Fading Lights

Play as an elderly man grappling with dementia. In this narrative/detective game, you will explore his home and interact with everyday objects that trigger fragments of long-lost and fading memories. You have to pay close attention to piece together Max’s relationships, history, and rebuild his family tree.

In this narrative-driven detective game, players explore the home of Max, an elderly man suffering from dementia. The core gameplay revolves around: Exploration: Navigate Max’s memory-filled home, searching for everyday items that serve as memory triggers. Memory Diving: Upon interacting with specific objects, players are transported into vivid, fragmented memories where they experience short, interactive scenes from Max’s past. Clue Discovery: Within these memory sequences, players gather key details, visual hints, and conversational fragments that contribute to rebuilding Max’s family tree, including the name of his family member as well as their relation to Max. Family Tree Reconstruction: After each memory, players enter a UI overlay where they piece together Max’s family tree. Only the characters discovered in past memories are available. Players must correctly match names and relationships, relying on clues gathered. Memory Review: All dialog and hints from previous memories are accessible in the UI, allowing players to revisit and reassess information if they’ve forgotten or misinterpreted it.

We deepened the narrative by reflecting the symptoms of dementia directly through gameplay. Each memory sequence was reimagined to not only recall a piece of Max’s past but also reveal a symptom of him developing Dementia. This approach allowed us to create deep empathy for Max.

Our game was developed using Unreal Engine 5.4.4 with Blueprints and for the 3D characters we firstly used Maya but eventually switched to Blender.

We used a combination of assets from the Fab Asset Store and custom models to bring Max’s world to life. Gitta was mainly responsible for the character design and creation using Maya and Blender. Sina created the VFX effects, including for example the shininess of the items and the level switch. Felix Engelmann created the soundtrack for the real word and for the flashbacks and Kilian Konz helped us out with his sound effects. Some more sounds were collected from free asset stores. Fromer FH student Bernadette drew our beautiful UI Elements.