UNLOCK! Final Assignment- Jiawen Li, Ziyuan Lin

Run From Mount Shackles — Game Design Document

1. Game Overview

1.1 Basic Information

Run From Mount Shackles is an Unlock style puzzle card game for teenagers aged 15 and above, as well as adults, especially players who pay attention to social issues. It runs on both physical cards and a companion web application, supporting cooperative play for 2 to 5 people. The recommended playtime is 120 minutes, and the game language is English.

1.2 Game Introduction

Run From Mount Shackles is an immersive puzzle card game centered on the serious social issue of anti human trafficking. The player takes on the role of a young woman who travels to a mountain village to apply for a teaching position. After experiencing what seems to be a peaceful interview process, she is suddenly imprisoned and gradually realizes that she has fallen into a human trafficking trap. Through card combinations, physical puzzles, and online interactive mini games, the game guides players to gain knowledge, develop alertness, and ultimately escape the mountain village to trigger a rescue ending while engaging in a tense and exciting puzzle solving process. The game is adapted from real social cases and delivers important safety education messages within an entertaining package. All puzzle content is deeply integrated with the main storyline, allowing players to experience the story through logical reasoning and emotional resonance.

1.3 Core Design Principles

The design of Run From Mount Shackles is built on four mutually supportive core principles, which together serve the game's entertainment experience and social education goals. The game prioritizes narrative first, with every card and puzzle deeply embedded in the story logic, so that solving puzzles advances the plot. Safety knowledge and emergency awareness are naturally integrated into the escape experience, allowing players to acquire and remember information through active participation rather than passive reception, achieving an organic unity of education and entertainment. In addition, immersion is built from multiple dimensions: a hand drawn visual style, a shift to darker tones as the story deepens, a looping suspenseful background music, and six online interactive mini games all work together to maintain a consistent atmospheric tension during the two-hour gameplay. The game encourages collaborative exploration, with players sharing clues, reasoning together, and making joint decisions under time pressure.

2. Worldview and Storyline

2.1 Background Setting

The story takes place in a remote mountain village in a secluded area of southern China. The village lies in a valley, connected to the outside world only by a winding mountain path. Cell phone signals are weak, and outsiders rarely visit. The village has a power structure centered on the village head, which on the surface maintains the peaceful order of an agrarian society, but in reality hides a long standing human trafficking network. The game is set in early autumn, when rice fragrance fills the air and mountain mists are thick. This seemingly idyllic natural scenery creates a strong visual and emotional contrast with the danger the protagonist faces, forming a core part of the game's rhetorical strategy.

2.2 Main Storyline

Preceding Storyline The Teaching Interview

The protagonist travels alone to the village to apply for a teaching position. The beautiful scenery lowers her guard. The three interviews, set in different locations in the village, appear normal: questioning in the elder's courtyard, examination by the production team leader, and a test by the forest ranger. But in fact these are carefully arranged traps. After completing the interview puzzles, the protagonist is drugged with a cup of tea and falls unconscious, beginning Act 1.

Act 1 Locked in a Room

The protagonist wakes up in a musty earthen room. A kind stranger slips a key and a mysterious patterned object through the crack under the door, hinting that tonight is the best time to escape. Players collect items and clues, eventually using the key to unlock the rusty lock on the window and escape the room. Looking down at the entire village from the window, two branching paths for Act 1 open up: the mysterious shop and the village head's house.

Act 1 Branch A The Mysterious Shop

The protagonist sneaks to the mysterious shop at the foot of the mountain and discovers that the pattern on the mysterious object exactly matches the pattern at the shop's entrance, confirming that she can ask for help here. The shopkeeper reveals a code word "ESCAPE" through a water pouring puzzle, then presses travel money into the protagonist's hand and urges her to escape carefully.

Act 1 Branch B The Village Head's House

The protagonist sneaks into the village head's house, unlocks the small door by moving wooden bolts to enter the courtyard, and finds a photo of the village head with a mysterious person in the study. Flipping the photo over, she solves a signature puzzle "Ed." in the corner and discovers her own teaching application form on the back, stamped with a red seal reading "Premium Quality". She realizes the village sees her as merchandise. By solving puzzles on a vase and a cabinet, she retrieves a hand drawn mountain map from a hidden compartment in the cabinet. This map becomes the core tool for the subsequent escape.

Act 2 The Mountain Pass and the Roadblock

Following the map, the protagonist reaches the mountain pass but is blocked by a patrol dog. Players must complete an online path puzzle mini game to plan a detour around the dog. Then, a roadblock demands a toll. After paying the shopkeeper's money, she is allowed to pass. The way forward is cut off by a broken bridge, and the pattern on the bridge planks sets up a clue for the next act.

Act 3 Help from a Mysterious Woman

Just as the protagonist solves a puzzle and escapes into the mountains, her pursuers closing in, a strange woman suddenly appears and takes her back to a wooden cabin deep in the forest. The player explores the room, solving several puzzles in sequence: using a sewing needle from a coat to repair a broken compass; finding a cabinet key through the pattern of doodles in a hunting notebook; opening the cabinet to discover another application form identical to the protagonist's. Comparing the two forms, the scattered capital letters together spell "FREEDOM". The strange woman is also a trafficking victim. Having endured many years, she chooses to stay in the village but still reaches out to help, giving the protagonist a handkerchief as a token and pointing the way to kind people outside the mountains.

