THE NIGHT CATALOGUE

A night guard. A museum. Eight exhibits that only move when you are not looking.

You are the night guard at the Halloway Collection. The doors lock at one and you have until five to walk your round and sign all eight exhibits into the catalogue.

They do not move while you are looking at them. Not slowly, not a twitch. They are marble and gilt and empty armour and they are exactly where the catalogue says they are, every single time you check.

They are also closer than they were.

The rule

An exhibit is observed — and therefore frozen absolutely — when all three hold:

1. it is inside your view cone,
2. nothing solid stands between your eye and it,
3. it is lit — by your torch beam, or by a hall lamp still burning.

Clause 3 is what makes this a game rather than a screensaver. A thing can be dead centre in your view and still walking toward you, because your beam is somewhere else and the hall is black.

The torch

A wind-up dynamo lamp. Lit, it drains at 5%/s. Dark, it recovers at only 3.2%/s. Recovery is slower than drain, so light is a budget and the night is longer than the battery. Going dark is not optional — it is how you pay for the light. And going dark is exactly when they move.

The loop

1. Walk to the next station on the round.
2. Put the beam on the exhibit and hold it — the entry fills over 2.6 seconds.
3. Which means, for 2.6 seconds, your back is to the other seven.
4. Move on. Watch the battery. Choose which stretch of corridor to walk blind.

No two stations are visible from the same spot. That is deliberate, and it is verified: a grid of ~950 sample points across the whole floor plan, all 28 station pairs, zero failures. You always have to turn your back on something.

What happens when one reaches you

Nothing violent. The screen goes white and you come round at the guard desk with three quarters of an hour gone off the clock, one signature smudged out of the book, and every exhibit standing back on its plinth as though nothing happened.

That is the whole of the horror: not injury — lost time, and a building patiently spending your night for you.

Three of those and the round is lost.

Controls

WASD walk · F or right-click work the torch · hold the beam on an exhibit to sign it in

Known issues

• Some z-fighting on the corridor wall/ceiling junctions.
• The blackout white-out can occasionally stick if game state is driven externally.

Built with

The observation rule lives in exactly one function — night.isObserved in night.module — and nothing else in the game re-implements it. The building is generated from code (Halloway.sceneModule), the exhibits are procedural assemblies, and the catalogue is drawn as a physical ledger rather than a list of labels.