IT LIKES TO BE WATCHED is a free online horror game. No download, no install, no account needed: you open the site, put your headphones on, and start your night shift. It runs in any modern browser, on desktop and on your phone.
It is a first-person survival horror game. You work for Panoptic Systems, a company that stopped existing decades ago, recovering tapes from abandoned sites: an endless maintenance level with yellowed wallpaper, an interrogation sublevel, and the wings of a derelict diplomat building, all real 3D locations you walk through with nothing but a flashlight. Find every tape, then find the exit. You are not alone in there.
Something hunts you through every site, and it follows one rule: it only stands still while you are looking at it. Keep it in your beam and it freezes mid-step. Turn around to search for the next tape and you will hear it start moving again. Deciding when you can afford to look away is where the real dread lives.
The game runs over three increasingly hostile shifts of a few minutes each. Anomalies are randomized, so every run is different and it holds up well for replays and for streaming. There are three endings, one of them secret, reserved for players who finish a full run without a single mistake.
The game reads your real clock and comments on how late you are up. It knows your screen, your battery level, and it remembers your name and counts the days you stay away. All of this happens locally in your own browser as a horror effect; nothing of it is sent to a server. The details are in the privacy policy.
Everything is hand-built: the graphics are drawn procedurally, frame by frame, with no image files, and every sound, from the background drone to the scream, is synthesized live in your browser with the Web Audio API.
IT LIKES TO BE WATCHED is made by Vincent Borgers, an independent game developer from the Netherlands. The game is free and supported by optional donations and ads around (never inside) the game. Streamers are welcome to record and monetize videos without asking. Feedback and bug reports: info@itlikestobewatched.com or the contact page.
Panoptic Systems is fictional. Probably.