The Walls Have Ears
Oct 29, 2026 · Online hide-and-seek in a haunted house, where the ghost is on the seeker's team but can only talk by haunting.
The Walls Have Ears is hide-and-seek in a haunted house on Halloween night, for 5 to 8 players. One player is the babysitter, counting to twenty and then searching the house with a flashlight. Everyone else is a kid in costume (a sheet ghost, a witch, a skeleton, a pumpkin-head, a vampire), running in the front door to find somewhere to hide: a wardrobe, the cupboard under the sink, the grandfather clock, the bathtub.
And one player is the ghost. The ghost is on the babysitter's team, and it watched every kid come in and hide. It just can't talk. All it can do is haunt the house: rock a creaking chair, knock inside a wardrobe, flicker a lamp, slam a door or wind up a music box. The babysitter has to work out what that means, and the two of you end up inventing a code in the middle of a round. A knock in the kitchen. Another knock in the kitchen. Look under the sink.
The kids hear every haunt too, and they get scared. Fear builds when the haunts land near your hiding place or the babysitter's light sweeps past. Let it fill and you scream, and everyone hears where you are. Sometimes your nerve goes and you bolt, which is what happens in the promo above: two knocks on the kitchen wardrobe, and the kid under the sink climbs out right in front of her. Kids who get caught come back as little ghosts and can make mischief of their own. Roles rotate every round, so everyone gets a turn at being the one who can't talk.
The house has two floors, thirteen rooms and twenty-five places to hide. You can play with friends by sending a link, with proximity voice so you can hear the kid hiding in the next wardrobe whisper, or jump into a public room, or play alone with bots in every seat. It works on a phone with a finger, or with a mouse and keys or a gamepad.
The idea is Jeff's own. It's the studio's first online game: it runs peer to peer with no game server, on a small multiplayer kit built alongside it, and if the player hosting the room leaves, someone else takes over mid-round. It's built with three.js. The furniture, the costumes and the babysitter are Meshy models, and the haunts, the screams, the music-box waltz and the drone were generated with ElevenLabs. The promo was filmed from a real round with bots, with the ghost doing the knocking.