👀 Game Overview 👀

Title: Persian Corridor
Genre: Stealth / Narrative-Driven / Cultural & Historical / Fantasy & Horror
Platforms: PC (Steam/Epic) | Engine: Unreal Engine
Release Target: Nowruz 2028 (April) Subject to change

Target Audience: 16-35 (UK/EU focus, US/ME secondary).
Price: £16.75 | $22.45

"In a world where adults choose fight or flight, a child steals back hope... one ration at a time."

Three Layers of Reality

The world isn't just a map; it's a shifting psychological landscape. Players navigate three distinct visual and mechanical planes:

• The Grey Reality (Normal): A dusty, occupied 1940s Iran. Set within the lush, fog-laden forests and jagged peaks of Northern Iran, where the humid Alborz mountains meet the Caspian gloom. Desaturated colours, heavy shadows, and the hum of foreign machinery. Your goal: Scavenge, survive, and stay unseen.

• The Golden Myth (Easy): For 7 seconds, the world erupts in colour. Sun-drenched turquoise and gold. Kurosh becomes a hero of the Shahnameh, gaining the strength of Rostam to tear down gates or leap across treacherous ravines and crumbling mountain debris.

• The Ink Nightmare (Hard): The debt is called due. The world turns into a chilling, distorted version of itself, monstrous Daevas hunt you through a landscape of melting film and twisted shadows.

The Architecture of Trauma (Mechanics)

1. The Q-System: "The Hero’s Debt"

The transition between worlds is immediate. There is no safety in the shift.

• The Transaction: Pressing Q grants you power, but it records every second. If you use 5 seconds of "Heroism," you must survive 5 seconds of "Nightmare."

• The Penalty for Greed: If you lose track of time and let the 7-second timer run out, the Nightmare doesn't just match your time, it doubles to 14 seconds of pure survival.

• Bank System: When you transform the world into a nightmare, you could skip the penalty and press Q again to return to the Normal grey world, But the time that you were meant to spend in the Nightmare realm stacks. Which means next time you use your powers, you can see that your time-to-spend in Nightmare is the leftover from last time plus the current run. You could continually stack them, but the more you stack, the more you damage your mental state which causes Mental Breakdown (Game Over)

• Visual HUD: No digital clocks. Intricate Persian Carpet patterns grow around the screen's edge. When the carpet is complete, the world ripps into the nightmare.

• The Colour of carpet indicates the mental state of the player.

2. The Melting Mind (Sanity)

Sanity isn't just a bar; it's a lens.

• The Burning Film: As Kurosh’s sanity slips, a "melting film" effect begins to eat away at the edges of the screen. Visual artifacts and Gaussian distortions make the path ahead uncertain.

• The Sanity Tax: Getting caught in the Nightmare forces a respawn and leaves a permanent "burn" on your sanity for the rest of the level. Your tolerance drops.

3. Perspective Shifts: "The Family Breath"

The game breathes through its characters. Out of the 7–9 levels, 3 chapters shift away from Kurosh to focus on the family he is trying to save:

• Darius (The Father): Narrative levels focused on the burden of denial and protection. Majority of the time when the game is on the fathers perspective, it is purely game narrative and in game cut scenes, except the ending.

• Kaveh (The Brother): Dialogue-heavy segments exploring anger and the choice to join the resistance. Choices made by Kaveh could impact the gameplay of Koorush.

• Purpose: These are mechanical "breathers"; no stealth, just high-stakes dialogue that determines the family's ultimate fate.

Themes & Pillars (USP)

• A Fractured Trinity: Three family members representing the stages of grief: Denial (Father), Anger (Brother), and Bargaining (Kurosh).

• The Hidden Corridor: Exploring a forgotten side of WWII, the civilian struggle in the "Bridge of Victory", the mourning of family members during an already hard time, and using dynamic mechanics to get the players invested to the characters.

• Mythic Resilience: Using thousand-year-old folklore to process a modern tragedy. To introduce Persian culture to the rest of the world and to showcase the Persian mythos.

Technical Specs & Production

• Hardware (Mid-Potato): Guestimates

  • Min: Win 10, i5, GTX 970, 8GB RAM.

  • Rec: Win 11, i7, RTX 2060, 16GB RAM.

• Team: Current lead: @Hamie Nouri (Producer/Designer).
  Seeking a team of <7 people (contractors or core).

  • Currently In talks with 3 folks to join the team

    • [the rest of positions are open]

• Funding Goals: £20K for seed; £500K for "Director's Cut" (Grants/Crowdfunding).

Timeline

• Nowruz (March) 2027: Vertical Slice

• Mehregan 2028: Beta

• Nowruz 2029: Launch

"Grief is a ghost. In the Persian Corridor, you don't just feel it... you survive it."