Brief
Re:member is a psychological horror 2D game prototype realised for the McGame Jam 2025 organised by McGill University, which theme was Lost & Found. The player have to regain the different parts of his body and try to escape this place.
My role
As a UX designer, i took the role of a Lead and Game Designer, creating the gameplay and managing the time and tasks of the project.
What I did in this project:
- Managed the planning and workload within the team.
- Designed the game concept and the gameplay loop.
- Designed the puzzle mechanics.
- Worked in collaboration with programmers and artists to improve the user experience.
Concept
You wake up into nothingness and darkness just as if you were yet to be born, you can’t see nor feel anything. But as time passes you start seeing your environment and you’re standing there, in a corridor, barely light up, wondering why you’re here, how you end up here and where you must go. All you have is a vague impression of emptiness inside you, an ominous feeling behind you and a force pulling you to the end of the corridor.
Do your best to discover who you are through various mini-games, avoid your demons who want to devour you and try to escape from this hellish place.
Gameplay
As the player progress in the corridor, he has access to the different rooms, each containing a part of his body locked behind a puzzle. Upon completing a puzzle, the player is send back at the beginning of the corridor to continue exploring.
Unlocking a body part grant an effect based on the body function of this part:
- The arms allows to grab things and move faster.
- The ear unlock the sound in the game.
- The legs allows to move even faster and to jump.
- The torso and the face are important part to unlock the real ending.
The game end when you look in the mirror at the end of the corridor, it will show what you look like with which body parts you regain.
Puzzle design
To acquire a body part the player need to successfully complete a puzzle. There is a puzzle to complete for each body part. I designed the puzzles so the player need to collect the body part in a specific order to complete them and reach the true ending.
While the first room contain the arms, the player can’t acquire them immediately because they will flee when he try to approach them. Instead there is a door behind them which can be access by the third room which contain the ears.
The ears are then needed to find the torso in the maze by listening to the rope sounds which guide him to the torso.
The player need to possess at least the legs to access the face through a platform game.
Future development
In a future development, we wanted to have a lot more rooms with body parts necessarily ours and when exiting the corridor through the mirror, it would either not let us escape if we did not have our real body or tell a different story than the real one.
The real end of the story is: “Suddenly you pass through the mirror and exit the house you were stuck in. Everything seems normal outside and as you turn back you saw nothing but a ruined house.”