Psychological Thriller ‘Shattered’ Brings a Sinister Escape Room Into Your Home

PlaySide Studios just launched Shattered, a narrative-driven psychological thriller that uses mixed reality to turn your physical space into a virtual escape room. Step inside the shoes of Jessica, a private investigator working to uncover the sinister secrets of a mental health facility with a dark past.

Shattered marks the first time that a developer has used Presence Platform to bring an escape room to mixed reality. And as if that weren’t exciting enough, the game is also available as part of the Meta Quest+ games catalog. So if you’re getting or gifting a new Quest 3 or 3S this holiday season, you can play Shattered for no additional cost thanks to your three-month trial Meta Quest+ subscription.*

We sat down with Shattered Executive Producer Ivan Ertlov and Lead Designer Harley Prince to celebrate the launch and dive deeper into the game’s backstory.

Harley Prince: I’ve been in the industry for around 14 years. I’ve done a whole bunch of different things. I started in the industry actually in serious games, like simulation-type stuff, before moving into the indie game space. So I’ve done stuff across PC, mobile, and I’ve done a lot of VR. I mostly moved to PlaySide because, in Australia, it’s got a lot going on. There’s a lot of opportunities. We’re making really cool games, and we’re also making really great VR and MR games, which is where my strengths lie. So yeah, it’s a good fit.

Ivan Ertlov: I’m very obviously not from Australia, but I live in Australia. I was born in Czechoslovakia, a country that doesn’t exist anymore. I had my education in Austria and Germany, with degrees in agricultural engineering and then psychology. But I started programming on the C64 as a kid, so I wrote my first text adventure at the age of 11. I was very motivated, and it was very bad. Later I returned to the games industry through a complaint letter to a publisher of Europa 1400. It was a beautiful game, but terribly buggy. So I wrote a two-page letter complaining in Medieval German to the publisher. And instead of getting a refund, I got a job as a creative writer. From there, I went into community management, development, game design, and then production. I produced for Anno, Hitman, and quite a few other games before moving to Australia as producer for RISK at SMG Studio.

In Australia, I had no friends and terrible internet, so I started writing books. Surprisingly, I had a few bestsellers and in 2022, and I wanted to retire from games. But then I received a message from Jamie Bentley, our Vice President and General Manager for work for hire, and he wrote, “I have this game here, and I need you to produce and write it because that’s exactly what you should be doing. I cannot tell you what it is—you have to sign the contract first.” And that was actually Shattered. That’s how I ended up here.

HP: I was just going to say, I don’t have anywhere near as interesting an origin story as you, Ivan. That was a ride. Alright, so essentially, Shattered is a mind-altering escape room thriller made exclusively for mixed reality. We’re blending your room with all of these ominous locations around the Greyvale Asylum. You’ll be manipulating objects and uncovering secrets that affect both realities.

The core mechanics of the game are around affecting two realities at once, so it’s something that’s really unique to mixed reality. It’s got a really strong narrative where you’re reliving the memories of Jessica, who’s a private investigator. She’s uncovering all her memories, she’s trying to uncover this conspiracy within Greyvale, and you’re really just trying to help her escape from the facility and the twisted world of her own mind. Lots of trippy, thriller-type gameplay.

IE: Okay, that’s an interesting one. So the original, I didn’t start from scratch. I was basically handed a two-page concept that came from Jamie and TJ Munusamy, our executive vice president of business development. Originally, it was a VR game—like, more explorative, more walking around in the facility and uncovering the truth. But it already had the core principles that we relied on. It was very much about conspiracy, you cannot trust the narrator, you cannot trust the narration. So, the inspiration that I was confronted with first, that we kept for a long time, was like Shutter Island. And at the same time, it had a very strong early ’90s TV suspense vibe.

In entertainment, in the TV industry, in series, there was this shift from the ’80s, where even spy and action series were very lighthearted and very funny. And then suddenly you had The X-Files. You had Space: Above and Beyond, which was like very much dark, sinister, and big conspiracies lurking somewhere. And that’s basically where we took inspiration for the game.

IE: So, the first question, that’s easy. It’s been like two and a half years. I think the earliest document that could be the ancestor of Shattered is from May 2022. That’s basically the timeline. For anecdotes, there are probably more than we think about right now. One of my favorites is that, during prototyping, we did a lot of things that no one has done before. We were researching groundbreaking interactions, especially when we had this shift from VR to MR. We were like, “OK, this is the new technology. This is a new playing field. How can we utilize it?” And we had our best engineers locked in a special room with darkened walls outside. Jamie called it the Black Mesa Research Facility and even labeled it like that.

It had a biometrically secured door—so very limited access to all this really crazy R&D. And the rest of the team did not know, like, the people who were working on Horizon Worlds, they did not know what we were doing there. And at the same time, our office manager and HR lead for the Gold Coast Studio, she’s a huge Hello Kitty fan, which the team didn’t really know - she started bringing Hello Kitty merchandise into the office. That happened around the same time that we were working in the Black Mesa. So for a few weeks, and I think it was even months, the entire Horizon Worlds team believed we were working on a top-secret Hello Kitty game in this Black Mesa Research Facility.

