Hushwell

About the game

You are a night radio operator. A survey team sent to Hushwell, an old sanatorium closed off in the mountains, has stopped answering, and their last message, broken by static, asks nobody to come. You drive up anyway. The game is seen in first person on the top screen, with almost nothing drawn over the view; the bottom screen holds a hand-drawn map that fills in as you explore, a recorder for the tapes you find, your flashlight battery and a radio-static needle that swings when the creature is near.

Whatever lives in the well under the building hunts by sound. Walking is quiet, running carries far, wading through water is loud, and crouching makes no noise at all. A lit flashlight lets you see, but it also lets the creature see you. If it finds you it strikes, backs off and comes again; after three strikes the chapter starts over from the last emergency radio, which is also where you save. A flare stuns it for a few seconds, and there are very few of them.

The story runs through a prologue on the mountain road and five chapters: the lobby and the wards, the flooded baths, the records archive, the chapel garden at night and the well itself. Each chapter hides keys, a tape and a final key that sets off a chase to the exit. Finding all five tapes opens a second ending. Hushwell was made in 2026 by devgyurak, with the help of an AI coding agent, and all of its images, sounds and voices are generated by its own code.

Playing it here

This is a homebrew game made for the Nintendo DS: a new game by independent developers, not a commercial release. It runs here in the DeSmuME emulator and needs no Nintendo BIOS or firmware. Both screens appear on the page, one above the other (side by side in a wide window); the bottom one is the touch screen, which you can click with the mouse or tap with a finger to place pins on the map, work the recorder and turn the dials of the locks.

Click Play. The game opens with a warning: it has flashing lights, sudden loud sounds and scenes of violence, drawn in a dark low-polygon style. Choose NEW GAME with X, then press X to read the radio messages and Enter to start. The radio voice calls you by the console's user name, which in this emulator is "DeSmuME". On a real DS the game can also listen through the microphone and react to the lid closing; neither exists here, and the game plays fine without them. Your progress at the radios is kept on the game's save chip, which your browser stores. F2 saves the emulator state and F4 loads it.

Controls

On a phone or tablet the DS buttons appear on screen, under the two screens (or on the sides, with the device lying down), and the bottom screen works as the touch screen.

Tips

Walk, do not run. Running gets you there faster, but every step is heard. Save it for the chase at the end of a chapter.

Turn the light off when the needle moves. The static meter tells you the creature is close before you see it. Darkness and a crouch are often safer than a flare.

Pin the map. Tap the map to drop pins on doors you could not open or rooms you still want to search; the building is a maze in the dark.

Credits and licence

Hushwell is by devgyurak ("Corvane contributors", the same team as Corvane) and is under the Apache License 2.0; its graphics, models, sounds, voices and music are all generated by its own code. We build the ROM ourselves from the author's source with the BlocksDS toolkit; the licence text, the notices of the libraries inside the ROM and the exact source are linked from this page.