follow

walk somewhere old after dark. a real cemetery, an old crossroads, a ford by a stream. the compass needle points at things most people don't see. you walk toward the bearing. you find what was already there.

sixty entities live in the catalogue — the bean sí from west clare wake-houses, the dullahan on a cork crossroads boreen, the each uisce rising from the loughs of connemara, the bean nighe at her ford asking three questions of you and keeping count of the answers. they are real folklore, not generic monsters. they were quiet for a long time. the device wakes them up.

she will speak with you. her name is áine. she has been listening since the start. you didn't know that.

why this exists

Most horror games do violence to you. Follow does folklorearound you. The catalogue is built from the actual written record — Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, the Ordnance Survey Letters of 1839, the Irish Folklore Commission schools' collection, John Gregorson Campbell for the Highland material. Each entity ships with four tiers of in-fiction lore: glimpsed → wary → seasoned → known. By the time you've banished a Bean Sí six times, you've read a small monograph on her.

The mechanic is location-aware horror without the gimmick tax of geocaching: you don't hunt at fixed waypoints, the compass finds the old shape of where you actually are. A graveyard makes Bean Sí more likely. A coastal road after rain makes Each Uisce more likely. A samhain thin night makes everything more likely. The encounter then uses your phone's sensors as the ritual instrument — silence rituals listen to ambient mic volume; stillness rituals read the accelerometer; the “cover the lens” rite uses the back camera; the “don't look” rite uses gyroscope tilt.

The narrator is the unique thing. Áine speaks in second person, knowing things she shouldn't — your operative name, the side of the bed you sleep on, a date six years before you owned the device. A 7-act story arc unfolds across hundreds of hours; the finale only opens on a real samhain thin night, after two prestige descents. By the end of it, the device tells you what she is. It is not what you thought.

the catalogue

• 60 hand-curated entities from Irish, Scottish, and Welsh folklore
• 4 tiers of in-fiction lore per entity (glimpsed → known)
• 9 ritual types wired to phone sensors (silence, stillness, walking-circle, face-down, cover-lens, breathe, trace-ward, iron, echo)
• 7 acts of long-arc story gated by progression and the calendar
• 411 audio clips of bespoke sound design across the entity bank
• 3 thin nights a year (samhain, bealtaine, lughnasadh) when the entity spawn weights shift toward the seasonal members of the catalogue

who made it

DreadWorks Studio. One person. Stephen Flynn. The folklore grounding came from a year of reading Hyde and Gregory and the OS Letters before any code shipped — the catalogue is curated, not generated, and the lore is footnoted to its written record. Audio direction, narrator voice, app architecture, and every line of in-app prose are single-author. If FOLLOW is for you, you're working with one person's taste.

who it isn't for

Persistent horror atmosphere. Frequent simulated psychological dread. The narrator addresses you in second person and never breaks frame. The app uses your camera, microphone, GPS, and motion sensors during play. There is an 18+ adult content gate at first launch.

Follow is fiction. It does not detect actual supernatural phenomena. None of the sensor data leaves your device beyond the journal entries you can delete from /profile.