The Ear as Leading Player: A Critique of the Sound Design in HAUNTED

Radio understood horror before television did. Generations of British listeners have been frightened by radio plays in which there was nothing to see but the darkness their own living room supplied. A creaking door, footsteps on gravel, a breath too close to the microphone: that was all it took. The picture formed in the mind, and the mind is a poor place to hide.

HAUNTED: Are You Alone?, the mixed-reality horror game for Meta Quest, is in a curious way a radio play with pictures. Of course there is a witch to see, arms in the walls, a doll on the floor. But in almost every chapter the horror arrives first as sound, and only afterwards as image. We want, therefore, to discuss the sound design as one might discuss an ensemble: role by role. The game is rated PEGI 18; some scenes from Chapters I to III are described below.

The Stage as Loudspeaker

First, the principle. According to the studio, sounds in HAUNTED come from real positions in the scanned room: footsteps behind the player, knocking from inside a particular wall, voices from beneath the floor. This is more than stereo. It means that the geography of your own room becomes the score. The wall where the bookcase stands is no longer just a wall but an instrument.

Add to that forceful haptics with every scare, every grab and every hit. One might call them the percussion of the ensemble. They are not subtle, but they bind sound and body so that a noise is not merely heard but felt.

First Voice: the Rotary Telephone

The telephone is the narrator of the piece, and it is a clever move to lodge the narrator in an object. In the prologue it rings behind the player on the floor, louder with each ring. Ignore it and you see it crawl closer, and eventually it answers itself, on speaker. A voice that switches itself on is a small monstrosity in its own right.

At the other end, a little girl whispering. The whisper is this game’s base volume, and it establishes a convention: whoever whispers does not want to be heard. When later the same voice returns ‘too calm and too deep’, as the studio describes it, that is a change of cast without a change of costume. You hear that someone else is speaking, though the voice is the same.

Second Voice: the Footsteps

Perhaps the most effective sound idea in the whole game is in the prologue. On the telephone you hear footsteps shuffling through the girl’s room. Then the same footsteps begin in your own room, synchronised with the telephone, and come closer from behind. The girl says three times: ‘Don’t turn around.’

Here the radio play merges with the room. What a moment ago was a story on the telephone is suddenly a noise at your back. It is the moment when fiction crawls down the line, and it works because it shows nothing. If you turn around, according to the studio, you see only for a split second a flickering shadow of the witch. The sound was the main event; the image is merely the proof.

In HAUNTED the image is usually only the receipt for something the ear has long since paid for.

Third Voice: the Knocking in the Wall

The second chapter is essentially a composition for walls. Three slow knocks behind the player, then faster hammering on another wall. Muffled screams, a child’s voice in the masonry: ‘Daddy, let us out.’ The knocking is not merely atmosphere but information. It tells the player where the next danger lives.

This dual function, atmosphere and stage direction at once, is the best that sound design in a game can achieve. The arcade mode Arm Cutter later turns it into an explicit rule: ghostly fists knock on the wall where the next arm will break through. What was horror in the chapter becomes a rhythm game in the encore.

Fourth Voice: Lullaby and Music Box

The most delicate role in the ensemble is played by the music, and it plays against the grain. In the first chapter the witch hums the girl’s lullaby as she slowly raises her head. At the end of the second chapter there is giggling behind the player, and a music box begins to play. In the third chapter that music box stutters and jams as the doll slips into wrong poses.

This is an old device. Nursery rhymes and music boxes have been part of the basic vocabulary of horror film since directors discovered that nothing sounds so eerie as innocence in the wrong place. HAUNTED invents nothing new here, but it applies the device precisely: the jammed music box is the acoustic signal that the doll’s imitation is tipping over. Music as a barometer of mood, not as wallpaper.

Fifth Voice: the Volume

Here we must raise an objection. Alongside the fine sound ideas, HAUNTED also relies on sheer volume. The skull in the fourth chapter arrives with the loudest noise in the game so far, and it will not be the last time the game uses volume as a weapon. That is honest, and the warning about sudden loud noises at every start is meant seriously.

But volume is the bluntest tool in the box. Where the game works with placement, with direction, distance and material, it is masterly. Where it simply turns up the dial, it is effective but ordinary. A scream from the wrong direction frightens; a scream that is merely loud frightens once and then annoys.

What You Do Not Hear

Worth mentioning, too, is what HAUNTED does not do. According to the studio’s privacy policy, the game does not use a microphone. Unlike some ghost-hunting games in which your own voice plays a part, here you are only a listener. That fits the opening on the telephone: ‘Don’t talk. She’ll hear you.’ You are meant to keep quiet anyway.

Conclusion

Anyone playing HAUNTED with headphones or a well-adjusted headset sound experiences an ensemble in which the ear takes the lead and the eye follows, well advised. The game is available only in English, which is worth bearing in mind for so voice-heavy a piece. It is available for Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3 and Quest 3S in the Meta Horizon Store; according to the store, from developer Special Games, published by ThreeFlavors LLC. Our advice: do not turn the volume all the way up. This game is at its best when you have to lean in to hear it.