“A gas has no face to look with, so there’s no cone of vision, just a front. By the time you notice it, it’s already at your back.”
Almost every wanderer knows the Smiler as silhouettes in the distance. A few speak of another, a mass of smoke that spreads through space instead of walking. The archive gathers those accounts here. None has been confirmed, and the creature that is reliably seen is the one described in Smiler: The Gaze.
The six phases described
| Phase | What witnesses say | How it ends |
|---|---|---|
| Latent | Exists far away, with no visible body, and drifts slowly through the level | Someone enters its radius of presence |
| Presence | Announces itself without showing smoke | It approaches, or loses interest and returns to Latent |
| Spread | Smoke enters through floor, ceiling and cracks, with several fronts at once | Contact head-on |
| Pressure | Fills the space and cuts off exits; the face emerges and dissolves | Extreme proximity |
| Strike | The smoke leaves your field of view, sounds, and reappears behind you | The window runs out and it withdraws |
| Withdrawal | Contracts, escapes through the geometry and disperses | Returns to Latent |
All the accounts agree that the Withdrawal is the way out of everything. Nobody has seen a Smiler die or switch off, and it always leaves by some route.
The chase and hunt phases that some add are really the way the front advances during the Spread and the Pressure. Once you are inside the Strike, there is no turning back.
How it perceives you
It has no cone of vision. It orients itself in three ways:
- Distance along the path the smoke travels, not in a straight line. Being four meters away with a floor slab in between doesn’t count as being four meters away.
- Noise. It is the main sense, and it hears you before it sees you, so the most prudent thing is to make none.
- A third sense tied to light about which the archive has no data.
In addition, obstacles slow everything it perceives, and a wall stops it.
How it chases
It doesn’t travel; it spreads on one side and retracts on the other. Witnesses estimate these front speeds. It is slow, under a meter per second, when it wanders, moves at walking pace when it hunts, and reaches 4.5 m/s once it has you. It is still slower than a survivor’s sprint, on purpose.
Even so, running isn’t enough, because the smoke surrounds you instead of following you. If it cuts you off on the other side, we are no longer talking about bad luck but about its way of spreading. The speeds change slowly, over a couple of seconds, which is why the advance reads as natural and smooth.
Like the Skinstealer, it gives up. If it loses patience it goes into the Withdrawal, and some claim it remembers where it lost you.
The strike without jumps
In the Strike, the smoke in front of you loses density and the smoke behind you gains it. Nothing has moved, only the distribution has changed, and that happens only if there was already smoke at your back. Against a wall it cannot attack you from behind. The window lasts between 1.5 and 2.5 seconds and there is a single strike per encounter. Nobody knows for certain what it does, and some speak of death, others of a fall, others of stolen objects or drained sanity. See Sanity for what each scare costs you.
What people say
Nobody has been able to confirm that a smoke front exists, that it has crossed paths with a survivor, or that it attacks that way. Each witness remembers a different temperament. One roams a lot, one opens several fronts, and one is reckless, and that is why the archive gives no single profile.