Occupancy

Be careful where you let your eyes rest.

Occupancy is a first-person psychological horror series built around interviews with people who lived through experiences that don't quite add up. A detective has spent years collecting these cases. Events that don't fit. Anomalies in survivors' accounts. Gaps where memory should be.

Each chapter is one of those interviews, and you play both sides of it. As the survivor, you walk through a first-person reconstruction of the night, moving through the rooms they remember and doing the things they had to do. As the detective, you sit across the table with the case file open, holding everything that was left behind after it happened. You can swap between the two at any time. The memory in front of you and the evidence in your hands don't always line up. Find the disagreements and clear them from the memory to remember more of what actually happened, before something else takes hold.

Chapter 1

Some nights are too dark to remember clearly.

The first interview. A young man, a teenager at the time, alone in his family's house for an evening. What he remembers and what was found afterward don't match, and where they don't, something else is waiting. He hasn't spoken about it in years. Tonight he tries.

Gameplay

• Walk through memory. Each interview drops you into a first-person reconstruction of the night. Move through the spaces he describes, examine objects, take in details the conversation will need later.

• Catch what doesn't belong. Switch your attention between the room as he remembers it and the room as the evidence shows it. The differences are the truth surfacing. Find them and you can push past them to the next part of the night.

• The gaps don't stay empty. What you leave behind, what you don't notice, feeds something. The more you leave, the worse it gets.

• Choose how the night gets told. Your dialogue and your attention shape which version of it you reach by the end. There's no single ending, and there's no obvious right one.

What to expect

• A complete standalone story. Future chapters follow the detective into new investigations. New survivor, new night, new environment.

• Multiple paths and endings, with branches that diverge meaningfully partway through. (not just 1 final choice)

• No two interviews unfold the same way. The anomalies, the evidence, and the memories you can recover shift from playthrough to playthrough.

• Built in Unreal Engine 5, focused on optimized photorealistic graphics.

From the developer

A few things I want to be upfront about, since these questions tend to come up and I want to be transparent:

• Each chapter is a complete experience. Nothing is held back or split off, despite the game having "Chapters." I fully believe in each chapter being its own experience and being a completely playable game on its own. The only reason for the format is to give me the ability to connect them all on top of the standalone games.

• In regards to voice acting and localization, the game will have voice acting however since I am a solo developer the voice acting will only be in English at launch. That said the game will still have subtitles and other interface localization for all of the languages listed in the side bar. (voice dubbing is on the table for post launch updates though)

• The release date is currently set to sometime in 2027. Ideally I want it to launch sooner rather than later, but the nature of making a game may say otherwise. That said, at the very least I plan to have a playable demo months before release. (its cliche but I would rather publish something I feel is a good product and worth a players time and money than rush something because there's a deadline)

Thanks for reading. If this is your kind of thing, a wishlist helps me know there's an audience for it.