Portfolio
[paRanormal;eScape] is a PSX horror experience inspired by genre legends like Silent Hill and Resident Evil. The game was made as part of my game design specialism for 2nd year, where I focused on narrative and quest design.
You play as a university student who wakes up in class inside a nightmarish version of reality. Paranormal entities haunt the halls. You must escape. The levels were based on the floor plan of my actual university. I deliberately placed weird, out-of-place assets and textures to make familiar spaces feel deeply wrong and unsettling.
I designed and coded a custom tank control movement system with fixed camera angles, evoking the feeling of retro PS1/PS2 horror games. The camera system was key to the horror experience, limiting the player's view to create tension and dread. Built solo in 4 weeks.
Screenshots
Documentation
A document where I proposed my reasonings for this project and the research I did before starting development
Weekly logs where i documented my progress, feedback and other thoughts on the project
End of project showcase where I talk about my game design intentions in this horror experience
Behind the Scenes
The story follows a university student who wakes up inside a nightmarish version of their university. The central goal is simple: escape. That word is threaded throughout the entire game, it is the title, and the university itself is based on Escape Studios, so the name appears in the environment too. The puzzle design reinforces the same theme: solving each puzzle rewards the player with a keycard, and keycards unlock doors that let them escape to the next part of the building. Every system echoes the same idea, escape, so the narrative and the gameplay are always saying the same thing.
Retro style horror games is my favourite genre and Resident Evil was the first game I ever played as a child. The aesthetic has always unsettled me in a way modern games rarely do. The lack of detail, the hidden areas, the way the low fidelity forces your imagination to fill in the gaps. I wanted to capture the feeling of a nightmarish dream: everything is out of place, you cannot quite piece together what is happening, but the fragments are all still there. That texture of half-understood wrongness is exactly what old PS1 horror games communicates, and it was the feeling I was chasing.
Modern games are designed to make the player feel in control at all times, responsive movement, free camera, immediate feedback. That is good game design in most contexts, but the lack of control scares me the most in horror. Horror is inherently about not being in control. By bringing back tank controls and fixed camera angles, I took that sense of agency away. The player cannot see what is around the corner. They cannot spin the camera to check behind them. That absence of control is where the dread lives, and it is something the genre somewhat lost when it modernised.
Basing the levels on the floor plan of my actual university elevated the horror in a way a fictional space could not. It is a place I know and see regularly and seeing it twisted, distorted, and populated with wrong textures and out-of-place sounds played directly on my own emotions during development. If it unsettled me, I knew it would unsettle anyone who has ever spent time in a place like it. Familiarity is what makes the distortion creepy.
© Copyright Humza Mustafa 2026