Project Subterra— Story Concept
Genre: Psychological Horror / Sci-fi / Survival
Tone: Oppressive, lonely, reality-bending
📖 Backstory (Prologue)
In the late 1980s, a secret British research facility known as “The Depth Project” was constructed
beneath a remote industrial site. The project’s goal: to explore the layers of space-time through
controlled collapses in physical environments. What they found was something else — a dimensional
bleed, a faultline between real and unreal.
They called it Sub-Level 0 — a floor that shouldn’t exist.
After a catastrophic failure in 1996, the entire facility was sealed off and erased from official records. No
one knows what happened below ground.
Until now.
Main Character
You play as Callum Strayer, an urban explorer and ex-firefighter known for investigating abandoned
military sites. You’re chasing a rumor: a lost floor with impossible architecture, strange noises… and signs
it might not be empty.
You enter alone, equipped with only a torch, your old crowbar, and a portable signal reader. Your goal is
to document it.
But once inside, the elevator doesn’t stop where it should.
You’ve arrived at Sub-Level 0.
🔦 Story Progression (in chapters or zones)
🟧 Chapter 1: The Descent
• Flickering lights, distorted safety signs, rooms that repeat.
• You find old VHS logs from staff — glitchy, panicked messages warning about “mirror walls” and
“time drift.”
• First contact: a blurry humanoid figure appears but vanishes.
🔺 Chapter 2: The Unmapped Zone
• Map glitches — nothing stays where it should.
• You start seeing copies of yourself in reflections doing things you didn’t do.
• First enemy: a fractured agent that only moves when you’re not looking directly at it.
🟥 Chapter 3: The Breach Core
• Many enemies appear that can danger Callum that he needs to kill
• After going through a difficult section for Callum he goes through several loop rooms that he saw
earlier on before in a random room being met with many enemies
• Callum kills all of the dangerous enemies getting in the way of his mission. You learn the facility
wasn’t just testing physics — it was trying to lock something in.
🧠 Twist & Ending Concepts (choose one or use multiple endings)
Ending: You find an override key to the elevator, but escape requires sacrificing every tool you earned
throughout the game and they fall onto the ground as you escape with a mysterious dark figure, who has
watched you the whole way flicks for 2 seconds at the end and the game is over.
This figure at the end can appear in random parts of the game keeping an eye on what's going on
(backstory, the figure is called Damien, he has haunted sub-level 0 since the 1980s and will haunt the
player forever).
✍️Themes
• Isolation vs. distortion — the idea that you’re not alone, but what’s with you might be… you.
• The terror of the unknown floor — not hell, not the backrooms, but somewhere between failed
science and dream logic.
• Tools of survival have limits — every crowbar swing, every flare shot costs you something.
