Hollow Pines

About Hollow Pines

Hollow Pines is a horror game built around casefiles. Each one is a place in a town that has been quietly wrong for decades — a motel, a road, a stretch of woods — and each is a self-contained night with something to find and something that would rather you did not find it.

It is not a shooter with a dark filter. You carry equipment, you manage what you can see, and the game is far more interested in what you do not know than in what is in front of you.

Casefiles and night trials

Cases unlock as you close them, and the night trials are the harder version for when the story difficulty has stopped frightening you. Both keep the same rule: the town does not explain itself.

Equipment

What you take matters, because you cannot take everything. The loadout screen before a case is a real decision and the game is happy to let you get it wrong.

Controls

Arrow keys or WASD to move, with use, fire and dodge on their own keys. I opens the bag, M the map and C the casefile.

How to play Hollow Pines

1. Open the career desk and select an available casefile. The first is Case 01, The Last Signal, about a missing radio engineer called Mira Vale.
2. Choose how hard the night should be. Story has forgiving encounters, while Survival keeps supplies scarce.
3. Spend any credits on career equipment before you start, then press Play Selected Case.
4. Move with A and D, hold Shift to run and press E to inspect or use things. F switches the torch on, the mouse aims and clicks to shoot (or use J), R reloads and Space dodges.
5. Follow the case objective. Locked doors, missing fuses and keypads each point to a clue or a tool somewhere else on the investigation map, which you can check with M.
6. If the signal finds you, restore your latest checkpoint or restart the chapter, and try a different approach.
7. Complete the final objective to close the case, collect the XP and credits, and unlock the next casefile.

Hollow Pines tips and strategy

• Light is your best weapon. The pale ones recoil from a direct beam, and holding your aim on them slows their approach. Keep the torch on a threat rather than sweeping it about.
• Watch the torch charge. The beam drains, and a flat torch leaves you with nothing but your gun. Spare batteries go in the bag and are used with a click, so carry at least one.
• Treat bullets as a last resort. Ammunition is scarce, especially in Survival. Dodge with Space and keep your distance from their reach, and search supply lockers when you do run low.
• Leave room in the bag. When the bag is full you cannot pick anything else up until you use a dressing or battery. Clear space before you search a new room.
• Heal at the right moment. A field dressing restores 50 health with H, and the game will not waste one when you are already at full health. Use it before a dangerous stretch, not after.
• Read everything. Notebooks, bulletins and photographs carry access codes and directions. If a keypad will not open, the number is written down somewhere you have already been or are about to visit.
• Restore power for shortcuts. Getting a power supply back on can unlock service routes back to earlier locations, which saves a long walk past whatever is still out there.

Casefiles and the career

The Last Signal is laid out as an investigation map of connected locations: the motel, the forest, the drainage works and the relay station, with Room 06 branching off the motel and a ranger shelter off the forest. You move back and forth between them as each discovery opens the next route.

Later cases change the job. One asks you to recover signal samples and treat stranded rangers with dressings before escorting them to safety, and another sends you back to the relay to face a stronger warden and its reinforcements under pressure.

Closing cases earns XP and credits. Every 300 XP is a new investigator level, and credits buy career equipment that applies to every solo case: an extra 12 starting rounds, an extra starting dressing, or a stronger beam that slows threats more. Which one you buy first is a genuine choice between fighting, surviving and avoiding.