THE TRIAL OF THE THREE CHAMBERS
1st person
Metroidbrainia
Made in
24 hours
A game about looping and misleading puzzles
ROLE : GAME/Level Designer, programmer
CONTEXT
The Trial of The Three Chambers is an Unreal Engine 5 project made for the GMTK 2025 game jam. The theme this year was "loop".
In this game, you progress through the same room, resolving puzzles until you finally realize how to truly escape this looping trial. You have to change your perception each time you enter the same room.
GAME DESIGN
For this project, I began by thinking around the theme "loop" trying to figure out what concept could be interesting. Then, I thought about Outer Wilds and decided to make a metroidbrainia. I hadn't much time so I thought about something very simple but with multiple layers.
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I came with the idea of a small room in which you resolve simple puzzles and resolving them open a door leading to another room, similar to the previous one. Then, you have to resolve the puzzles again but there's a twist : either there's a second puzzle to resolve, or the solution to the puzzles changed.
What I found interesting in this concept is how simple it was to excecute and yet how complex it could be in term of puzzles, allowing me to reuse assets and mechanics by using them in different creative ways.
Mechanics
For the mechanics, I wanted simple ones that the player is familiar with so I could twist them later on with the Level Design.
Walk
I designed a simple walk, adding head bobbing as I usally do for first person games.
Grab
I designed a simple grab mechanic to be able to resolve puzzles. It allows the player to move objects around and place them wherever needed.
Each cube is unique and has a different tone when grabbing them, giving a hint of how to resolve a certain puzzle.
Pedestals
Pedestals demand the player to place the correct cube on them. Doing so activate a flame to indicate to the player that it was correct.
Though, for the last puzzle, in which the player has to place cubes in the correct order, I couldn't use the flame until completed else it would have given the answer right away.
Crystals
I designed an interaction mechanic that allows the player to activate crystals.
Each crystal as a unique color and tone so the player can link them to the cubes.
Flames
As mentionned before, flames are a generic feedback used to indicate to the player wheter or not what he's doing works.
Though, they also serve another purpose : giving a hint for the last puzzle. Indeed, each cube and crystal activate a specific flame and if the player notices it, he can deduce the correct order.
Books
Since the game is a metroidbrainia, I had to find a way to communicate hints to the player.
I found books in an asset pack I had and thought they were perfect for what I needed.
Whenever the player gets close, the camera moves over the book to make it easier to read.
Paper sheets
As the books, the paper sheets communicate subtle hints to the player but in a different way. Whereas the books communicate textual informations that are hard to understand, crystals communicate visual informations, easier to understand.
Gameplay video
Level Design
For the Level Design, I wanted a very small room, easy and fast to navigate around but with lots of negative spaces blocking the player's view from important elements.
​The game is about resolving puzzles but the concept I came with was the following : everything to finish the game is in the first room but I'm going to lay out the level so the player follows a linear path I have planned for them.
This way of laying out the level taught me something very useful about player's psychology : the player will always take the easiest path, the one's in front of them rather than looking for another one.
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I also designed the game to reflect the Dunning-Kruger effect, each room represents a step of the effect. I wanted to break player's expectations about the game which seems easy at first but then complexify over time, reflecting the way your learn about a topic : the confidence at first then modesty comes.
1st room
So the first room has two doors, one to access the second room and the other one to finish the level. Though, I made the player spawn faced to the first door and I conveniently placed the cubes to complete the puzzle.
Playtests confirmed my theory, the player runs toward the bait and place the cubes then go to the next room, ignoring every other elements.
This is the first step of Dunning-Kruger effect :
"Mount Stupid", the player thinks he's smart because the puzzle is easy but I made him think that because in the next room, the puzzle is different and they need to look for answers.
2nd room
The second room displays a message, hinting to the player that he didn't search the room.
So, the player completes the first puzzle again but it doesn't work, there's still 4 flames to activate.
Here's it's the "Valley of Despair", what the player though they knew is only a part of something bigger they didn't expect.
But when searching the room a bit, they find the crystals which each activates a flame and opens the door to the next room.
3rd room
The third room displays another message, hinting to the player that he still didn't search the room enough. At this point, players didn't even went upstairs because I focused their attention toward the cubes and crystals.
Now, it's the "Slope of Enlightenment", the player is learning, now they know what to do, they just have to search the entire room.
And from the begining, there was symbols on dressers all around the room. The solution here is associating symbols with the cubes and then placing each one of them on the right symbol.
The dressers work the same as the pedestals but I changed their model, the player was used to placing cubes on pedestals so he couldn't expect to have to place them on a different object.
1st room (again)
