Corridors of Dread: The Architectural Psychology of Liminal Spaces in Horror Game Design

You are walking down a perfectly ordinary hotel hallway in a video game. There are no monsters, no sudden loud noises, no blood on the walls. Yet, every step you take fills you with a creeping, suffocating sense of panic. This is the power of the "liminal space"—the art of designing environments that feel deeply familiar, yet inherently wrong.

Why do empty parking garages, endless stairwells, or slightly distorted domestic rooms terrify us more than a grotesque creature jumping out of a clos...