Abort: The Exile
2024 Silver Winner at the MUSE Creative Awards
Overview
Abort: The Exile is a 3D horror adventure game that takes you to the early 2000s in China, where you'll unravel the unsettling mysteries of the Zhang family.
Blending environmental puzzles, non-combat stealth, and nerve-wracking QTEs, the game twists family trauma into an unsettling journey that echoes the silenced struggles of women through the shadows of Chinese folklore.
The Story
Debao, the long awaited only son of the Zhang family, returns to the ancestral estate for his thirteenth birthday. Strange whispers wake him in the night and lead him into a place where spirits linger. As he walks through the dark halls, he uncovers the family’s hidden past and the forgotten lives of the two sisters he never met.
What did I do
As the lead game designer, I created the core interaction loop and narrative-driven puzzle structure. I co-led an 8 person design team, authored the Game Design Documents, Testing Plan, and cross-department Feedback Packets for Art, Programming, and Audio.
I also consolidated team ideas into cohesive quest flow and level design.
Key Mechanics
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Movement - walk, run, crouch
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Interact - collect, use, QTE (environmental enemy), inspection
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Save/load
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Camera
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Diary
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Backpack Inventory
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Enemy
Camera
Players use the mystical camera to expose haunted artifacts, and the flashing sound also attract nearby, which contribute strategically to the stealth and environmental puzzle-solving gameplay.
Made a prototype that shows the red light flashes faster as you get closer to the object, and the viewfinder in the center turns green when you’re facing it.
Level Design Pillars
Goal one: Use the mansion’s architecture to express family hierarchy and conflict
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Recontextualize familiar routes through staged spatial transformation
Goal Two: Create stealth tension through
constrained navigation and sightline control
Constrained navigation and sightline control
The level uses narrow corridors, sharp turns, blind corners, and layered architectural occlusion to limit visibility and delay information, creating stealth tension and a persistent sense of uncertainty.
Symmetrical layout
The estate’s formal symmetry establishes order and ritual, while character-specific room identities and staged spatial changes gradually destabilize that order.
Environmental storytelling
Each room is designed to communicate its occupant’s role, value, and conflict within the family hierarchy, turning spatial progression into character revelation.
Transformative backtracking
Repeated traversal is used to reframe familiar paths, allowing the house to evolve narratively and psychologically over time
Environmental Storytelling through quests
Scale Puzzle
This is a balancing puzzle in which players collect hidden objects from the environment and use them to counterbalance a pile of gold ingots on a scale.
To bring the scale back to balance, the player must use camera to search the hall for three hidden objects that hold the last traces of the sister, Ruonan's life.
Design Goal:
Mechanically, the puzzle trains players to read the environment, using the camera to uncover and collect easily overlooked objects. This creates a more deliberate search pattern while directing player attention toward narrative details embedded in the space.
Narratively, the scale puzzle helps players uncover more about Ruonan's story and the nature of this arranged marriage. By weighing symbolic objects against gold, the puzzle frames her marriage as a transaction, reducing her body and future to exchange value.
Took account for all of the possible interactions and edge cases for this puzzle.
Tracing Puzzle
This tracing prototype places players in the perspective of Ruonan the sister, who secretly practices calligraphy, hoping to enter a competition. Despite her parent's belief that girls shouldn’t waste time studying, writing becomes her act of resistance.
The design goal is to let players feel her determination and vulnerability through the mechanics:
each stroke must begin carefully, follow the proper order, and stay within gentle boundaries that reflect the pressure she lives under.
A diagram to validate logic, and further communicate the inputs and the feedbacks.
