Project Jump Scare

You wake in an empty office under emergency lights. Balloons hang for a celebration that never happened. Across the street sits a building. On the horizon, something enormous waits in the fog.

Project Jump Scare is a single-player survival horror game about leaving safety, carrying one critical piece at a time, and coming back before the woods change again.

The core loop

• Scavenge food and water so hunger and thirst do not end the run.

• Free a following drone that lights the dark and can be thrown at threats.

• Collect randomly placed parts and restore carnival rides (merry-go-round, Ferris wheel, tea cups, and more), one piece at a time.

• Close combat is click-to-attack on enemies when your hands are empty. You can also throw the drone. While you carry a part you cannot fight without dropping the part, dealing with the threat, and picking it up again.

• After the rides are restored, the illusion breaks. A cosmic entity emerges. You run a timed escape while it grows.

What is in the purchase right now

• The current single-player start: office and building intro with drone reveal, the forest crossings, full carnival restoration, and the final escape sequence.

• The one-item carry rule, click combat, throwable drone, survival meters.

• A free demo that stays available. It is a smaller version of the same loop: leave safety, take one thing, fight when you drop it, return, restore.

What Early Access is for:

Long-term, scavenging widens. You will push into more kinds of places during both restoration and escape: suburban neighborhoods, stores, malls, and other areas that can appear around the carnival. Those spaces are not in the demo. The first full step is the carnival. The next step is turning on the areas that grow around it. How far that expansion goes before it becomes unruly is what players need to test. The loop may be adjusted as that scope grows.

This is Early Access. Generation, balance, combat feel, and content volume will change. The one-item rule, the shifting forest, and the Old One remain the center.

Steam Deck support:

Steam Deck and SteamOS: this demo is the Windows build. It fails to start on Proton 11, the current default. In Properties, Compatibility, force Proton 10. Proton 9 also works. Recommended to shrink "screen percentage" in settings to 80 for smoothest play experience. There is no native Linux build in this demo.