Everything looks normal. Nothing is normal.
Play STILLHOUR — free, in your browser
STILLHOUR is a free first-person liminal-space horror game that runs in your browser. It is 3:17 in the morning at The Wenlow, a hotel that is lit, clean, carpeted and ready for guests, with music coming from a floor you are not on and nobody behind the front desk. A card says your room is 614 and your key has gone up with housekeeping. The hotel is built out of real rooms — a coffered lobby with a grand piano nobody is playing, guest corridors with brass room numbers, made-up bedrooms with the lights off, a humming ice alcove, the laundry and the service corridor behind STAFF ONLY — but it is not built like a real building. It changes. Only where you are not looking, and never while you can see it: a corridor is longer when you come back out of a room, a painting has been swapped, a door that opened onto one room now opens onto another, and the fire evacuation plan on the wall has quietly been reprinted to match. You carry three yellow caution signs, and any room with a sign standing in it cannot change, which makes them your only way of keeping a way back. The staff are the other rules. Housekeeping pushes a cart with a bad wheel you can hear from two corridors away, tidies every room you leave untidy and turns down anyone it finds inside one; a DO NOT DISTURB hanger is the only thing it respects. Downstairs, down a flight of stairs that goes further than a hotel should, is the pool: a bright indoor swimming hall with perfectly still water, daylight in the high windows at three in the morning, and a lifeguard on the high chair who does not move while you are watching it. Someone has been waiting for you in every one of these places. Chapter One — Check-In — takes most people half an hour to forty-five minutes, saves at every bed, sofa and bench you rest on, and never ends your run: being caught just wakes you where you last rested, with everything you found. STILLHOUR is an original game and is not affiliated with the Backrooms or any of its creators.
You start in the lobby, in front of the desk. Read the card and play the message on the house phone: your room is 614, the elevator needs a key card, and the key is with housekeeping. The single line of handwriting at the top of the screen always tells you what you are looking for next, and Tab (NOTES on a phone) shows it again along with everything you have read.
The guest corridor runs west out of the lobby. Most of its doors are locked; some open onto guest rooms with the lights off — the switch is on the wall by the door. At the far end a STAFF ONLY door leads to the back of house: a service corridor, the janitor's closet, the linen room, the housekeeping office and the laundry.
The janitor's closet has a stack of caution signs and a memo that explains them. Q sets one down in front of you. A room with a sign standing in it cannot change, however long you are gone, so a sign in the corridor you came in by is a way back that stays a way back. You have three. Pick them up with E.
Housekeeping starts its rounds when you go behind the staff door. You will hear the cart first — one wheel ticks — and it knocks before it goes into a room. It goes to rooms left untidy: lights on, doors open, signs on the floor. If it finds you inside a room it is servicing, or sees you taking something from its cart, it turns you down, and you wake up where you last rested. The master key card hangs on the end of the cart.
Take the key while housekeeping is inside a room. It faces the bed while it works and does not see behind itself — but it hears running. Walk up, take the card, walk away. If it follows you, it is slower than your walk: break its sight and keep going, or get into a guest room, close the door and hang DO NOT DISTURB on it from the inside (F).
The master key runs the elevator. The sixth floor has one long corridor, and room 614 is along it. Somebody left you a note, a pot of tea and a pool band.
The pool is through the POOL & FITNESS door on the south side of the lobby, behind the chain; the band opens it. Walk on the pool deck. The lifeguard on the high chair whistles once, then twice, at anyone running or going in the water, and the rules board says it will not signal a third time. It does not move while you are watching it.
The plant room key is on the lifeguard's chair. The plant room is off the north side of the deck, and draining the pool opens the last door in this chapter.
A first-person liminal-space horror game: you explore an empty hotel at 3:17 in the morning, and the pool beneath it, looking for room 614 and for whoever has been waiting for you there. There is no combat. The horror is in the place — a building that is bright, clean and completely normal, except that it rearranges itself whenever you are not looking — and in its staff, who each have one rule you have to learn.
No. STILLHOUR is an original game with its own world, story, rooms and creatures, and it is not affiliated with the Backrooms, Kane Parsons, A24 or any other Backrooms creator. It sits in the same broad genre — liminal spaces, empty places that feel familiar and wrong — which is why people who like the Backrooms or the "poolrooms" tend to like it. There are no yellow office mazes, levels or noclipping in it.
It is free and runs in your browser, on a computer or a phone, with no install and no account. Every surface, sound and piece of music in it is generated by the game as it runs, so it loads no texture or audio files. Headphones make a real difference: every room has its own echo, and you will hear things before you see them.
Only where nobody is looking. A room you have seen and walked away from can come back different — a longer corridor, furniture moved, a painting swapped, a light gone out, a door that now opens onto a different room — but nothing ever changes in front of you, and the important places (the lobby, room 614, the pool) never change at all. Caution signs are how you fight it: set one down in a room and that room stays exactly as it is for as long as the sign is standing.
Not in a way that costs you anything but time. If housekeeping turns you down, or the lifeguard reaches you, you wake up on the last bed, sofa or bench you rested on, with every key, sign and note you had. The run saves itself as you go, so you can close the tab and continue later.
Chapter One, Check-In, takes most people between half an hour and forty-five minutes the first time. The leaderboard is for how quickly you can finish it once you know the way — the clock stops whenever you are reading a note, so reading everything never costs you. Further chapters are planned.
Yes. A gamepad works throughout (left stick to walk, right stick to look, A to use, X for a caution sign, Y for the DO NOT DISTURB hanger). On a phone the left thumb walks and dragging on the right looks, with on-screen buttons for everything else. On older or integrated graphics the game picks a lighter quality setting on its own; you can change it in the pause menu.
Also in: Free Halloween Games You Can Play in a Browser, Free Liminal Space Games You Can Play in a Browser, Free 3D Browser Games (WebGL, No Download) · All collections
All 36 free browser games · Collections · About · Updates · Contact · Terms · Privacy