Vesper Street': a close look, tips and whether it is worth your time

If you like horror games that scare you with silence and dripping water rather than jump scares, give this one a look. Here is everything you need before the first launch: the gist, the controls and some working techniques.

What this game is

Vesper Street is an isometric survival-horror set in a drowned town. The reservoir broke and it has been raining for forty days; the phone booths keep ringing and Tomas Kell keeps answering. Now his sister Nadia walks back into the water to find him, gathering seven of his torn pages across three chapters.

The city, the rain, the neon, the fog and every sound are not downloaded — they are computed in your browser: voxel geometry, water reflections and a synthesised WebAudio score. That is also what sets the genre note here: the town is as quiet as your browser allows, and in that quiet a ringing booth two blocks away is enough.

How to play, in short

1. Tap or click the ground to walk there; tap an object (page, battery, key, valve wheel, phone) to walk to it and use it.

2. Drag a finger or the mouse to orbit the camera; a vertical drag tilts it.

3. Mouse wheel or a two-finger pinch zooms the frame in and out.

4. F is the flashlight, M sound, H hides the HUD, Esc or space hangs up and puts the note down.

A few final tips

• The water in Vesper is not rising, it is remembering. The Answered freeze in your flashlight beam — hold them there and they burn. Do not switch the light off next to them, and do not spend batteries on empty streets.
• Street lamps are safe ground, batteries are not forever. Light is both your weapon and your safe zone, so plan the route before you walk into the dark.
• The campaign is linear, but the ending is yours: all seven pages — four of Tomas's diary entries, two pump-station logs and a night nurse's note — unlock the real ending. Miss one and you only get static on the line.
• Check out the demo mode on the game page — the AI shows how pages get read and how the flashlight is handled, and repeating it yourself gets much easier. Progress saves in your browser, so Continue returns you to exactly the chapter you stopped on.

Your leaderboard score is the number of torn pages read: seven at most. Put on headphones, and do not answer. Ready to try? "Vesper Street"