Game Design

(Elliott) #1

it out of the prison and to the graveyard. Needing to navigate through the graveyard,
where the player will expect to find creatures to battle but instead hears only disembod-
ied voices, the player progresses to an abandoned quarry. Used for prisoners sentenced
to hard labor in the years following World War II, the quarry has been abandoned for
decades. Torque must navigate through the quarry to reach a path that winds up the hill
to the asylum.
The asylum has been abandoned for nearly a hundred years and looks it: ceilings
are collapsed, the tile floor is rotting, the paint is peeling off the walls, and the player is
only able to access a small section of the building. Once inside, Torque is quickly locked
in the building by the projected form of the long-dead head of the asylum, Doctor Killjoy.
The player soon meets Sergei, a guard who was in the asylum hanging out with some
fellow guards when the monsters started appearing. All of his fellow guards are now
dead, and the player will find their bodies horribly mutilated around the facility, as if
they have undergone postmortem operations and experiments. Sergei is clearly intoxi-
cated and is decidedly calm about everything, explaining that he’s ready to let whatever
happens happen. Sergei does tell the player where the radio is located in the building so
that Torque can get the parts he needs. He also explains about the circuit breaker in the
basement that the player can use to turn on the lights in the building, and adds that he’ll
be thankful if the player can turn it on so he can listen to his record player again. He’s
certainly not going to risk his life to go turn it on himself, though.
As the player navigates the asylum, Killjoy repeatedly appears in a strange “pro-
jected” form, taunting the player from afar. Once the player has recovered the parts he
needs from the radio, the player is lured into a final confrontation with Killjoy, who
speaks to Torque and claims that he knows about the player’s “condition” (the black-
outs), and suggests he can possibly cure him. Once the player smashes all of Killjoy’s
projectors, he is defeated, and the player is finally able to leave the asylum. It is impos-
sible to return to the prison through the quarry, so Torque has to go back via the beach.
On the way to the beach, the player travels through a large expanse of woods.
Along the way, he may discover the somewhat hidden location where the island’s
natives were massacred 500 years ago. In the woods the player will meet Clem, an
intelligent and well-read prisoner who had been planning an escape for months and who
complains that the appearance of the creatures has ruined everything. Clem knows of a
way the player can get back into the prison, through the escape tunnel he dug, which
terminates on the beach. Clem has planned a way of getting himself off of the island via
a raft he constructed out of various pieces of junk from the prison. But Clem cannot go
down to the beach and use it because of the horrific monsters that are lurking there. If
the player will help him, Clem will gladly show the player the location of the escape tun-
nel as well as some other secrets.
On the beach the player finds the wreckage of the slave ship that crashed on the
island in the 18th century. An old rickety set of stairs used to lead up off the beach to the
prison, but they collapsed in the earthquake. From the beach the player can once again
see the lighthouse on the eastern side of the island, but now its light has gone out. Clem
shows the player the escape tunnel, which will get him into the prison’s abandoned
basement. The player will need to defend Clem while he gets his raft ready to go, and if
the player is successful, he will watch Clem float out to sea.


Appendix B: Sample Design Document:The Suffering 631

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