HAUNTED, briefed for room-scalers: what the game demands of your room and your body

Most Quest horror games build you a haunted house and put you inside it. HAUNTED: Are You Alone? goes the other way: the haunted house is your own room. Through passthrough you see your real walls, your floor and your ceiling, and that’s exactly where everything happens. For us room-scalers, that’s the interesting question: what does the game demand of the space we’ve cleared, and what does it demand of the body standing in it?

This briefing answers precisely that. No score, just a technical assessment: play space, input, movement profile, modes and comfort. Story details stay deliberately vague; we name late chapters only in passing.

The key facts at a glance

Headsets per store	Meta Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, Quest 3S
Play modes per store	Room-scale, Standing
Input	Hand tracking or Touch controllers
Players	Single player
Store comfort rating	“Comfortable for some” (Moderate)
Age rating	PEGI 18 (Extreme Violence)
Internet	not required
Language	English
Price	£3.99 (Meta Horizon Store, en-gb, as of 10 Oct 2026)

The game is published by ThreeFlavors LLC and released on 9 October 2026. You’ll find the store page in the Meta Horizon Store.

The room is the level

HAUNTED reads the room you set up in Quest Space Setup. Walls, floor and ceiling become the play space. According to the studio, any room size works, and on launch the game lists every room you’ve scanned on the headset. “Scan a new room” drops you straight into Space Setup.

What that means in practice: arms break out of your walls, a hole opens in your floor, blood splatters onto your wallpaper. The cleaner your scan, the more convincingly these effects land where they belong. A sloppily captured wardrobe quickly becomes the wall something comes out of.

For the mixed reality effect, the usual hardware rule applies: Quest 3 and 3S show colour passthrough, Quest 2 shows the room in greyscale. The game runs on all four headsets per the store, but the effect is noticeably more direct on the colour devices, because the effects sit on a more realistic view of the room.

The movement profile: what your body has to do

This is where HAUNTED differs from many horror games, where you mostly walk and look. Here the body is the controller, and the game asks for a surprisingly broad range of movement:

1. Turning: sounds come from real positions in the room, footsteps behind you, knocking in a wall. You’re constantly turning.
2. Looking away and looking at: in the first chapter the witch reacts to where you’re looking. Gaze direction comes from head orientation, not eye tracking.
3. Leaning: at one point you lean over a hole in the floor.
4. Ducking: recurring, for instance when something comes at you.
5. Crawling: a later chapter has you crawling through a tunnel on hands and knees.
6. Swinging: axe and baseball bat in the story, plus a sword in the arcade modes.
7. Grabbing: right up to grabbing wrists with your real hands in the finale.

This is not a seated game. The store lists room-scale and standing, and by the crawling section at the latest it’s clear why. If you need a fixed seat, this isn’t for you.

Hands or controllers?

Both work. Hand tracking suits moments like the grabbing at the end particularly well; controllers give you a firmer feel in the hand with the firearms and when swinging. According to the studio there’s strong haptics on every scare, grab and hit — and of course you only feel those with controllers.

One practical point for hand tracking: it needs enough light, and the game darkens your room virtually. So don’t leave the real room pitch black.

Story and three arcade modes

The story runs from a prologue through seven chapters and a finale to an epilogue, roughly 25 to 35 minutes. Each chapter brings its own mechanic and usually its own weapon: axe, baseball bat, revolver with torch, pistol, a mirror, later nothing at all. Via “Chapters” every chapter is selectable from the start, and there’s New Game+ after the credits.

Under “Games” three endless arcade modes await:

• Grave Rush: one of your walls opens onto a graveyard, zombies come through the hole. The shooter of the three.
• Arm Cutter: knocking announces where the next arm will break out of the wall. From wave 3, out of the ceiling too. You cut with axe or sword.
• Skull Hunt: dark room, torch in the left hand, laser-sighted revolver in the right. The beam freezes skulls, and you revive a fading battery by shaking it.

They share a combo multiplier up to ×8, three hearts, coins, top-5 high scores and the “Bone Market” shop, where you unlock shotgun, sword and assault rifle. Shop and coins belong only to these modes, not the story.

What that means for your play space

A simple bit of prep follows from the movement profile:

1. Clear the floor: crawling and ducking need a clean floor, with no cables, toys or glasses.
2. Check your swing space: arm span plus weapon length, upwards too. Ceiling lights and fans are the classics.
3. Scan your walls: free, cleanly captured wall surfaces give the wall effects room to work.
4. Lights on: enough light for inside-out tracking; the game supplies the darkness.
5. Boundary on: in mixed reality too. Especially with scare reflexes, the boundary is your safety net.

Comfort and content warning

The camera is never moved by the game. That’s a big plus for motion sickness: you move, nobody else does. After every death the game offers “Help”, and from the third death in a chapter also “Skip chapter”. So nobody gets stuck.

You should take the content warning seriously — it runs over two pages every time you launch the app: sudden loud noises, flickering and dimmed light, gore, intense jump scares. Per the game, not suitable for children, pregnant people, or people with epilepsy, heart conditions or anxiety disorders. The PEGI 18 rating is meant seriously.

For streamers and anyone who doesn’t want to show their home, there’s “Hide my room”: instead of passthrough you see a virtual padded cell built on your real walls. The scares still work. Bear in mind you then can’t see your real room, so the boundary matters doubly.

Who it suits

• Adult horror fans with a Quest who want the scare in their own home rather than a stranger’s villa.
• Mixed reality enthusiasts who want to see what room scan, spatial audio and hand tracking can do together.
• Score chasers who stay on in the arcade modes after the story.

It’s less suited to anyone who wants to play seated, expects a long campaign, or can’t handle jump scares.

Scaler’s take: HAUNTED is one of those games that takes room-scale seriously: turning, leaning, ducking, crawling, swinging and grabbing in a room that’s genuinely yours. The story is short, but every chapter has its own mechanic, and the three arcade modes give the game life beyond the credits. Our view: bring a clean scan and a clear floor and you get one of the most physical mixed reality experiences on Quest for £3.99 (as of 10 Oct 2026). Lights on, boundary on, coffee table away.