Haze

HAZE is a short, quiet point-and-click horror story. You are alone aboard a derelict research vessel, re-running a reconstruction of its recovered record. At first the ship shows you itself the way it would like to be remembered: tidy quarters, a calm bridge, a mug of coffee left beside the navigator's keyboard. Every log you read and every voice you hear gives the record more to work with, and slowly the rooms begin to show you what they were keeping out of frame.
The Captain's Weight
Captain Maura Jeanette is good at her job. Her crew trusts her with their lives and with their mistakes. Her husband runs the medical bay. Her daughter draws her pictures and tapes them where she will see them.
Every system aboard still reads normal.
What happened here is in the maintenance tickets and the shift reports, the messages that were drafted and never sent, and the recordings the crew made for no one in particular. None of it tells the whole story on its own. You put it together.
How It Plays
Look closer. Point and click through the ship's rooms. Read crew logs, clinical notes, maintenance reports, and the things people leave on a desk when they expect to come back to it.
Listen. The crew's logs are performed aloud, each in their own voice. Some things aboard were only ever written down.
Reconstruct. What you understand is the input. When you have read enough, a room can be re-run into a deeper layer: the same place, the same angle, closer to the truth. What a room shows you, it can't take back.
Understand, not choose. There are no dialogue trees and no final button. The story closes according to how much of it you pieced together.
Nothing to fight. No combat, no fail states, no timers, nothing hunting you. You cannot lose. You can only decide how closely to look.
One Ship, One Story
HAZE takes place on a single ship, designed room by room around a single story. Every log, note, and recording aboard was made by someone on this ship, for someone on this ship. None of it was left for you. Small things recur. A name in one room makes sense of a message three rooms later.
The Look
A used-future ship in the spirit of late-seventies and early-eighties science fiction: cold ribbed corridors, CRT readouts, banks of toggle switches, cassette recorders, and the one warm lamp in a cold room. Rendered in chunky low-resolution pixels with a PSX-era edge, and carried by room tone and tape hiss rather than a score that tells you what to feel.
Length
About 30 minutes. Best in one sitting, with sound on.
Content Note
HAZE is a story about grief, burnout, and going unseen by the people closest to you. It contains themes of depression and suicide. If these are hard subjects for you right now, please take care of yourself. Support is available through Find A Helpline.