There's a moment about ninety minutes into Hollow Signal where the game does something so simple, and so effective, that I put the controller down and just sat with it for a second: it turns the sound off.
Rating: 9.2 / 10
Not muted — the game keeps ambient wind and your own footsteps — but the low-frequency hum that's been running under every scene since the opening cutscene just stops, and you realize how much tension it had been quietly building the entire time. It's the kind of restraint you rarely see from a team this size, and Hollow Signal is full of choices like it.
What works
- Sound design carries the entire mystery. There's barely any dialogue in the first two hours; you're reconstructing what happened at the tower entirely from tape fragments and environmental audio cues.
- The flashlight is a character, not a tool. Battery management sounds like a tired mechanic on paper, but the way light interacts with the fog system genuinely changes how you read every room.
- A six-hour runtime that never overstays its welcome. No padding, no filler collectibles — every area exists because it needs to.
What doesn't
The back third leans harder into combat encounters than the slow-burn first half promises, and it's the weakest stretch of the game as a result — competent, but generic compared to everything around it.
— the game's co-director, in our review interviewWe wanted the player's ears to do the work their eyes couldn't.
The bottom line
A two-person studio built one of the most confidently-directed horror experiences in years on what was clearly a fraction of a AAA budget. If the combat stretch had the same conviction as the rest of the game, this would be a perfect score.