Celia
An Escape Room Game
Intro
In this Escape Room game, the player steps in the shoes of Celia, who has infiltrated into an evil chemist’s lab and has to retrieve a secret formula to cure her mother, but finds herself trapped in the laboratory.
The player has to overcome various puzzles using deduction and subtly-placed clues.
Celia is the result of one year of work during my 3rd year of university. Together with my other two team mates, we designed the game by drawing inspiration from puzzle games like “We Were Here” and “The Room”.
To perfectly capture the feeling, we went to multiple Escape Rooms and wrote down our moment-by-moment experiences and findings.
The experience was designed to be a part of a narrative, to improve immersion and drive anticipation to discover more about the world and the evil chemist. The players we tested with were mainly driven by the curiosity of finding what the next puzzle would be, but they were also attracted by the story we laid out to them.
My main contribution was in designing some of the puzzles, as well as finetuning the pacing and progressive disclosure of clues based on feedback. The first draft of the story was written by me.
I was also in charge of modeling and texturing a big portion of the furniture and interactables present in the room.
The game’s Alpha version can be downloaded here, and you can see some gameplay in the video below.
Other than bringing the game to a better, more consistent visual state, I would add voiceover from the main character at key gameplay moments. This would help on two fronts: it would act as a more subtle layer of hints, as well as adding more bits of narrative to further drive curiosity.