Stare Into The Abyss: Post Halloween Review

HOW IT STARTED: From Riven to Abyss

Abyss was started on the 26th anniversary of Myst, a very important series that inspired me hugely to get into making my own video games. Riven was the major inspiration for this project, and is the all time best of the Myst games.

Since this was intended as a one month only game project, and I’d wanted to try my hand at a spooky “horror” game for Halloween, the timing was perfect. I would make a horror Myst like game. Which would be a trick (pun!), since a Myst game doesn’t usually involve violence or threat of death like many horror games do, plus I’m not interested in jumpscares.

My concept to solve the problem for horror without violence was to design puzzles that bring out the phobias in people e.g. darkness, unknown, narrow spaces, disorientation, fear of heights or falling, disease and icky places, etc. This all led me to invent a prison overhanging a huge abyss.

HOW IT ENDED: Entamaphobia

It was a slightly late release the evening of Halloween, so especially from a global perspective, I missed the holiday, but better late than never. It has enjoyed several downloads a day since then and is relatively popular on Itch.io right now at around the 50th game on the free games page.

The puzzles lost most of their connection to sources of fear, unless your fear is doors (entamaphobia). You largely spend your time attempting to open a path through a variety of gate types, sometimes in combination.

What does remain scary, if anything, is the darkness, the unknown, and the eerie sounds that surround you while working on the gate puzzles. The semi-realistically rendered world definitely helps with this, too, and was a major challenge for me to create.

A few people who’ve played have seemed to find the puzzles too opaque to solve. Perhaps, I made the game too difficult and frustrating. Ironically, although very happy with the puzzle designs myself, I expected it was actually far too easy, but I’m too close to the project to know.

Virtually none of the story clues made it into the game and I wonder if more time to include this side of the game would incentivise players to engage more deeply into the world and therefore make the puzzle difficulty more palatable.

HOW IT MIGHT CONTINUE: Maybe?

This was possibly the most fun I’ve had making a game and it taught me the basics of this game type and graphics type. While I do not feel like it was a total success, it is a great achievement.

The primary goal was a decent and complete game prototype within one month. One of the constraints I chose was to use only assets premade by others in order to save time, and this turned out great.

Now I wonder if it would be worth extending the project a few more weeks to either smooth over some rough spots, including puzzle difficulty, or expand the game to add those missing story elements and maybe add a small gameplay feature or two.

I’m not convinced yet that further action will make enough difference without overinvesting, and I definitely want to move on to other tiny games. What do you think?