You wake up dead.
The Bureau of Liminality assigns you a manor, five demanding Patrons, and no way home. Scare your guests to harvest screams, laughs, vomit and mind shards. Pipe those reactions through production lines to feed the Patrons. Hire monstrous staff who will help enormously and occasionally kill somebody. Build the gate, get out of limbo, and try to do it before the Bureau notices the bodies.
Fear is fun. Death is paperwork.
What's in the demo
The demo is the opening chapter, roughly an hour, and it runs until the night your first guest fails to go home.
Build your first rooms, decorate them, then upgrade them
Scare guests and catch what comes out of them: screams, laughs, vomit
Put undertakers on the payroll and decide how they spend their shift
Craft and refine raw reactions into something the Patrons will accept
Meet your Patrons and summon your first VIPs
Handle a body, and the Bureau investigator who comes asking about it
When the demo's ending card comes up you can close it and keep playing in the house for as long as you like.
No jump scares. Spooky, funny, and rude about death.
Plays on Windows, and it plays on Steam Deck with full controller support if you would rather run a haunted house from the couch.
What happens next
Hauntworks will be at Steam Next Fest this October, and launches into Early Access on October 30, the night before Halloween. The demo stays up in the meantime, so grab it whenever.
If you like what you play, the single most useful thing you can do is hit Wishlist on this page. It is what tells Steam to show the game to anybody else.
Creators
Record it, stream it, monetize it. No permission needed, no strings. Press kit with trailer, screenshots and ready-to-use footage lives at haunt.works/press, and press or creators who want a build early can email [email protected].
Thanks for being here. Go break something.
Chris, Elbow Elbow Games