A hand holds a cream baby monitor showing the nursery camera; on the lamp-lit wall of the upstairs corridor, the shadow of a head on a long, bent neck turns towards the viewer

HUSHABYE

October 1988. The baby in the crib is not the baby.

A first-person horror game you play with your voice, which I am making solo in Unity 6. The sound runs on Wwise and my own C# DSP.

Watch the alpha (3:06) Earlier versions

You’re babysitting for the night. The swaddled bundle in the crib on CAM 1 is the creature. The real baby is crying somewhere else in the house, and the crying draws the creature out of the crib. Over five nights you find the baby, calm it and hide it, lure the creature away with your voice and put the real baby in the crib while it is empty. If the crying fades, the night is lost.

Single-player first-person horror, in production. 2026, Windows PC, Unity 6 HDRP. Solo: game design, C# gameplay, Wwise and DSP, and the models, including the house and the creature. All pictures on this page were captured in the game in October 2026.

The baby monitor’s screen on CAM 1, the nursery in infrared: the crib with the swaddled bundle, a mobile, a strip of six camera numbers, a battery and the date 08.10.88
CAM 1  08.10.88 The crib at the start of a night.

Hushing the baby, luring with your voice

First-person view down a dim upstairs corridor: a swaddled baby in a knitted cap rests on the left arm while the right hand points a flashlight ahead
With the baby on one arm, the other hand holds only the flashlight.

A real “shh” into the microphone calms the baby in your arms: a calm baby cries more quietly, and its crying fades more slowly. Without a microphone, holding Space does the same, more weakly.

With the monitor raised, you pick a camera, record your voice into it and play it back from the speaker in that room. The creature goes to check. Each playback costs battery, and the baby’s crying is louder than any recording.

Recordings stay in memory on your PC. The voice is never written to disk or sent anywhere.

A swaddled baby in a knitted cap, eyes shut, lies on the pantry floor beside a wooden cupboard in the warm light of a flashlight
The real baby, found in the pantry.
Close-up of a baby-monitor camera mounted high on a corridor wall: its lens, a small red light and the round speaker grille
The camera on the upstairs corridor wall, with its lens and speaker grille.

Sound through rooms and doorways

The upstairs corridor from the top of the stairs: doors left ajar, a band of lamplight from one room across the runner, the nursery at the far end
Doors left ajar on the upstairs corridor. Each doorway is a Wwise portal.

Each room in the house is a Wwise room and each doorway a portal. An open door lets the crying through and a closed one muffles it.

A voice played from a camera goes through a C# effect that makes it sound like the speaker of a cheap monitor: a 300–3400 Hz band, soft distortion, 9-bit grain, hiss, 50 Hz hum and short dropouts.

Before Wwise, the same graph of zones drove my own C# engine with five FDN (feedback delay network) reverbs.

A baby monitor from 1988

In a lamp-lit 1980s kitchen, a hand raises a baby monitor; on its screen, the infrared picture of the upstairs corridor, empty under its ceiling lamp
The kitchen at night, with the corridor camera on the monitor.

The monitor copies the on-screen display of a VHS camcorder: camera number, battery, REC, date stamp. There is no health bar; you judge the baby by its crying. To look at the monitor, you have to put the baby down.

  1. Infrared monitor view of the nursery: a crib with a swaddled bundle, a mobile above it and teddy-bear wallpaper
    CAM 1  08.10.88 Nursery
  2. Infrared monitor view of the upstairs corridor, empty under its ceiling lamp, with doors on both sides
    CAM 2  08.10.88 Upstairs corridor
  3. Infrared monitor view of the twins’ room: a crib, an old pram and a baby walker on a parquet floor
    CAM 3  08.10.88 Twins’ room
  4. Infrared monitor view of the downstairs hall: a terrazzo floor, a coat stand and the stairs going up
    CAM 4  08.10.88 Hall
  5. Infrared monitor view of the kitchen: a table with a cloth, the stove and shelves of jars
    CAM 5  08.10.88 Kitchen
  6. Infrared monitor view of the living room: a ceiling lamp with three shades, a patterned rug, a coffee table and a sofa
    CAM 6  08.10.88 Living room

The thing in the crib

In a flashlight beam, a long, ridged neck coils out of torn teddy-bear wallpaper; the head hangs in darkness above it
It comes out of the wall beside the crib, head first.

The creature is a blind woman’s head on a procedural neck several metres long, with a headless body in a floral nightgown limping behind it. It hunts by sound.

In the crib it passes for the baby. When it hunts, the wallpaper beside the crib bulges and tears in strips and the head comes out first; on the way back the body goes in first and the head last. While it hunts, the lamps in the house go out.

It searches rooms and looks into hiding places; if it finds you, the night ends. Later nights add a red ribbon for the crib and poppy seeds the creature stops to count, both folk protections against changelings.

From inside a bathtub, behind a half-open curtain, moonlight falls across the bathroom where a pale head searches above the edge of the tub
Hiding in the bathtub while the head searches the room.
Under the corridor lamp, the silhouette of a headless body limps towards the stairs, its long neck arching ahead of it
The body follows its neck down the corridor.

The house, October 1988

The game takes place in one two-storey family house furnished as it would have been in 1988: a wall unit with a television, patterned wallpaper, terrazzo and a pendulum clock. These rooms are shown with their lamps on; on a hunting night they are seen by flashlight.

  • A 1980s living room: a dark wall unit with books and a television, a pendulum clock, patterned wallpaper, a coffee table on a rug and a three-shade ceiling lamp
  • From the hall, a narrow staircase climbs into the dark towards a lit landing, a flashlight beam on the wall beside it
Two more rooms: the kitchen and the bathroom
  • A lamp-lit 1980s kitchen: a cloth-covered table, a white stove, tiled walls and shelves of jars
  • A small 1980s bathroom: white tiles with a patterned border, a washbasin under a mirror with a lamp and a laundry bin