that function like acts but are built more like the numbers of a variety show. Each act has its own prop and its own rule.
| Act | Title | Prop | Stage idea |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | The Witch | Axe | Whoever looks away loses |
| II | The Hands | Axe | The walls knock back |
| III | The Doll | Baseball bat | Pantomime with a doll |
| IV | The Hole | Revolver and torch | A hole in your own floor |
| V | The Darkness | Pistol | A wall opens onto a graveyard |
| VI | The Mirror | Mirror | Reflect light back |
| VII | The Puppy | nothing | Crawling through a tunnel |
This structure has a strength and a weakness. The strength: no act repeats the previous one. The weakness: an arc spanning all seven is more asserted than built. The girl on the telephone holds the numbers together like a compère, but the witch who is supposedly behind everything appears after the first act almost only in disguise and from the wings.
The Performers: an ensemble of voices
It is remarkable how much of this piece is told through the ear. The studio says that sounds come from real positions in the room: knocking from a particular wall, voices under the floor, footsteps behind your back. The witch hums the girl’s lullaby, a music box starts and jams. You could say the sound design plays the lead and the images are supporting players.
The player is both audience and performer. You duck, lean over the hole, hold a mirror at an angle, crawl on hands and knees. The game never moves the camera. The one who moves is you, and that turns every scare into a small physical scene.
The Scene Change (Spoiler Warning)
Spoiler warning: the following section reveals how the finale and epilogue are staged.
A good director saves the big scene change for the moment he needs it. HAUNTED does exactly that. The finale is the only chapter that leaves mixed reality. Black rot creeps over the real walls and crumbles to ash, and the player stands in a void where the witch keeps all the abducted. The only light source is a cheap lighter. The three-metre-tall mother moves only when you are not looking.
Afterwards the room returns, and birds sing outside. The epilogue is a final call that asks the player to take off the headset, and then lands a punchline we will not fully reveal here. Only this much: the piece does not break the fourth wall, it sits on it.
What Doesn’t Quite Come Off
The middle section, Acts IV and V, turns into a loud revue. Revolver, pistol, waves of skulls and undead: it is well made, but it is spectacle, not dread. A strict dramaturg would have cut or rebalanced here.
Besides, the evening is short. The story lasts about 25 to 35 minutes, according to the studio. As an evening of theatre that would be a one-act play without an interval. Anyone who wants to stay afterwards will find three arcade modes in the menu that function as encores. The piece itself is available only in English, which weighs heavily when there is so much spoken text.
Curtain Call
You do not leave this evening of theatre through the foyer but by taking off a headset, and you then stand in exactly the room where a witch has just shot up from the floor. Hardly any theatre in the world can produce that feeling, and that is the real argument for HAUNTED.
If you want to book a ticket: the game is in the Meta Horizon Store for Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3 and Quest 3S; according to the store it comes from developer Special Games and is published by ThreeFlavors LLC. A tip from the programme: clear the stage beforehand. You will turn, lean and crawl, and no theatre is liable for coffee tables.