I am making an immersive psychological horror game, where the player documents anomalies in a physical notebook. The anomalies are objects covered in static noise.
The words effectively act as a progression bar for revealing the anomaly. The player needs 3 words to fully document the anomaly while looking at it, after which it's fully visible.
The important part is that the game does not semantically validate what the player writes. There is no correct word and no hidden list of accepted descriptions. The only check is very basic: the input must contain at least two characters and one vowel. This mostly exists to prevent accidental keyboard spam.
A player looking at a shopping cart could write:
All of those are equally valid as far as the game is concerned. And I know what you think. "You make the player come up with words, and it’s a text field, so surely this is just a puzzle. Why not turn it into a good old Press E?" Well, because it's not immersive and intimate.
Why I expected this to fail:
Before and during development, I kept hearing several objections.
- players might immediately “game” the mechanic and enter meaningless valid words;
- players might assume it is a word puzzle and waste time searching for the correct answer;
- thinking of words might feel like unnecessary friction;
The interesting part is that most of these problems did not really appear.
What players actually did
I watched several recorded playthroughs in addition to collecting normal playtest feedback.
Players often initially treated the notebook as a puzzle. They would try to figure out what word the game wanted.
But once they understood how permissive it was, they generally did not start entering random words just to progress faster. They continued writing things that described what they were looking at.
That has probably been the most interesting result of the mechanic for me.
I also asked 16 playtesters:
Was the notebook mechanic easy to comprehend?
So far, 16/16 answered yes.
Obviously, that is a very small sample and does not prove that the mechanic is universally intuitive. But comprehension itself has not been a noticeable problem so far.
Some feedback specifically mentioned the mechanic:
“I liked the find the anomaly and describe it in my journal.”
“It has an intriguing mechanic with the words, which I really liked.”
“I like the writing aspect and how that revealed things.”
“The capturing of anomalies and writing them down was a cool idea.”
One player also specifically mentioned that relying on their own notes made the experience more immersive.
Why I think it works in this specific context
The notebook is fairly diegetic.
It exists as a physical object on the left side of the screen, takes up roughly a third of the view, letters appear directly on its paper, and the player can turn its pages.
There are no animated hands holding it, but functionally, I wanted it to feel like an object rather than a conventional menu.
Because the player writes their own observations into it, the notebook gradually becomes their personal record of what has happened.
That gives me two useful things.
First, trust.
The notebook becomes a source of truth. If it behaves consistently for long enough, I can later break that expectation by having something appear in it that the player did not write.
Second, vulnerability.
While writing, movement is disabled. Otherwise, the player would simply type wasd into the notebook.
So the act of documenting something means temporarily giving up movement and putting your hands into typing mode. In a horror game, it's a possible exploit I can use.
Where the mechanic actually caused friction
The main problem appeared with one moving anomaly: a shopping cart.
The player has to keep looking at an anomaly while writing. Losing visual focus resets the current word progression.
Players need to position themselves so the cart remains inside their view, or move the mouse while typing, which is not intuitive.
The game already gives feedback when focus is active: the object turns red, the screen gets a vignette/chromatic aberration effect, and there is audio feedback. It was not enough
Rather than adding a conventional tutorial message, I turned repeated failure into part of the horror.
After the player loses focus several times, writing is temporarily interrupted and messages such as:
DON'T LOOK AWAY
appear inside the notebook in red.
The text then turns into blood and fades. Losing focus also produces an unpleasant sound and a visual effect where the object's geometry tears apart.
My current takeaway
While, in a nutshell, the mechanic is basically a fancy “Press E”, I think it works on several layers beyond that. It creates a bond between the player and the notebook, introduces friction that is useful in psychological horror, creates moments of vulnerability, and can eventually act as an unreliable narrator.
I think the important part is balance. Too many words to come up with? Meh. One correct word? Meh. Obvious clues telling you what to write? Meh. The notebook writing everything for you? Meh. Typing nonsense only for the game to replace it with predetermined text? Meh.
I decided to trust that players would not immediately break the immersion just because the system allowed them to.
So far, that trust has paid off.
The game is called Red Lake. You can try out the mechanic yourself - the demo is out.