HP: There’s just so many memes and things like that. It’s funny because you make a game that’s all about, you know, it’s a thriller and there’s all these things that scare people. The things that people focus on are sometimes the weirdest fears. Like we have a rat in the game, and there’s been this rat throughout this entire development. And people just get so caught up on this one feature, they ignore all the other scary bits of the game. And it’s just like, no, it’s all about this rat.

So that’s been the joke of I guess the last year and a half, I think. Just, “Where’s this rat going to be? What levels is it going to be in? Where’s it going to appear?” Yeah, it’s pretty strange. Not what you’d expect.

IE: The first part, that’s a little bit easier, so I will pick that up and then hand it over to Harley. We actually started this pivot to MR with Quest Pro. We had like two early versions of Quest Pro in the office, and we looked at what’s possible. We all knew Passthrough from Quest 2, but it was like this grainy grayscale experience. But now we were like, “OK, this is a layer of reality. Our game is about layers of reality. So this is our chance to add an additional one that the player is familiar with. It’s their environment.”

Opponents is the wrong word because the game is not really about villains. It is about villains, but not about enemies that you fight. It’s about characters you interact with. But now we had the opportunity to bring them into your space, to expand your actual space, to turn your floor into a gate to another layer of your subconscious reality, and that was just too exciting to let it pass. And then with Quest 3, that was the mind-blowing experience for everyone who tried it for the first time.

HP: It ended up being a very good genre fit because you don’t immediately think of having an escape room within your own space, but taking that safe place that the player knows and then transforming that into this weird escape room with cinematic scenes and all these thrilling moments—it creates a really interesting contrast. And mechanically, we’ve been able to do some really unique things. The whole core mechanic of the game is about how you affect your reality and the reality in Greyvale through—it can only really be described as portals. You’re looking at objects within your space and that space and seeing how you can manipulate mixed reality, essentially. It’s completely something that only really fits in MR.

IE: And to add that: It also works on several layers. Basically, you bring an object into your space, and this object contains an opening into another space. You interact with this space and alter the first one on the way. That’s only possible in mixed reality.

HP: It’s sometimes a very hard game to explain. You have to experience it to know.

IE: Originally, the game title was Jessica. We even had key art developed with Jessica as the title before it was changed to Shattered.

She’s a former private investigator. She specialized in financial investigations. So she’s highly educated, very focused. And then she spiraled down because she discovered a conspiracy—or she believes that she discovered the conspiracy. You don’t know what’s real and what’s her imagination.

She’s very stubborn. She has behavioral traits common among second- and third-generation immigrants: strong family ties, that make-it-or-break-it mindset where I can relate very much because, very obviously, I grew up as a first-generation immigrant in Europe and now I’m in Australia, an immigrant again.

There are some bits of narration, memories where Jessica relives the past of her dialogues with her sister, her fiancé/husband, where you see that she has this approach of “If you are not with me unconditionally, you are against me.” Which brought her quite some pain in the past and was very unhealthy for her personal relationships. But this is all part of what you also uncover in the game. It’s not only about the big corporation, the conspiracy behind it. It’s also breaking a little bit into the habits of the past and resolving them on the way.

HP: Yeah. It’s all about the strong character, and you’re kind of uncovering who she is while you’re also uncovering what the mysteries of the game are. You’re in this place called Greyvale, and she doesn’t know why she’s there. Her memories are all twisted. So you’re uncovering this backstory as you’re uncovering the truth of why she’s there and what’s going on.

IE: Originally, we were actually looking at a fake 1920s style or an imaginative 1920s style for the entire Greyvale facility. But keep in mind that that was still under the assumption that you walk through the entire facility.

We were actually inspired by the Superman Building in Boston—it’s called that. It’s like this gigantic structure, and we wanted to make it a 1920s asylum for very rich people, like very comfortable. And then we threw all of that out, went back to the drawing board, and decided on a stylized art style.

It’s not overly stylized. We're not talking about Fortnite, but you have a subtle stylization all across the board because we have found out that it's more believable even in MR mixed with your environment. And the style, I would say architecture-wise, our inspirations are from the 1990s. And we’re using very subtle colors. It’s not overly saturated. But when we communicate something important or the right move, we use warm colors.

And in the end, it’s something you have to see to understand that the challenge is you need pieces of art and entire sets of art that are compatible with the living rooms of hundreds, thousands of different people in different countries with different living rooms, which is a challenge to solve.

HP: Yeah. Just trying to make sure that whatever style we go with, it does feel like your room is the escape room. Because that’s the whole thing of it: Greyvale is almost invading into your space as you open up these openings. I guess the other half, like, as you’ll see through the game, is like, we’re not just taking these normal art deco style asylum rooms or whatever. We’re also twisting and corrupting those spaces visually with a lot of like, weird stuff, just as Jessica’s losing track of reality and her memories, that the memories get more twisted over time.

