Crawl Freedom: Preparing the Floor for the Chapter VII Tunnel (Spoiler Warning)

Most of us have optimised our play space for standing and walking. Head height clear, swing room clear, floor reasonably tidy. In HAUNTED: Are You Alone?, though, there’s a moment that demands a completely different level: your knees. One chapter asks you to crawl through a tunnel on your hands and knees. Suddenly your face is 50 centimetres above the floor, and everything lying there becomes your problem.

This guide covers how to prepare the floor for it. First, a warning.

Spoiler warning

From the next section onwards, we describe the setup of Chapter VII (“The Puppy”). We won’t give away the whole chapter, but we will cover the sequence up to the tunnel. If you want to experience HAUNTED without prior knowledge, skip straight to the checklist further down, which works without spoilers.

What happens in the chapter (up to the tunnel)

Chapter VII has no weapon. A puppy runs out of your wall, and a child’s voice asks you to follow it. Glowing arrows lead you to a spot in your room, and there a large rock grows out of your real floor: a tunnel that, according to the studio, is up to 4 metres long and adapted to your room. The puppy runs inside, and you’re meant to crawl after it.

The tunnel gets darker and narrower. Along the way, bats flutter towards you and a spider drops down in front of your face. We won’t reveal what waits at the end.

For floor planning, that means: you crawl a distance whose direction the game derives from your room, and you react to scare moments while doing it. Flinching on your knees is a very different movement from a step backwards while standing.

The floor checklist

1. Find the longest clear stretch of floor. According to the studio, the tunnel adapts to the room. Even so, it’s worth knowing the longest clear straight line on the floor and keeping it free of obstacles.
2. Search at knee height. Get down on your knees yourself and look around. Chair legs, table edges, bed frames and radiators are closer at this height than you’d think.
3. Move cables out of the way. Charging cables, extension leads and speaker cables are the most common trip hazards at knee height. Coil them up or run them along the wall.
4. Secure carpet edges. A raised carpet edge catches under your knees or the heels of your hands as you crawl. Fix it with tape or roll the carpet up for the session.
5. Pick up the small stuff. Lego bricks, hair clips, coins. Anyone who’s ever knelt on a Lego brick knows the score.
6. Pad anything with sharp corners. If a coffee table can’t be moved, drape a blanket over the corners.

The surface: what’s good for your knees

Crawling on laminate or tiles is unpleasant, even over a short distance. A few options:

Surface	For crawling	Note
Carpet (fitted)	comfortable	doesn’t slip, no edges
Loose rug	comfortable, but a slip risk	anti-slip mat underneath
Foam puzzle mat	very comfortable	join the edges neatly
Laminate/wood flooring	hard	use knee pads or a blanket
Tiles	hard and cold	like laminate, best avoided

A simple solution if you don’t have a mat: knee pads from a DIY shop or sports shop. They look odd, but in mixed reality nobody sees you anyway except the bats.

Head and headset at crawling height

When you crawl, the headset tips forward and the weight pulls on the head strap. Tighten the strap a little more than usual before the session so the headset doesn’t slip when you lower your head. If you use a cable, say for charging while playing, unplug it for this session. A cable that ends up under a knee while crawling pulls on the headset.

And the most important point: watch your head height. When you duck away from a spider, you go even lower. Table tops at 70 centimetres become a hazard for the back of your head once you’re on your knees.

Boundary at floor level

The boundary on the Quest is a wall you see as you approach it. On your knees, though, you move differently, and you’re more likely to be looking at the floor than straight ahead. So:

• Leave the boundary on. Never disable it, not even in mixed reality.
• Allow for clearance. Leave a buffer between the boundary and real obstacles, especially at knee height.
• Mind Hide my room: if you play in “Hide my room” mode, you see a virtual padded cell instead of passthrough. That means you can no longer see your real floor. For the tunnel chapter, passthrough is the safer choice.

If it doesn’t suit you

Not every body likes crawling, and not every floor is suited to it. HAUNTED has a safety net for this: after every death, the game offers “Help”, and after the third death in a chapter it also offers “Skip chapter”. On top of that, all chapters can be selected from the start via “Chapters”. So if it’s a bad day for your knees, you can always come back later.

The dry run without a headset

Before you start the chapter, a short rehearsal without the headset is worth it. Get on your knees and crawl the longest clear stretch of your room once, around three to four metres if you have that much space. Watch for three things:

1. What can you feel under your knees and hands? Joints, carpet edges, crumbs.
2. What’s at head height? Table edges, chair seats, window sills.
3. Where does the stretch end? A wall is no problem, a radiator is.

This rehearsal takes a minute and shows you the room from the perspective you’ll have in the chapter. Afterwards you’ll know where you need to make adjustments. And if your room only allows for shorter stretches: according to the studio, the tunnel adapts to your room, it’s “up to” 4 metres long, not always 4 metres.

Comfort tips

• Warm up: A quick squat and back up, then once onto all fours. Sounds over the top, but it’s kind to your knees and back.
• Water within reach, but outside the play area. Glasses on the floor are the last thing you want while crawling.
• Stand up and breathe for a moment after the tunnel. The switch from crawling to standing can make you briefly dizzy.

Scaler’s take: The crawling in Chapter VII is one of the most physical moments mixed reality currently offers on the Quest, and that’s exactly why the floor deserves five minutes of preparation. Cables away, edges secured, knees protected, table tops in mind. Then the terror stays in the tunnel and not in your shin. The game is available in the Meta Horizon Store.