Where Darkness Took Them

📌 Description

Game project developed over a year and a half as part of the Unity course at ESIEE Paris. It is an exploration (and horror) game where the player must find fragments of their memory scattered inside a mansion in order to escape.

📚 Lore and Deeper Meaning

Our game features a narrative with a double meaning. In this first part, the character feels drawn to a mansion where they allegedly saw their child trapped. The rest of the story is straightforward: they head there, suffer an unfortunate accident, and then wake up locked inside a room of that very same building. Through the gameplay, our protagonist will try to escape the mansion with the help of a lost soul, before being captured by demons right at the exit.

We aimed to go beyond traditional horror tropes here, drawing inspiration from titles like Five Nights At Freddy's or Fears to Fathom, which often feature a deeper underlying meaning. In this project, the concepts of children's mental images, the mansion, and these demons are far more metaphorical than the player might initially think. These images and the strange pull toward the haunted location actually reflect the character's profound insanity. They are seeking to relive their own damned childhood rather than saving their own child. The mansion is in reality a representation of the psychiatric hospital they never managed to escape from. The wandering soul and the demons are reflections of their deep emotions and mental state.

Technical Aspects

The game was developed in Unity3D using C#. The project includes a cinematic cutscene system as well as voiced dialogues.
The game is also fully optimized (using occlusion culling) to ensure a smooth and immersive experience. Several custom shaders were written to enhance the game's atmosphere, notably a fog shader and a Ray-Marching shader.

🎨 Assets

• Polygon Horror Mansion (Synty)
• Starter Assets - FirstPerson
• Starter Assets - ThirdPerson
• Cute Monster Ghost's FREE
• Footstep mini-pack
• Wooden Planks
• PROMETEO : Car Controller
• POLYGON - Sampler Pack