Here

Third-person narrative game where your emotions reshape the world around you. Explore isolation, connection, and recovery through branching choices and shifting environments. Are you here?

Research Question: How can player-driven decisions in a narrative game interact with visual feedback systems to communicate emotional disconnection and recovery without using explicit exposition?

About the Game:

Here is a story-driven 3D game that follows Milo, a young man moving through the weight of everyday life while navigating emotional instability. In this world, your mental state is not just felt, it is seen. Colors fade as Milo becomes disconnected, then return as moments of clarity and connection emerge.

As the player, your decisions guide Milo’s emotional journey. Red appears when he lashes out. Blue glows in acceptance. Green signals growth. These colors are not rewards, but reflections which responses to how you choose to engage with the world, yourself, and others.

This game treats interaction as communication and uses the environment as a mirror. Emotional shifts are expressed through visual and audio cues rather than explicit exposition, creating an experience that is personal, grounded, and metaphorically rich.

Core Features:

A branching narrative that reflects your emotional choices

Visual feedback systems where color and saturation respond to Milo’s internal state

No combat or puzzles, only decisions and dialogue that reveal character and consequence

Symbolic storytelling using environment, sound, and tone

A focus on mental health themes such as anxiety, burnout, grief, anger, and healing

Development Status:

Here is currently being developed as a final major project for my university degree. The game is in active production, with a vertical slice underway that focuses on the emotional feedback loop, branching narrative structure, and color-based world transformation.

The development draws from deep research into emotional game design and interactive storytelling. Inspirations include titles like Gris, Celeste, Sea of Solitude, and Life is Strange, but the direction remains grounded in original ideas, personal themes, and experimental storytelling methods.