BEHIND THE WALLS
Explore the inside of your walls in this First-Person adventure game.
BEHIND THE WALLS
Explore the inside of your walls in this First-Person adventure game.
Personal project, 2023
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Explore the inside of your walls in this First-Person adventure game.
Behind the Walls is a first-person adventure game set in a surreal world hidden just beyond the walls of your bedroom.
You're trapped in a shifting loop where space folds, time twists, and every path brings you back to the start. The more you explore, the less familiar things feel. Can you break free—or are you just digging deeper?
The game draws inspiration from House of Leaves for its eerie, mind-bending setting, Half-Life for its environmental storytelling and pacing, and atmospheric walking sims like Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch for their richly detailed, explorable spaces.
The blockout for the first level
I wanted to create an exploration game with a melancholic atmosphere and richly detailed 3D environments.
The first draft featured a single level set inside an obstructed wall. Players would crawl beneath clutter, balance across wooden beams, and drop down pipes to reach the bottom.
Along the way, muffled voices and distant sounds echoed from the other side—the inside of the house. The goal was to evoke a sense of isolation and longing, as if the player were forever cut off from an unreachable world.
This design also allowed for minimalist storytelling, using sparse environmental cues to spark the player's imagination.
While designing new levels, I developed a looping structure where the final level always brings the player back to the starting point—the bedroom.
Each loop introduces subtle (and not-so-subtle) variations in level design, atmosphere, and puzzles, deliberately playing with the player's expectations to create surprise and tension.
Examples:
In loop 2, a bridge that was intact in loop 1 is now broken, turning the path into a platforming challenge.
In loop 3, the same level is plunged into darkness, requiring a flashlight to navigate.
As a reward, completing each loop unlocks access to a new room in the house—yet the player always ends up back where they began.
This looping system is not just a narrative device; it's a smart way to deepen gameplay while reusing and recontextualizing existing assets.
A flowchart of the different loops
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