Aquarium Nightmare
Aquarium Nightmare is a 3D horror escape room game where players return as a former staff member to uncover the dark secrets of an abandoned aquarium. Through exploration and puzzle-solving, players piece together the aquarium’s eerie past while fighting to escape the nightmares that still lurk within its empty tanks and halls.
Role: Lead Designer & Engineer
Platform: PC | Unreal Engine 5
Genre: 3D Horror Puzzle
Team: 3 students working over 2 months
Contribution
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Level-designed three main levels — the aquarium lobby, laboratory, and education panel corridor — each with unique spatial layouts, puzzles, and item interactions that tied into the escape room experience.
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Designed and implemented eight consistent escape-room style puzzles, balancing difficulty with clarity and integrating them into the environmental storytelling.
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Wrote and structured the narrative around the theme of ocean pollution, using mutated sea creatures and environmental storytelling to show the consequences of human impact. The story culminates with the protagonist’s own mutation.
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Created a diary system where players uncover story fragments and hints in each room, gradually revealing both the aquarium’s secrets and the protagonist’s transformation.
Level Design & Narrative
The aquarium is built across two floors, each designed to reflect a shift in both gameplay and narrative.
The First Floor
The Second Floor
Lobby: The Outsider, the Observer
The main lobby introduces the player as an outsider. This floor includes the entrance lobby with three small tanks, a staircase, the giant central tank, and a cinema. Here, puzzles are focused on observation and discovery — the player learns about the aquarium’s history and uncovers fragments of the staff diary. Solving the brochure puzzle ultimately grants the staff ID card, the key to moving deeper inside.
Laboratory: The Insider, the Caretaker
With the staff ID card, the player steps into the aquarium’s inner world, beginning to embody a staff member. This floor consists of the laboratory, exhibition hall, final hall, and the connecting staircase. In the laboratory, the player must repair wires to reactivate the tanks, symbolizing taking on staff responsibilities. As they step out, symptoms of radiation and pollution appear, represented through a mutation meter.
Exhibition Hall: The Inhabitant, the Mutated
In the exhibition hall, players face a series of corrupted, pollution-themed puzzles — from rotating pipes to reshape mutated marine creatures — each granting a mutated item as a reward. To progress, the player must consume all four items, a disturbing mechanic that both sustains them and pushes their body further into mutation. This descent reaches its climax in the final hall, where the protagonist is no longer an observer or caretaker but has fully transformed, mirroring the aquarium’s monstrous, polluted creatures. The cycle of ocean pollution closes in on the player, leaving them trapped as part of the nightmare they once sought to escape.
Lobby Level Puzzle Design
Players can unlock the staff diary by counting the number of specific marine animals across 3 tanks in the Lobby.
Lighting highlights this panel as a point of interest for the player to explore.
An aquarium brochure is hidden within the diary pages and is added to the player’s backpack once collected.
Placing the brochure on the main exhibit tank’s description reveals the password “save,” which unlocks and dispenses the laboratory ID card.
At any time, players can take items from their backpack and hold them in hand for interaction.
Diary System
Initially empty diary, hinting player to collect more diary entries
Collected entries unfolds the overall narrative, also puzzle hints for player guidance
Rotate the Pipe Puzzle
There are 3 rotatable pipe connections in this puzzle.
Player need to transport polluted water into mutated sea shark's mouth in the exhibit to progress in mutation meter.