Hellblade dev’s next game takes place entirely in a single, real-life apartment

In terms of horror games set inside a single mundane location modeled closely on real life, PT casts a long shadow, but the studio behind Hellblade aims to take its own shot at this absurdly specific genre. Ninja Theory’s mysterious Project: Mara is going to take place inside a single apartment, modelled on a real-world location that’s being recreated down to the last detail.

The devs call Project: Mara’s apartment “our most ambitious and realistic game setting ever”. The ultra-realistic environment is too complicated to recreate entirely by hand, so the studio is building tools to procedurally generate those tiny details. As chief creative Tameem Antoniades explains, “It’s an entirely different approach that is laying the foundation for all of our projects across the studio, and all of our future projects.”

Project: Mara is part of Ninja Theory’s Dreadnought initiative, a series of small-scale projects being built by small teams within the studio. Project: Mara has been described from the start as an “experimental title” that aims to explore the concept of mental terror.

“We’re aiming for an experience that feels real that doesn’t feel like a game, and it doesn’t feel like a movie,” the studio explains in the dev diary below. “It’s something altogether different.”

The video will give you a much closer look at the impressively realistic environments you can expect.