Knock Knock

The town is overrun with monsters, and some of them look a lot like the kids. But it would be a sin to deny a real kid their sweets.

Trick-or-treat from the wrong side of the door. You’re inside 31, Cinder Lane on Halloween with tonight’s list: three children, each with a photo of their costume. Someone knocks and says they’re Sami. You look through the peephole and decide whether that’s Sami, or something wearing Sami’s costume.

It’s one of my four entries for the Rive Halloween Challenge, and it borrows the shape of That’s Not My Neighbor and the paperwork of Papers, Please.

Fair, not random

The one rule I care about: you should always be able to tell. A real child matches the photo exactly. An impostor is wrong in exactly one way you can check, like a different colour, the wrong hat or a missing accessory. From the second night some of them show a sign instead.

Keep an impostor out and it doesn’t always leave quietly.

Open the door for one and it gets in, one of four ways, and leaves a mark on the door to remember it by.

Fourteen costumes

They’re made of cardboard, felt and bedsheets, each in three colours. No two colours inside one costume are close enough to argue about. I measured them, and a test makes sure it stays that way.

One camera

The first hallway had three vanishing points and a door almost as wide as it was tall. The second one goes through a single camera at peephole height, so walls, ceiling, floorboards and the swinging door all meet where your eye is. Outside, six shaders draw the lamp-lit porch, the ground mist that the posts and the visitor cut shadows through, the moths, the moon and the fisheye lens itself.

The other three

The rest of my Halloween entries: Hollow, a pumpkin you really carve, Séance, a talking board that answers back, and The Fogged Mirror, a bathroom mirror you shouldn’t clean. All four are in the Rive Halloween Challenge on Contra.