Game developed for Newgrounds Spooktacular and ScreamJam 2024

Controls:

WASD / Arrows: Walk around

Space: Check / Speak to NPC

Enter: View Map

Change

• v1.2: Minor gameplay tweak.
• v1.1: Balancing and bug tweaks.

=== TL;DR Description ===

I said I'd be releasing two this year and heres the second. Stay Indoors is a exploration horror game which tries to emulate the style and restrictions of a ZX-Spectrum title. Two reasons, number one I thought it might be interesting to try this and number two to support a meta story about the game being a real game I had back then that is seemingly cursed.

The premise of the game itself is that you live in a town where noone leaves the house at night following an incident which you, a young kid, have not been fully made aware of the details. One night your dog escapes and you decide that if its really that dangerous out at night, you need to find him as soon as possible and so you venture out to find him.

The dog (and other entities) will wander around the map and your job is to find the dog and get back before whatever it is thats got the adults so spooked finds you. There are 5 endings, and clues as to the nature of the incident that led to this situation happening to find.

I made the game in just under a week as an entry for ScreamJam, which is the game jam I entered the original MÆRE into last year.

=== Full Story ===

Has anyone else ever come across this game?

When I was a kid growing up in the early ‘90s, my Dad worked as a mechanic on an industrial estate where most people knew each other. It was a bit lawless back then and communities like this would have a bit of a network for getting stuff that either ‘fell off a truck’ or was just a straight up bootleg. One of the things my Dad would regularly bring home for us was pirate video games and “Stay Indoors” was one of them. It was an 8-bit game that ran on British home computers.

The object of the game was to run around a neighbourhood eerily similar to my own looking for a lost dog. There was also a monster roaming the streets that would chase you if it found you, but you could run into other people’s houses and hide in them if this happened and maybe if you waited long enough the monster would leave. It was like a primitive version of those "chase" horror games that were popular in the 2010s.

The game had a lot of strange elements in it that made it stand apart from other games we owned. It had a strange, unsettling vibe. The NPCs in the game had a depressing aura. They would speak of the hopelessness of their situation and their desire to get out. Most games back then had an upbeat tone. Stay Indoors didn’t. Everything about it felt muted, grim. Yet, at the same time, something about the setting felt oddly comforting. Unlike the fantasy castles or far off planets in other games, Stay Indoors looked like my neighbourhood: the same terraced houses, the same run down garages. It was familiar, but warped.

The biggest issue with the game was that it was frightening. It felt genuinely stressful when the monster would appear and the game’s map felt uncomfortably large. You felt exposed. My brother and I both started having nightmares not long after we got the game. Mum was quick to blame the game. Dad insisted it was fine though so we kept it.

It wasn’t just us either, one day I overheard my Mum talking to my Aunt. She said she'd heard me and my brother up to something downstairs in the middle of the night. When she went down to drag us back to bed, the living room was empty. She went up to check our rooms and we were both sound asleep. My Aunt just brushed it off as Mum being on edge, that the kids’ over active imaginations were simply getting to her now too.

At the time my brother developed an imaginary friend Mr. Bradbury, who seemed linked to the game. He said Mr. Bradbury would stand in his doorway at night and speak to him about things, one of the topics they talked about was the game. Mr. Bradbury is allegedly the one who told my brother that you could hide in houses from the monster. But I’m sure he must have figured this out on his own. Sometimes Mr. Bradbury wasn’t so friendly. One morning whilst driving us to school my brother asked my Mum to tell “him” to stop walking around the landing at night. My Mum asked who “he” was, was it the dog, a spider, Dad? No, it was Mr. Bradbury. I’m probably going off on a bit of a tangent here, but Mr. Bradbury was given the blame for the incident that proved to be the final straw for this game. One day my brother came screaming down the stairs having encountered a particularly scary part of the game. Apparently Mr. Bradbury had advised him that the mine held a secret of some kind and he had gone to check it out. Enough was enough and Mum ended up taking the game away. The nightmares stopped shortly after, and my brother eventually forgot about Mr. Bradbury.

I’d largely forgotten about this game until recently my Dad was having a clear out of the loft and dug out a tape case full of these old games. “Stay Indoors” was amongst them. I haven’t been able to find anything about the game online so I suspect it may have been written by a bedroom coder and distributed privately.

I’ve uploaded it here in the interest of preservation and to see if anyone else remembers this old thing?