Role: Gameplay Designer
Horror game where players escape from living statues that carry the curse of madness with them.
Pandora's Madness was a project that attempted to deconstruct typical player behavior in first-person horror games like SlenderMan or Soma. The analysis was that players in those games had a tendency induced by the games to not look at the monsters that haunted them. This created a sensation of unknown and anxiety, but it also standardize enemy encounters, as they were all dealt with the same tactic of running away without looking at the enemy.
My response to that analysis was the "Pandora's statue". Opposite to the "Weeping angels" found in the Doctor Who series, the statues would only move toward players when they were looked at, remaining still when not.
Initially, players would react to the statues similarly as in other games, avoiding eye contact and attempting to proceed without interacting with them.
However, at one point the game required players to manipulate the statues' position intentionally, using their sight to drag them to concrete locations. We could afford to do this because the statues reacted predictably to player input, similar to how stealth games encourage the manipulation of enemies for players to go undetected.
Enemies were now double-edged tools, ones that players had to carefully manipulate to progress. We created anxiety in players not from the desire not to look at enemies, but from the friction between that desire and what the game required players to do.
To balance and add variety to the enemy encounters, I also added the Medusa Heads, an object that stopped statues in place when inside their cone of vision. Using enemies and heads together, level designers had a wide range of tools to encourage enemy manipulation and create interesting gameplay situations.
From a Gameplay design perspective, Pandora's Madness is challenging to evaluate. On one hand, I feel its ideas were conceptually interesting but in practice failed to engage players in the ways we intended. But on the other, I think that part of the reason for that was a lack of focus on level and encounter design which ultimately did a disservice to the statue enemies. Perhaps, with more time and playtesting, this concept could have truly shined.
