Don't Breathe: a cursor-is-your-breath horror game in Rive

Your cursor is your breath. Move and it hears you. Don't Breathe is a complete stealth-horror game built in Rive. One room, three candles, ninety seconds of night, and one rule: stay still, stay silent. Hold the mouse to hold your breath. Glide to a candle, stay steady for two seconds, and the match strikes. But every exhale is a sound, and The Hollow is listening. The Hollow was once the owner of this house. Now it listens for breath in the walls. It drifts at the edge of the dark, and when it hears you, its eyes widen and it comes. Light all three candles before dawn and you survive, ranked by how quiet you were: Silent Saint, Careful, or Heavy Breather. This is a full game loop, not a tech demo. Title, playing, win, lose, difficulty that ramps as candles light, and an entity AI with three states: dormant, suspicious, hunting. Every frame is a single custom WGSL shader painted on the GPU Canvas: fog, film grain, candlelight with wax drips and volumetric shafts, drifting ash, breath vapor, and The Hollow itself. The sound is fully procedural too: a breath loop, a heartbeat that quickens as it closes in, the match strike, the jumpscare sting, all synthesized and wired to game events as Rive AudioAssets. One .riv file, 863KB, built with the Rive CLI. Play the demo: https://dontbreathegame.blogspot.com/2026/10/dont-breathe-play-horror-game.html Walkthrough video attached. Social post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7515622992521965568/ AI disclosure: I used Claude, an AI coding assistant, to draft the scene markup, game logic, and shader code, then hand-refined everything through four versions. The walkthrough's gameplay footage is rendered directly from the game's own shader, the narration is AI voiceover, and the sound effects are procedural audio I synthesized by hand.