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About This Game

One seeker. Up to seven hiders. One asylum with the lights off.

Hide & Shriek is an asymmetric multiplayer horror game for up to eight players, and a single player one when there's nobody about. One of you is handed a torch and told to find the others. The rest get a head start, a building that creaks, and a locked front door.

A night is a run of rounds: three, four, five, seven, or until somebody says stop. Every round you're dealt a role, you hide or you hunt, and then everybody who lived gets paid and goes shopping. Points carry across the whole night. The seeker's chair moves round the table.

A round, start to finish

The head start. Ten to forty five seconds, your choice, and then they let the seeker in. There's space under the beds on the ward, under a table in surgery, behind the crates in the boiler room. Pick one, get in it, and hope the door shut behind you.

The hunt. Two to seven minutes of working out what you can hear and what they can hear.

The way out. Every door in the place is bolted. Hiders buy the unlock at terminals dotted round the building, stood out in the open, a second and a half at a time, until between you you've paid it off. Nobody is told how close it is. Not you, not the seeker. Then it's ten seconds with both hands on the lock, and a seeker who walks in on you puts all of it back.

The payout. Survive and there's money in it, and the fewer of you who manage it the more it's worth. Survive on your own and you clean up. You can probably see where this is going.

It's a game about noise

Sprint and the whole ward knows. Walk and they might. Crouch and you're near enough silent, and also near enough stationary. Floorboards creak. Doors are loud to open, and while they're shut they're the only reason nobody has looked at you yet.

The seeker sees in a cone rather than all the way round, so most of hiding well is learning where the edge of that cone is and moving when it moves. Their torch tells you where they're looking. Yours tells them the same.

There's a radio too, no range limit on it, and keying it is the loudest thing a hider can choose to do. It gives away exactly where you're stood, and it crackles out of everybody else's radio while it's at it. Mute whoever you like from the pause menu. Nobody is told.

And if the seeker catches you, that isn't necessarily the end of it. Somebody brave enough to come back for you can put you on your feet again.

The shop is where the friendships go

Eighty five items, and the shelf stocks one of everything and only one. You pick in order of who's richest, so everything you buy you've taken off whoever was next in the queue.

Nearly all of it comes out of the worst drawer in a British house. Nan's sherry. Jeans from your twenties. The family WhatsApp group. Crocs in sport mode.

Forty five of them help you: quieter boots, a longer sprint, a better ear, a shroud, a discount at the shelf, something to patch you up with. Eight are things you leave lying about for other people, like a can of oil, a bag of Lego across a doorway, next door's Ring doorbell. Four are traps the seeker gets to lay. A tripwire that grasses you up, a pot of treacle, caltrops that shut a corridor for the next three people through it.

The oil is the one, though. Leave a can outside somebody's hiding spot, walk three rooms away, get on with your evening. They come out, they go over, and they're still on the floor making a noise about it when the torch arrives. None of it points at you.

Seekers hold grudges

At the end of a round the seeker curses one hider, and they'll pick whoever's been annoying them. Twenty eight to choose from. Clown shoes, so everything you do is louder now, crouching included. Glow in the dark pyjamas, so they'll pick you out from half again as far off. Everyone can see you've got them on, because that's the point.

Curses hang about for a few rounds and stack three deep. The only way out from under a bad one is to die, which is the sort of offer this game keeps making you.

Eight of you, or none

Online. Up to eight. Open a room and hand the code out, or go into the server browser and take a seat with strangers. If your wifi goes the seat waits for you, and so do your coins and your inventory.

On your own. The whole game against the building. The seeker comes on five settings, TIMID up to RELENTLESS, and the rest of the night is dials: how many rounds, how long you get to hide, how long the hunt runs, how fast either side moves, how far each of you can see. Nine rows, five steps each, saved between sessions.

The tutorial. A guided run through the ward that teaches crouching, doors, terminals and the lock, with a seeker who isn't really trying.

What you keep

Eleven characters, every one of them voiced, three of them behind the unlock ladder. Sixty nine deeds to chase. Surviving, catching, dodging grabs, shaking chases, reviving people, cursing people, being cursed, and one for winning a night on the cruellest dial there is.

And an encyclopedia that only fills an item's page in once somebody's used one on you. You will learn what the talc does the hard way.

In the box

• Asymmetric hide and seek horror for 1 to 8 players, online or on your own against bots
• One asylum, built by hand: reception, the day room, the cell block, infirmary, surgery, the morgue, the baths, records, the plant room and the yard
• A full night runs about 25 to 40 minutes. Set it to three rounds, or set it to endless
• 85 items. 45 that help you, 28 curses, 8 to leave lying about for other people, 4 traps for the seeker
• Directional torch cones, sight blocked by walls and furniture, footstep noise that carries, floors that creak, doors you can slam
• Radio voice chat with no range limit, and a mute list for when that stops being funny
• 11 voiced characters, 3 of them earned
• 69 deeds, and an item encyclopedia that fills itself in as things get used on you
• Five seeker difficulties from TIMID to RELENTLESS, plus nine tuning rows for whoever is hosting
• Lose your connection and your seat waits for you, along with your coins and your inventory
• Gamepad and keyboard, original sound design and a title theme

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some of the content in this game was made with the help of generative AI: artwork and textures, sound effects and music, and some of the written text in the game and on this page. All of it was reviewed and edited before it shipped. Nothing is generated while you play, and the game does not connect to any AI service.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Hide & Shriek is a horror game about hiding from a seeker in a derelict asylum. Its mature content is violence, and the violence is stylised and distant: characters are low poly models in a deliberately coarse late nineties console style, drawn small under a fixed three quarter overhead camera, and a hider the seeker catches is struck at melee range, leaves a short trail of red pixels on the floor and collapses into a body that another hider can revive. There is no weapon detail, no gore, no dismemberment and no close up death animation. The horror is atmosphere and tension rather than imagery, built out of darkness, footsteps, the edge of a torch beam and the pressure of being hunted, with startle moments when the seeker finds you.

The asylum is a setting rather than a subject. It is an abandoned building the players hide in, with rooms including a ward and a surgery, and the game contains no depiction of mental illness, of patients or of treatment, and tells no story about them.

The shop items are British domestic comedy, so alcohol and vaping appear as joke objects with names like Nan's sherry, the novelty beer helmet and the emotional support vape. Nothing is consumed on screen and none of it produces intoxication in game. Humour of the same register includes mild toilet jokes.

The game contains no sexual content, nudity, sexual assault or non consensual content, no depiction of suicide, self harm or substance abuse, and no real world hate content or political themes.

Online play includes voice chat between players over an in game radio, so players may hear speech from other players that is not created or moderated by the developer.