HINENI

Content warning: blood, death, religious imagery, flashing images.

“Here am I.” — Isaiah 6:8, said on seeing the seraphim.

You wake from a coma in the Threshold Hospital.
The world has fifteen minutes left.

The nurses still change the sheets. A doctor counts to forty-one with his forehead against the wall. A woman in a wheelchair is waiting for a son who comes back at seven; it has been seven since yesterday. A man in the corner begs you not to look at the ceiling.

Look at the ceiling.

WHAT IT IS

HINENI is a short first-person horror game rendered entirely in ASCII: a real 3D hospital turned into characters by their shape, like an engraving that breathes. There is no combat and nothing to shoot. Reading and choosing stop the clock. Walking does not.

• Fifteen minutes, six endings. The last thing you do decides how the world ends for you. Every ending has its own look, and the ones you find can be revisited from the menu.
• What is above the ceiling. Wheels full of eyes. Bodies with the faces of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle, praying, weeping blood, speaking in tongues. Look away and they wait. Look back and they go on.
• A city on fire behind the glass, sirens and screams you only hear standing close to it.
• Every line voiced, in five languages chosen separately for text and voice: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.
• Plays anywhere: in the browser (desktop and phones, in landscape, with two touch sticks), or downloaded for Windows, macOS and Linux.

CONTROLS

WASD walk · Mouse look · E interact · F flashlight · Esc pause · F5 save
On phones: two sticks, and the Controls button for the rest.
Best with headphones, in the dark, in one sitting.

DOWNLOADS

• macOS: the app is not signed with an Apple certificate. The first time, right-click Hineni → Open → Open.
• Windows: SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher: More info → Run anyway.
• Linux: make Hineni.x86_64 executable if needed and run it.

CREDITS

Design, writing and code by Jorge Polanco. Music, “Mechanical Hum”, by antm_ai.
Characters: Quaternius (CC0) · Props: Poly Haven (CC0) · Voices: Kokoro-82M · Bells, sirens and screams: Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0, CC BY-SA 4.0) · Fonts: Meslo LG, Noto Sans SC/JP, Ma Shan Zheng, Yuji Syuku, Rubik Wet Paint.
Scripture: Revelation 6:8 and 9:6, Isaiah 6:8 (KJV, Reina-Valera 1909, Chinese Union Version, Japanese Colloquial, Almeida Revista e Corrigida).

---