Le Fardeau is a game that I curently work as the main game designer.
Le Fardeau is a stealth game were you need to avoid groups of ennemies in a grand mansion. The player must be careful about his heartbeat, as it makes a lot of noises, and alert the surrounding ennemies. Each time the player is sighted by an ennemy, his heartbeat increase, which make avoiding ennemies a lot harder. The player need to find a key and the locked door in each stage to continue, and find a way to escape the mansion.
As the game designer, I firstly decided the intentions. I found that the core mechanic worked well with an horror game. Every sound and object should make the player feel anxious, wich is why we decided with the game artists to go for a retro PS1-like style, because of the aspect ratio, wich is much smaller than screens nowadays and support the claustrophobic ambiance of the game, and because of the resolution of the texture, wich make unclear what an object is at first sight.
The game was also intended to be very difficult by punishing a lot the player if he makes a mistake.
Each time he's close to an ennemy or he runs, his heartbeat increase and if his heartbeat reach the maximum, his stress jauge start rising, wich limit the minimum his heartbeat can decrease to. So each encounter with an enemy rises the difficulty of sneaking by an enemy.
