NO HEALTH BAR. Nothing else in this game does damage, so hit points would be a
survival-horror UI bolted onto a demolition game. Instead: one meter, DREAD, fed by
every way this place gets at you — being stared at, something close behind you, each
loop, and your own coughing. It decays when nothing is happening to you, and every loop
makes it grip harder (DREAD_LOOP_GRIP), so the place gets better at this the longer you
stay.
At 100% you die, and WHICH source pushed it over decides the death, which is what keeps
the three memes legible at the one moment it matters:
STARE "YOU LOOKED TOO LONG / it was still. it was always still. that was never the
safe part." (Slenderman)
REACH "IT WAS ALREADY IN THE ROOM / you were making so much noise."
Sprays. This is the gory one. (the xenomorph)
LOOP "YOU ARE STILL IN THE ROOM / you walked it eleven times. you will walk it
again." Eleven loops and the room simply keeps you. (Blair Witch)
Gore.gd is procedural — seeded blobs that swell on the lens and then bleed downward in
streaks, a wet burst at the camera (physical deaths only; being taken by the static
shouldn't spray), the camera going down to land on its side on the carpet, then the
card. The sequence is deliberately SLOW: a jumpscare is a spike, but a death should take
its time, because the seconds spent watching the lens settle are where it lands. R wakes
you up.
Player.set_frozen() so you can't stroll around during your own death.
Renamed Backrooms' VHS layer to `tape` — `dread` is the meter now, and it was clearer
anyway.
dev/probe_death.gd drives all three deaths and the revive.
Note: the "Parameter material is null" warning only appears under the headless dummy
renderer; windowed runs are clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
