Neighbour

The first phantom is scratching at the door and the first of many phantom puzzles is about to begin.

If you Left Hand the door then it opens and you find yourself staring into total darkness. The moans and cracks and static noise flare to a really unpleasant volume. The darkness spreads quickly across the screen and after a few seconds, you crash to desktop. There are rumours that if you look away quickly enough then you can survive opening the door, but nobody has provided reliable evidence of this.

The only other doorway in the room is now locked, so you are left with little to interact with. The longer you leave the scratching at the door, the louder it gets. The wheezing and moaning grow louder too, and the louder they get the more distorted they become. Strangely, using the taps resets the noises to their initial level which leads me to believe that the taps affect on sound is just a bug.

The solution to this first part of the puzzle is hard, because it involves you doing something that seems counter-productive. You need to let your phone go dark. This is a common theme in RRE – when you think you've tried everything, stop – and try doing nothing. Once the room has been dark for about 10 seconds, the scratching will stop and the wheezing will recede. You can no longer open the door, even if you can find your way to it in the darkness. The only way to proceed is to Right Hand and turn on your cell. The room is immediately filled with wheezing and screaming and if you look out of the breath-covered window, there will be Neighbour.

Describing the appearance of the phantoms is always going to be hard. You can't see much of them to start with, and the moment you glance at them, things just get darker. Judging from the height of the window, Neighbour is about human-sized and taller than it is wide. Like all phantoms it is various shades of black, purple and dark blue, and is engulfed in some kind of smoke cloud. A single throbbing limb writhes from the darkness on occasion. The moniker of Neighbour comes from one of many early RRE fanarts in which this protrusion was imagined as a waving hand and a speech bubble declared “hey Neighbour I just wanted to invite you round for a bbq but I can see your busy :D”.

With distance and the window between you, you do have a chance to look at the phantom for a moment, but any longer and the darkness spreads across the screen. Neighbour grows to fill the window, and then its darkness engulfs the walls. Each time you Right Hand, the light draws it towards you, and each time you look at it, you are closer to death. You are forced to negotiate your way through the room in darkness, trying to avoid Neighbour without looking at it to see where it is.

It is terrifying. If you walk into Neighbour then you're given swirling smoke that you can rarely escape from, and the volume increases to a roar. About 50% of deaths to Neighbour result in a crash to desktop, but 50% of the time you will be returned to the moment before he appears at the window. Progress is made by finding your way to the door and opening it in the dark. Whilst you expect, from the layout of the house, to be outside, you find yourself in another corridor. Using your phone draws Neighbours attention and he will chase you. Running into the corridor introduces another key element of phantom puzzles.

Your phone rings. It lights up and makes noise. You can suddenly see the fact that the corridor twists and turns into a sort of maze ahead. It also causes Neighbour to give chase. You are faced with a predicament – do you answer the phone and go back to darkness knowing that finding your way through the maze will be near impossible, or do you let it ring and hope you can outrun the terrifying thing behind you? In this case, the latter is easier because of how hard it is to navigating the maze, but the former is possible. If you do answer the phone you get the following message in an older male's voice:

“Star...Star...Good...Circle...Circle...Good….Star...Star...Good...Waves...Waves...Good...Cross...Cross...Good...Waves...Waves...Good. Perfect.”

Although as random as any other message received so far, this is actually a clue for a puzzle later on, which leads me to believe that you are "supposed" to answer the call.

The maze halts abruptly in a dead end and another locked door. If Neighbour is too close when you reach this part of the maze, you will die. If you've managed to stay far enough ahead, and not relied too heavily on your torch, you can Left Hand the door a few times, and eventually you will hear the sound of it unlocking. Open the door, crash to desktop.