You might think that indie horror game level design is unrealistic, but back when I was working for a local Internet service provider I ended up having to check something out in an abandoned building that had once been an elementary school, and I discovered the following:
It had a full basement
At some point that basement had been finished into a bunch of tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across
There were no hallways, and the rooms connected to one another in a maze-like warren with no particular plan that I could discern
For some inexplicable reason every single room was stacked floor to ceiling with broken kitchen appliances
I guess what I’m saying is those games are basically documentaries.
(One of the rooms contained an industrial freezer unit that seemed to have been partially stripped for parts that I’m pretty sure was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to the room that contained it. Like, was the room built around it? That one still bothers me a little.)
I worked at a newspaper that had been in the same 150 year old building for 40 years, but it had lost most of its staff and gradually only occupied a small portion of the space. But it was this block-long nest of low, windowless rooms and corridors that seemed to follow no coherent plan, just endless tetris-piece shaped offices with doors to offices with doors to hallways filled with doors to more hallways and tetris offices, all of it with sagging wood paneling and forgotten furniture and only 40% of the lighting worked, and again — no windows — and drifts of ancient office equipment and stacks of water damaged boxes full of paperwork and then occasionally you’d pull aside a hanging dusty plastic sheet or roll away a metal fire door and be in a vast empty space that smelled like pigeon shit and cigarettes from the 80s and had unfinished floors and brick walls and dishwater light through a skylight onto an abandoned portable golf driving range surrounded by dusty old inert Macs.