And that also is something that is invasive into the player’s space. You’ll start seeing corruption growing within your room. It’s very cool how it goes on a visual journey of starting off a bit more normal and then getting a bit crazier over time. I think the most stylized part of the game is the characters. We do have a really strong cast of characters—not just Jessica. There’s quite a few. There’s been a lot of work trying to make those characters believable with animation and facial expressions. It’s a fully voice acted game, so we’ve got all the facial capture stuff as well.

IE: Around the early stages of Shattered, John Guscott joined PlaySide as audio lead and then as audio director. He’s a very seasoned composer, and he led our team of sound designers. There were, of course, the usual challenges for the VR space, but MR is a totally different beast again because if you work too much with, like, hall effects, and the player sits in a tiny 2 x 2 meters apartment, it doesn’t sound very credible. So you have to be really careful how you create the audio system.

We worked with Kevin Manthei as the composer, and he is the composer of the Ultimate Spider-Man TV series and of Batman: Gotham Knight. He’s a very experienced designer and also a musician. So he was basically composing, playing, and sending dozens of iterations. We got this score with a ’90s vibe that’s running in the background, and on top of that, we have our sound effects.

We also hired the best voice actors we could get. We had our wishlist of voice actors that included like Hollywood A-list. And then of course, the casting agencies came back and said, “They probably could not do that, but here, we have this person for you. And they have worked on these games,” and then you're like, “Yes, it's amazing. Let's do that!” So, yup, that was the process. Lots of iterations.

HP: I think the most challenging part is, as Ivan said, the MR-iness of it because we have these portals that open up into these spaces. So, how do we sell that the audio within those spaces is legitimate while also trying to fill the player’s room where they’re playing with the audio as well? And then the player also has the ability to open and close these spaces, and have multiple open at once. You can be looking into completely different rooms through these portals. So how do we balance the audio between those things and make it feel believable? But the guys have done a really excellent job at it. It sounds super cool.

HP: Obviously the game has all these intriguing cinematics and thrilling moments and jump scares. But for me, as a designer, I love the a-ha moments. We have the game’s full puzzles, and our—not just logical escape room-type puzzles, but they also stretch the player’s understanding of how the mechanics work. You really have to think outside of the box in terms of how you apply these principles. And when you finally do figure that out, it’s a really great feeling. We’ve seen in the playtesting, people just love that moment where they’re actually solving things. The rest is cool as well, but it’s that one, like, “Yeah, I’ve figured this out—I’m going to escape now” that people really love. Ivan might disagree, though. He thinks I’d like the jump scares more than anything else.

IE: I think my favorite part, and that sounds very trivial and boring, but my favorite bit if I try to get into a player’s perspective is when I for the first time bring a door into my space and interact with it there. I just open the flap and turn around, and I see that the flap in the reflection is also going up and down. Because if I imagine I’m a player and I see that for the first time, I’m like, “Oh!” That’s the moment where I realize everything that I do here affects the space over there.

And like from a developer-producer-writer’s perspective, I think—and I’m not spoiling it now—but I think the final part of the game where you interact with characters, but you have for the first time a solid idea of what it is actually that you are seeing, that’s my favorite bit because that’s really the uncovering of the truth with one character that you already know at that time. That’s my favorite thing. I cannot say it well without spoilers.

IE: It’s hard to talk about without giving things away.

IE: It’s a story that kind of follows Jessica’s journey as she’s dealing not just with the conspiracy, but with her own internal problems. The layers are there to highlight that journey and reveal the answers to herself. Her story is almost more important than the case that she’s uncovering, or the conspiracy around Greyvale. There are different layers of stories to appeal to different people. Some people will resonate more with more evidence and conspiratorial stuff, and other people will resonate more with what’s happening with her internally. We’re trying to cover both, but then have those both reflect each other in a way and they’re both intertwined as a whole narrative.

It’s already mentioned in the first 20 seconds of the game. I would say, it’s like discovering the secrets of the Wakefield Corporation and discovering yourself. That’s basically the shortest I can boil it down to.

IE: I think Gone Home is actually a good reference for the discovery parts. And it has a similar vibe, but I would love to say that we have some hints of Alien: Isolation also in the mix.

IE: For PlaySide as a company, we have Kill Knight. We’re publishing Mouse. We have the entire Dumb Ways to Die franchise in several incarnations across various platforms. Age of Darkness is leaving Early Access very soon. There are lots of exciting things going on, but for this team, there’s nothing to share just yet.

IE: I mean, “Go play the game” is always good, especially as a developer.

I think that it was a very challenging and a very rewarding development process, which was probably in some parts one of the most challenging and one of the most rewarding games I ever worked on. I really, really hope the players enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making the game. Harley, what do you want players to know?

HP: I think mixed reality is such an interesting thing because it’s so hard to get a grasp of what it really feels like by looking at videos and stuff. And we’re doing a lot with it. It’s pretty intense. So, I’ll just say, “Go and play the game” because nothing’s really going to capture the feeling other than being in the headset and playing it yourself.