Don't Wake the King

Somewhere under the wood, the King is sleeping. He is blind, and he listens.

Don't Wake the King is a co-op horror game for up to four players that listens to your actual microphone. Not a push-to-talk button - your real voice, in your real room. Whisper and the forest ignores you. Raise your voice, and something that was asleep is not asleep any more.

Four cursed bones have to reach the altar. Everything else you can carry out is worth money. Nothing tells you to hurry, and nothing is going to: there is no dawn coming to save you. There is only the wood, and the rule that you do not die in it.

It is dark, and it stays dark. There are no torches here, and there never will be.

Your voice is the danger. Every word you say out loud is heard by something. The King wakes to volume. The thing in the trees follows sound to where it was made. Working together means talking, and talking is the one thing the forest will not forgive - so you learn to say less, and to mean more.

Sound is a place. Noise carries the way it really does: it fades with distance, it is swallowed by leaves, it bends around a ridge. A branch snapping two hundred metres away is indistinguishable from footsteps, and there is no way to find out which it was except by going to look, or by deciding it was nothing.

The wood is new every night. The forest is generated - its clearings, its bogs, its trails, the places worth searching. Nobody has a map. Nobody has the route memorised. The only person who knows where the third bone is, is the one who found it.

Dying is a demotion, not an exit. You come back as something that drifts after the people still breathing. You cannot carry, you cannot open, you cannot do the work - but you can go and look, and you can still be heard. Being the one who can see and cannot act is its own kind of night.

Survive, and the wood asks for a rematch. Every night you live through multiplies what the next one is worth, and a wipe takes the whole run with it - including everything the nights before were worth. And the pot is also your money: the gear that might keep you alive is bought out of the winnings you would otherwise be walking away with. Shopping is gambling too.

Something out here changes people. Not everything that goes wrong with you will be the forest's fault, and not everything will be obvious. Some of it will only happen to one of you, and nobody will be told which.

It works with fewer, and it is harder.

Best played in the dark, with people you can talk to - and would rather not have to.