Decomposure
Decomposure is a unique apocalyptic organization game where players must navigate their survival within a confined, industrial room, relying on object-based text prompts to learn about their world. As apocalyptic events unfold, players face the dilemma of deciding which items to preserve and which to sacrifice. The game’s narrative is revealed through the exploration of the room and its objects, with large-scale disasters manifesting subtly through effects like window flashes, sounds, and camera shakes. This design choice emphasizes the gradual erosion of normalcy and highlights how trauma often accumulates through small, persistent disruptions rather than a single cataclysmic event. The game fosters a feeling of isolation and disconnect from the outside world, subverting the typical survival-focused narrative of apocalyptic games by centering around seemingly trivial personal items and their narratives.
Co-Developer & Lead Designer
Artist's Statement
Challenge
The central design goal of Decomposure, completed as a final submission for Patrick Jagoda's Critical Video Game Studies course, was to interrogate and deconstruct the illusion of player agency within apocalyptic game spaces by reframing object permanence and environmental storytelling through the lens of disruption rather than progression. Drawing from theories of environmental narrative, diegetic UI, and affective game design, the game aims to replace conventional survival mechanics with a system of persistent instability and emotional attrition. It explores how micro-interactions with everyday items—rather than large-scale events—can serve as critical narrative nodes, encoding memory, loss, and control in a confined ludic environment. The project also investigates how minimalist spatial constraints can intensify psychological themes, using spatial semiotics and ambient feedback to evoke isolation, fragility, and dissonance.
Results
The game space was constructed as a single-room diorama with high-fidelity object physics and subtle ambient effects, employing a fixed cinematic camera to heighten voyeuristic tension and detachment. Objects were embedded with metadata-driven text prompts, revealed through an in-game typewriter interface that functions as both a narrative artifact and an emotional mediator. The visual language relies on muted industrial palettes, volumetric lighting, and soft post-processing to blur the boundary between safety and decay.
Disasters are rendered not through spectacle but through layered aesthetic cues—window flares, randomized audio distortion, and camera tremors—designed to interrupt the player’s sense of order. Shelf objects have conditional states and low persistence thresholds, making them prone to displacement or destruction with each environmental shift. This dynamic instability subverts traditional management game systems, turning organizational logic into a futile but emotionally resonant gesture. The result is a deliberate aesthetic and systemic dissonance that challenges the player’s impulse to impose structure on an inherently collapsing world.