Wrong Deer

Wrong Deer is a free trail cam horror game that runs in the browser. You spend the night in a cabin in the woods with four trail cameras strapped to trees along the four paths that lead to your door. Every time something moves in front of a camera, a grainy infrared photo is sent to your monitor - but it arrives a moment late, so what you see is always a little old. Most of the night it is deer, raccoons and owls. Then one frame shows a deer standing on legs twice too long, looking straight into the lens.

You have one move: tap a camera to fire its white flash. The flash only works up close. When the thing is near the lens, the flash sends it running back into the trees and you earn evidence; when it is halfway down the trail, the flash only pushes it back a step; when it is still far away, the flash is wasted. Flashing a real deer or an empty trail wastes a battery too, and batteries are scarce - you start the night with four and get one back every hour. After every shot the flash needs a second and a half to recharge; a tap while it charges fires nothing and costs nothing, so tapping fast does not empty the batteries. The rule that keeps you alive is in every photo: real deer look away, and the wrong one always stares at you.

If you let it through, it reaches the porch, the porch camera shows it at the door and it starts to knock. Tap the cabin before the third knock to drive it off with the porch flash, which costs two batteries. Hold out from midnight until 6:00 AM and dawn ends the night. A night takes about two and a half minutes, and the first two nights are forgiving: if it reaches the door, the porch light breaks and it leaves instead of getting in.

There are twelve nights, and each one adds a single new trick. Animals arrive on the second night. Then it starts avoiding the camera that last flashed it, fog swallows the trails, it learns to walk on all fours like a real deer, it peeks from behind tree trunks, snow hides it so that only fresh tracks give it away, it knocks cameras over so their pictures come in sideways, it shakes branches on the wrong trail to lure your flash, a new moon darkens every frame, two of them come at once, and a storm makes every photo take twice as long to arrive. The last night mixes everything until dawn, and after it the nights go on with random weather.

Every morning the evidence you gathered buys one of three camera upgrades: a faster uplink, spare battery cells, a wider flash that also works at middle distance, a porch floodlight that halves the porch flash cost, a spare mount that stands a knocked camera back up, a salt lick that draws real deer to one trail, and microphones that show steps even when no photo is sent. The best flash photo of each night goes into your album. From the second night you can also play a duo night with another player online: two screens, one cabin and one shared battery, where either of you can flash any camera.

Wrong Deer plays with one finger on a phone or tablet and with the mouse or the keyboard on a computer: the number keys 1 to 4 or the arrow keys flash the cameras, 5 or Space flashes the porch, and P pauses. There is no gore and no jump-scare spam - the fear comes from waiting for the next photo to load.