Eager to immerse myself in this chilling survival horror game, where I can evade its terrifying creature using my webcam.

I’m often put off by gimmicky horror games, but sometimes I see one and think “yeah, that’ll be a laugh.” This time around it’s Eyes Never Wake, the debut survival horror from developer Allan Hedlund. Where some horror games in recent years have used your microphone to track how loud you’re being, Eyes Never Wake uses your webcam to track whether your face is present or not.

In Eyes Never Wake, the monster that’s trying to hunt you down can’t see you if your face isn’t visible on screen. The trailer quite cleverly shows this by smoothly cutting from gameplay to real world footage of the player ducking down to hide from the incoming threat.

It’s quite obvious the game takes some cues from modern creepypastas like The Backrooms, and I think the monster design itself is a bit generically naff, but I do think the idea of slamming my head into my desk just to avoid being spotted is pretty funny. It’s sort of like an evil but less emotionally devastating Before Your Eyes.

You might ask “can I not just turn my webcam away so the monster can never see me”, to which the game answers, “no, because there are doors that require in-world facial recognition scans in order to open them” – and it also uses your microphone, so it might hear you anyway.

The trailer doesn’t reveal much about what Eyes Never Wake involves beyond the cam-ducking idea, so I can only hope it also has things like well-designed layouts and decent pacing. Mostly, though, I’m just excited by a dev playing with the medium while considering the real, physical presence of a player.

No word on a release date, but if you’re into this game that YouTubers like Markiplier are guaranteed to play, you can wishlist it here.