#shadow!papyrus

In this concept, you're a little kid laying in bed, in the dark. Your night light's gone out, so you need to get your flashlight to stay calm. The only problem is that there's a monster in your room. It's sitting in a chair with it's back to you, not moving or making a sound, and it frequently turns around to look at you. When it turns to look at you, you have to pretend to be asleep. There are two meters at different areas of the screen; ones for your danger level and the other is for the condition of your sanity/how mentally stable you are. When you close your eyes and pretend to be asleep, you need to listen very carefully and keep them shut until you hear a very faint audio cue or you have to wait for the danger level to go down. If you open your eyes too soon before you've gotten a chance to get your flashlight, you're attacked. The attack doesn't kill you though, it drains your sanity. If you're attacked too many times, you slowly lose your sanity due to all the fear you're feeling, and you'll turn into a shadow person/mara demon, just like Nightmare.

If you want to survive the night, you need to get your flashlight off of your dresser and point the light at the monster (Nightmare), but ONLY when he looks at you. Once you have your flashlight, his behavior changes. You're supposed to pretend to be asleep when he turns to look at you, but if he happens to catch you with your eyes open, he'll quickly dart to another part of the room to hide. You have a limited amount of time to find him with your flashlight, before he attacks you and drains your sanity. If you point your flashlight at him enough, he retreats and hides in your closet the rest of the night. When you start the next night though, he come back. Each night you choose to play, he gets closer and closer, and he turns around more often. In other words, each night gets more difficult. If you choose to play the game in hard mode, you share a room with your sibling, who's a toddler. If you use the flashlight too much in hard mode, the light will wake them up and they'll scream, which results in basically a game over, because Nightmare will be alerted to the situation and he'll know that you're not actually sleeping.

Your danger meter shifts from green to orange to yellow to red, with green being completely safe and red being not safe at all. Your sanity scale works the same way, except green is when you're totally fine and red is when you're dangerously close to losing your mind and becoming a shadow person. You'll know your sanity is starting to get low when you start hallucinating. When the scale is at orange, your vision goes in between blurry and clear at random times, sometimes preventing you from seeing if Nightmare's looking at you or where he is. When the scale reaches yellow, you'll start to hallucinate. You can tell these are only hallucinations though because they'll look like holograms or be misty/smoky in appearance. When the scale hits red, these hallucinations become solid beings, as well as actual threats. Meaning, if you hit red, not only do you have to manage Nightmare, but you have to manage three other threats as well, each with their own quirks.

Dust and Killer are figments, but they have their own preferred ways of showing up to torment you. Dust likes to try entering your room through your bedroom door. Keeping the door closed is a good way to keep him out, but the door will only stay closed for a few seconds at a time before it creaks open again. If the door is closed, you're safe, but the more open it is, the more likely it is that he's in you're room. Killer likes to slide out from under your bed. You have to check it frequently to make sure that he stays there and doesn't move, and if he speaks to you, hearing his voice drains your sanity. If either of them get too close to you, you have to close your eyes and stay as still as possible. No matter what you hear, it's imperative that you don't move. Dust doesn't speak, but his presence drastically raises your danger level, while Killer's voice drains your sanity.

The third hallucination is Papyrus, who is a shadow. He doesn't speak, and he usually doesn't come too close to you, but he's still just as dangerous as the others. He peers at you from outside your window, and you have to blast him with the flashlight when he does. You have to make sure that you only look at him with the flashlight on to keep him out, though. If you mess up and look at him too many times without the flashlight, he'll start appearing in your doorway, too. He goes between the two places completely at random, and he hates being seem. If you accidentally look at him without the flashlight while he's in your doorway, he'll charge at you and you'll be attacked, which further drains your sanity.

Now back to Nightmare. During the last few nights, he'll appear beside your bed, waiting to pull himself up just enough to peek at you. If you get him with the flashlight, he'll slowly slide back further and further away, until eventually, he's forced to hide in the closet until the last night. On the FINAL night, he crawls up onto your bed and inflicts sleep paralysis (meaning that you can't move at all and you'll hallucinate at the same time). You have to keep your eyes shut and remain still until you hear and auditory cue that signals that he's no longer on the bed. This is the only guaranteed time where his movement makes noise; the rest of the time it's a 50/50. He'll sometimes look like the silhouette of a solid person, and in that form, he makes noise when he moves. Other times, he'll look somewhere between a mist and a solid form; that form is when he makes absolutely no noise.

Appearance wise, Nightmare is just this black silhouette of everyone's favorite OG Nightmare, with no definitive features except for his singular cyan eye light (which is usually seen glowing). You'll know he's looking at you if you can see his eye light. You won't be able to see his face or what he actually looks like until he's right on you, draining your sanity. If he's about to attack you and drain the last bit of your sanity, you'll hear him start laughing a little.

The others make no sound whatever, except for Killer's mumbling and occasional tapping on the underside of your bed. When he and Dust get too close to you, there will be a very faint ringing in your ears. Papyrus comes with binaural (aka 3D) audio, so you might hear knocking on your window or soft breathing in your ear from time to time. Binaural/3D audio would give the illusion that he's actually there with the player (you) irl.