Game concept proposal – Kseniia Trufanova – Artistic Game Development I

Game proposal concept sheet

Small Introduction:
“What feeling can you describe, waking up in an uncomfortable, cold bed with a vomit-stained mattress? You don’t remember where you are, and who you are. You see a small bedroom, a small apartment with an unpleasant swamp-green color.
Everything is so unfriendly and choking, and your head is testing with an ache. You try to remember, try to keep yourself up.
– It’s too dark, you need to open a window.
You are walking to a window covered with a curtain, put on a heavy fabric with your finger and open the shutters…”

Character:
The main character, Jason Rose, is a tall, middle-aged man, approximately 39 years old. His face looks gaunt and worn, covered with stubble and creased with lines of exhaustion. His tall frame is dressed in old, battered jeans, a simple T-shirt, and a green coat stained with grease and age.
At the beginning of the game, Jason wakes up in a room and realises he has lost his memory. He remembers nothing, but as the story unfolds — through exploration and puzzle-solving — Jason gradually pieces together the fragments of his past, assembling the puzzle of his own story into one whole.

A former worker at a law firm, who lost his job and eventually drowned himself in alcohol. Jason lost everything: his career, his family, and his wife, who was later found dead in a forest. And only one person knows the whole truth about that murder — Jason himself. He buried it deep in the basements of his memory, shut it away behind the doors of a dark cabinet. But memory is relentless. Every night, nightmares break into his mind, turning into screams, the crack of branches underfoot, and the crimson glare of a flashlight. Guilt strangles him like a noose, and the more he tries to drown it in the bottle, the louder the voice of the past echoes in his head.

Now, in his dreams, he finds himself in a decaying, alien world — a labyrinth of his own memories. The walls breathe, the floors are covered with damp mould, and behind every door, whispers can be heard, all sounding like his wife’s voice. To move forward, Jason must gather fragments of memory and puzzle pieces, torn photographs, and blood-stained scraps of letters. Yet with each piece he puts together, the terrifying picture of the past becomes clearer.

And he is not alone in this world. A shadow stalks him, woven from guilt and horror. Its footsteps echo through the empty corridors, and if Jason hesitates for too long, it draws closer, its cold breath grazing the back of his neck. To survive and uncover the truth, he must complete the puzzle. But every piece brings him not only closer to the revelation, but also to a confrontation with what he fears the most.

Environment:
At the beginning of the game, the protagonist wakes up in a small apartment with peeling walls painted in a sickly green, long darkened by damp and time. The furniture and appliances feel ripped straight from the 90s: a creaking wardrobe, a rattling TV, a broken fan, as if all of it was bought in bulk from a secondhand shop. The front door is bolted shut, and outside the window, there is no street, but an endless blood-red strip swallowed by crimson fog and the sickly light of the moon. The window leads to nowhere — and yet it is into this nowhere that Jason must step. Through the first puzzles, he breaks through into the Scarlet World — the beginning of the game’s second act.

The forest greets him with suffocating silence. The space feels wider than the apartment, but no freer: the twisted shadows of the trees hang like nooses, while above them the sky burns like a blood-drenched dome. Here lie new riddles and painful fragments of memory. And here Jason must find the rusted hatch that leads downward – into the farthest chambers of his own mind.

The third act becomes a nightmare of metal and rust with endless corridors where the walls drip with moisture and every footstep echoes as though the world itself is watching. The puzzles grow ever more complex, and behind Jason stretches the relentless Shadow — the embodiment of his guilt. This is the final labyrinth, the last threshold, where the truth will be revealed and all masks will be torn away.

Important objects of interaction:
A TV that works intermittently, a photograph, a window, a key.

Style:
Cubic, uneven. Dark style under old film.

Gameplay:
The game will be based on the mechanics of the games “Scilet Hill” and “Resident Evil”, mainly including the process of storytelling through interactions with objects, solving simple puzzles and exploring the environment. Basically, the game will be positioned as storytelling through exploring the environment.

Quick Concepts: