Pause & Deserve
A horror game where the pause button is your worst enemy. Every time you freeze the monster, it comes back faster. Forever.
What It Is
I had never opened Unreal Engine before this. Gave myself 8 weeks to learn it by building something from scratch - code, audio, level design, everything solo. The result is a horror game built around one bad deal: you can pause to freeze the enemy for 5 seconds, but every time you do, it gets 20% faster than it already was. That compounds. Use it five times and the thing is running at roughly 2.5x its original speed. Safety now costs you later.
Audio carries the whole experience - there are barely any visuals telling you what to do. I built the atmosphere entirely from foley and field recordings, handled spatial audio through UE5's HRTF plugin, and used MetaSounds for the SFX with Sound Cues for triggers. The technical breakdown is below.
Pause & Deserve - Gameplay
Approach
Pause Mechanic
Press pause and the enemy freezes for 5 seconds. But when it unfreezes, it moves at 1.2x its previous speed. That compounds. By your fifth pause, it's at roughly 2.5x and you can't outrun it anymore. Players start rationing pauses like ammo.
Forest Ambience
Layers of rustling grass, cracking branches, wind through trees. Then random paranoia sounds mixed in - a twig snap behind you, a rustle that might be nothing. You can never tell what's the forest and what's the enemy.
3D Audio
UE5's built-in HRTF spatialization. With headphones on, footsteps land behind you, wind passes from left to right, and you actually check behind you when a branch cracks back there.
What I Learned
I spent days trying to synthesize creepy forest sounds in MetaSounds. Then I recorded actual foley - boots on dirt, hands on bark, fabric rustling - and it sounded ten times better in five minutes. Turns out good recordings just sound better than anything I could build in MetaSounds.