Fractured Realities(Honours Project)

Fractured Realities is a first person psychological horror game structured across three levels, each set within the same hotel room placed in disorienting locations: a city, middle of the ocean and outer space. The setting is constant but the world outside is not. The game is driven by a stress mechanic that increases passively over time. To manage it, the player has two options- pills, which reduce stress or alcohol which worsens it. When stress crosses a defined threshold, hallucinations begin. These are not fully scripted events but systematic responses to the player’s condition: environmental shape shifting, sound effects and visual shaders(HLSL). The visual psychedelia is not used for romanticizing drugs but as a representation of perceptual distortion driven by anxiety, overdose, addiction and schizophrenia. The technical foundation of the project sits in Houdini and Unreal Engine 5.
The aim of this project is to develop a three level psychological horror game that explores stress induced hallucination and
perceptual breakdown through procedural environment distortion, using practice based research to represent mental instability
and substance interaction in a grounded, ethical, and non romanticized manner.