Project / PC game / Vertical slice

Atlantis: The Dark Mirror

A first-person mystery adventure set in Plato’s Atlantis. The great Sun-Mirror fails to light at dawn, the High Priestess has vanished, and a young cartographer has just stepped off the boat.

Actual in-engine screenshot: the Hall of Tides, a marble hall with orichalcum columns, a reflecting pool and a bronze sea-god statue — Actual in-engine screenshot from the automated playthrough, 31 October 2026. Work in progress.

PlatformWindows PC

EngineUnreal Engine 5.8

StageVertical slice

Public game downloadNot released

The story so far

Atlantis, at the height of its power. Every dawn the Sun-Mirror on the Temple of Poseidon throws the first light across the city’s harbor rings. This morning it stays dark. Kael, a cartographer from a vassal island, arrives with a summons from the High Priestess Nesaia, and finds the gates locked and the city silent.

The setting draws only on public-domain sources: Plato’s Timaeus and Critias and Greek myth. The story, characters, and puzzles are original.

What is playable

The current slice runs about ten minutes across two areas. On the Outer Harbor, Kael meets Theron the harbor-master and the guard Ixion, finds a dropped wax tablet, and works out the symbol lock on the Tide-Gate. Inside the Hall of Tides, the chamberlain Mereth explains the sealed door, and three bronze mirrors must be turned to bounce a sunbeam onto a crystal lock. The chapter ends in the Priestess’s empty sanctum.

The three characters are MetaHumans in Bronze-Age costumes, and every line of dialogue is voiced.

Latest update: a lighting pass

31 October 2026

Playtesting showed the interiors were far too dark. Columns, ceilings, and corners of the Hall of Tides disappeared into black, and the sanctum walls could not be seen at all. The fix was a full lighting pass: stronger braziers, soft fill light across the hall’s ceiling and walls, a brighter shaft through the oculus, even light in the sanctum, and local exposure so shadows lift without washing out the sunlit harbor.

The same pass replaced the solid Tide-Gate slab with a bronze portcullis you can see through, gave the warehouses plank doors instead of black openings, filled the sea shaft in the sanctum with water, and set the wax tablet properly on its crate. The project also moved to a fresh Unreal Engine 5.8 project. After the changes, the automated playthrough still completes every story step from the first dialogue to the final title card.

Before and after comparison of the lighting pass, four in-game views: Hall of Tides, Mereth, the sanctum, and the bridge — Before (left) and after (right): the Hall of Tides, Mereth, the sanctum, and the view across the bridge. Actual in-engine screenshots.

Actual in-engine screenshot: a beam of light reflected across the Hall of Tides during the three-mirror puzzle — The three-mirror puzzle: the beam has reached the crystal lock. Actual in-engine screenshot.

How it is made

Almost everything in the slice was generated on a local workstation or built by script. Tileable materials and reference images come from FLUX.2, props are turned from images into 3D with TRELLIS.2, the score comes from ACE-Step, and the voices come from Kokoro text-to-speech. Architecture is modeled by Blender scripts, and Unreal Engine Python assembles the level from a design file. Game logic is written in C++.

What comes next

The distant city still needs more detail, and the slice needs more polish before anything is shared to play. No public download, release date, or store listing is announced. A download will appear here only when a public build is actually available.

Actual in-engine screenshot: the lowered bridge leading through the portico into the lit Hall of Tides — Across the lowered bridge, toward the Hall of Tides. Actual in-engine screenshot.