Breathdown

Breathdown is a short-form psychological horror experience created in 48 hours for the Global Game Jam 2025. The game places players in the role of a lone diver exploring the flooded remains of a sunken shopping mall. Oxygen is limited, guidance is minimal, and the submerged corridors are filled with debris, strange visions, and a lingering sense of dread.

The project includes several official GGJ diversifiers, including Y2K, In a Liminal Space, Time is a Flat Circle, and Soundscape, which strongly shaped both its design and tone.

The player must navigate three interconnected underwater levels before running out of oxygen, orienting the movement with the mouse. As they progress through these maze-like environments, they must avoid environmental hazards  (some embedded in walls or floors, others floating through the water) and reach a mysterious endpoint that appears to be a shop. At the end of each level, in this building, the player encounters a surreal, mermaid-like entity and engages in short conversations through a branching dialogue system. Each completed level becomes more complex, distorted, and dreamlike, and the final scene loops seamlessly back to the beginning, reinforcing the game’s themes of psychological entrapment and recursion. 

As the solo designer in the team, I collaborated from the initial concept phase, helping to define the tone, setting, and pacing of the experience. My narrative work focused on reinforcing themes of isolation, memory, and disorientation through visual storytelling and ambient dialogue. I wrote over fifty dialogue blocks for the mysterious underwater entity, organizing them into a branching structure that evolves based on the player’s choices.

I also designed the game’s cyclical narrative structure, building the final scene to return the player to the title screen in a seamless loop, mirroring the claustrophobic feeling of being trapped underwater, mentally and physically.

I was responsible for the core layout of all three levels, starting with paper sketches and helping translate them into modular blockouts in Unity. The levels were intentionally disorienting but navigable, built around looping routes, misdirection, and the use of subtle visual landmarks to ground the player.

Each level was designed with increasing complexity and distortion, emphasizing the descent into a surreal underwater world. I collaborated with the programming team to implement event triggers and the interaction with the NPC.

I handled the design of the UI and screen flow, including the oxygen display, map indicators, and menu transitions. To support our Y2K constraint, I created some of the UI elements in Aseprite using a stylized retro aesthetic. I also created multiple versions of the UI with glitch effects to visually reinforce the sense of limited oxygen and player disorientation.

The game relies heavily on diegetic feedback: players gauge their progress and oxygen supply through subtle visual and auditory cues in the environment rather than explicit text or HUD elements.

The project blends folk horror, Y2K design, and liminal aesthetics to create an unsettling, immersive environment. CRT-style filters and Windows-era visual elements emphasize the feeling of digital decay, while the mermaid entity introduces a folkloric and emotional contrast.

The soundscape, entirely ambient and music-free, was designed to evolve with player progression, becoming more distorted and unnatural as oxygen depletes. As the designer, I worked to ensure this audio-visual cohesion supported the intended emotional arc of the experience.

Breathdown was a deeply rewarding opportunity to apply and refine my skills in level design, UX, and narrative systems under time constraints. It’s one of the most tonally consistent jam games I’ve worked on, and I’m proud of how well the whole team brought the vision to life. We were thrilled to receive the Best Visuals award at our local jam site, and are currently exploring ways to expand this project into something larger.