Spatial Narrative Design in First-Person Horror Games Theoretical Foundations and a Design Framework

First-person horror games use explorable space, environmental clues, and restricted or ambiguous audiovisual perception to organize both narrative understanding and fear. In this study, spatial narrative denotes the production of narrative meaning through the organization of game space. Existing research on environmental storytelling, game space, cognition, and horror often treats these elements separately, leaving their relationships to threat expectation and practical level design insufficiently specified.
This study adopts a theory-informed qualitative approach combining a literature review, purposive case selection, structured analysis of selected locations and sequences, cross-case comparison, and framework construction. It examines six cases—Outlast, P.T. (Playable Teaser), SOMA, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Alien: Isolation, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent—selected for theoretical variation in spatial strategy.
The analysis identifies four interrelated dimensions: spatial structure, which organizes exploration and may stabilize or disrupt cognitive maps; environmental storytelling, which distributes clues for narrative reconstruction; horror atmosphere, which shapes uncertainty through restricted or ambiguous audiovisual cues; and emotional progression, which regulates the sequence of safety, anticipation, tension, and release. These findings are synthesized into a Spatial Narrative Design Framework comprising eleven case-derived design principles, a hypothesized conceptual pathway linking spatial design to environmental information, cognitive construction, threat expectation, and horror experience, and a sequential level-design process. An illustrative application to The End of Song demonstrates how the framework can inform the development of a new level concept. The framework is theoretically grounded and receives qualitative and conceptual support from the case analysis; however, its effects on players have not yet been empirically tested.