You wake up in /home with no memory, the last surviving process after a
catastrophic system failure. The filesystem around you is corrupted and haunted
by the daemons of what went wrong. Explore it, fight what's left of it, and
piece together what happened — using real Unix commands (ls, cd, cat,
pwd) as your only tools.
The directories are real ones. cd .. walks up the tree, ls -a shows what is
hidden, and a locked directory doesn't even show up until you hold its key. Type
man cd and the game tells you what cd does in an actual shell, not just in
here.
Every directory hides a flag. Some you just read with cat; some are buried in
huge logs you'll need grep to search; some are rogue processes you find with
ps and end with kill. Some flags hand you a key, and a new directory
appears. Hold 11 flags and /boot — where the Daemon Overlord waits — opens.
Stuck? Type hint.
No prior command-line experience needed; the game teaches you as you go.
What changed in each version: CHANGELOG.md. The version you're
running is on the title screen and on the first line of debug.log.
Exploring the Graveyard — pixel scene view, live panels, ECHO's quick reference
| Pokemon-style battles | Pick your difficulty |
|---|---|
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| Continue any run — one save slot per run | Settings — right from the main menu |
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On this page click Code → Download ZIP (direct link), unzip it, then open a terminal in that folder:
cd hauntedTerminal-mainAll commands below must be run from inside the game folder.
From inside the game folder, run the start script for your system:
On Mac/Linux:
./start.shOn Windows:
start.batThe start script automatically checks for Python, creates a virtual environment, installs dependencies, and launches the game. First time setup is completely automatic.
Prerequisites: Python 3.10+, pip
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.pyFull command list, classes, mechanics and tips live in REFERENCE.md — the game teaches all of it as you play, so treat that as a lookup, not required reading.
This project is licensed under the MIT License — see the LICENSE file for details.
- Inspired by classic text adventures, Zork, and Unix philosophy
- Rich — terminal formatting and UI
- Textual — TUI framework
- PyYAML — data loading
- cowsay — for inspiring the easter egg
Game Design & Development: NoHudd Narrative Design: The Great Kernel Panic storyline Pixel art: AI-generated, hand-picked and resized Special Thanks: To all sysadmins who've faced kernel panics
________________________________________
/ \
| The disk is clicking. Can you hear |
| it? It sounds like teeth. 010101. |
\ /
----------------------------------------
\ ^__^
\ (oo)\_______
(__)\ )\/\
||----w |
|| ||