Walls at Sundown

‘Walls at Sundown’ is a student solo project I worked on for three months during the Autumn of 2015. It’s a first-person game where the player incarnates an anonymous refugee in an obstacle-ridden journey from home, which they are forced to abandon, to a safer place beyond the sea.

The current version was intended as a prologue or demo and constitutes about half of the planned content for the game. While I had some intention to continue the development, life got in the way eventually. However, this version is entirely playable and can be completed if the game behaves well enough to not crash in the meantime.

‘Walls at Sundown’ was developed using Unreal Engine 4.

All songs used in the game are under a Creative Commons Attribution license and created by psalters.

Here is part of a pretentious explanation I wrote back in 2016 or so:

My intention before developing ‘Walls at Sundown’ was creating an interactive experience which would explain, metaphorically, the story of an unnamed civilian escaping from war and seeking asylum. […] From the beginning I wanted ‘Walls at Sundown’ to transcend the usual approach to newsgaming, both technically and conceptually. Traditional newsgames such as Syrian Journey, one of my main inspirations, are strongly bounded by a particular context (a time, a place and its concrete circumstances), although in a fictionalized way, and often rely on interactive fiction-ish (IF) mechanics and gameplay. My idea, though, involved a first person game with aspirations to realism on the artistic side and a deliberately vague story told through text but also environmental puzzles. So, in the end, it isn’t effectively a newsgame—it just walks the fine line between serious gaming [and gaming, period?].