Act 4 Survival in the Mountains

The protagonist travels alone through the dark mountain forest, using natural navigation knowledge such as the Big Dipper to find north, tree rings to determine direction, moss growth orientation to tell north from south, and midday tree shadows to identify east and west. Combined with the repaired compass and the hand drawn map, she follows four correct paths. Finally, using an online flashlight mini game to illuminate marked symbols on tree trunks and cross referencing with the mountain map, she pieces together the name of a neighboring village.

Final Act Four Melodies and Dialing

 After great hardship, the protagonist crosses the mountains and arrives at the neighboring village, where she meets four strangers. Each hums a different melody, and the melodies contain rhythmic information. The player, holding the handkerchief token, compares the rhythmic pattern printed on the handkerchief with the drumbeat rhythms of the four melodies one by one, looking for an exact match. The melody sung by the middle-aged man is the correct one. Adding the numbers he sings to the numbers on the token card yields a dialing opportunity. The player enters the contact phone number from the application form on the web dialing interface. The call goes through. Based on the clues provided by the protagonist, the police successfully rescue two other trafficked women in the village, and the perpetrators are held criminally liable.

3. Theoretical Foundations

3.1 Greimas Square and Narrative Structure

The Greimas Square is built on two fundamental oppositions, S and anti S. The game uses "freedom" and "imprisonment" as its contradictory pair. On this basis, the square introduces two derived terms: non S and non anti S.

Freedom S: This is the ideal state the protagonist pursues, represented by successful escape, returning to a safe environment, and making contact with the outside world. In the game, this pole is concretely embodied by the final cell phone call and crossing the village boundary.

Imprisonment anti S: This is the protagonist's initial state and the predicament to be overcome, represented by being confined in a room, losing freedom of movement, and being under surveillance and threat. Opponents such as villagers and the patrol dog maintain this state.

Non freedom non-S: This term means "not freedom" but not exactly active imprisonment. In the game, this corresponds to resistance. The protagonist continuously takes action during the escape, such as finding keys, combining cards, and solving puzzles. She has not yet gained freedom, but is no longer passively enduring imprisonment.

Non imprisonment non anti S: This term means "not imprisonment" but not true freedom. In the game, this corresponds to complicity. Those ordinary villagers who benefit from the trafficking network but are not its direct designers appear to live normal lives and even act friendly, but their behavior helps maintain the imprisonment system. They do not personally guard the protagonist, nor do they help her escape, thus occupying an ambiguous position of "non imprisonment".

The Greimas Square is not only used for static classification but more importantly reveals the action relationships between characters. In Run From Mount Shackles, the narrative unfolds through tensions among these four positions. The protagonist subject starts from "imprisonment", and her goal is "freedom". To achieve this goal, she needs the help of helpers. The helpers provide different kinds of assistance from the positions of "non freedom" and "non imprisonment". For example, the stranger who slips the key is in a state of "non imprisonment" but also lacks full freedom, so his action moves the protagonist from "imprisonment" toward "non freedom". The woman in the mountain cabin is in a state of "non freedom", but she provides the protagonist with key clues needed for "freedom". The ambiguity of the helpers is confirmed in the game through puzzle solving, which exactly reflects the deep logic of the narrative structure: true help often comes from those who have not yet achieved perfect freedom themselves but also do not belong to the oppressive system. The opponents maintain the stability of the "imprisonment" pole. The village head, the patrol dog, and the roadblock use direct violence, surveillance, and control of passage to prevent the protagonist from entering the positions of "non imprisonment" or "freedom".

The Greimas Square also introduces more complex logical relationships. Several items in the game, such as the application form stamped with "Premium Quality" and the photo of the village head with an outside accomplice, reveal how the pole of "imprisonment" is supported by external social forces. This introduces a fourth dimension: the relationship between sender and receiver. The manipulators of human trafficking, as senders, do not appear directly in the game scene, but they influence the field through objects and systems. This expands the simple binary opposition of "freedom" and "imprisonment" into a complex network of systemic oppression.

So the Greimas Square helps Run From Mount Shackles clearly position each character's narrative function and also reveals how the game constructs a profound story of escape and awakening through suspenseful helper identities, progressive resistance actions, and ambiguous complicit positions.

3.2 MDA Framework

The MDA framework breaks game design into three interconnected levels: Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics. In Run From Mount Shackles, these three levels work closely together to serve the dual goals of entertainment and social education.

At the mechanics level, the game operates around a card combination system as its core: red cards and blue cards add together to unlock new cards, green mechanism cards require solving puzzles through the companion app, and yellow lock cards require players to collect passwords to advance. These rules include deliberate constraints like time penalties for incorrect combinations, creating a sustained sense of pressure. The six online interactive mini games extend the mechanics layer, each calling on different cognitive skills: the patrol dog puzzle tests spatial reasoning, the flashlight illumination relies on systematic environmental scanning, and melody recognition requires sustained auditory discrimination.

These mechanics give rise to rich dynamics. Players naturally form role divisions, and the countdown timer amplifies tension and forces negotiation. The cross platform design, constantly switching between physical cards and the web application, creates a rhythm of transition that mirrors the protagonist's own movement through different spaces.

At the aesthetics level, sensory experience is built through the hand drawn visual style, the shift from warm tones in the interview phase to oppressive tones in the imprisonment phase, and the looping suspenseful soundtrack. A sense of community emerges naturally from the collaborative structure of sharing discoveries and debating solutions under time pressure. Most critically, exploration and discovery drive the experience forward. The emotional impact is enormous when players realize they themselves are being treated as merchandise and that the strange woman helping them is also a victim.

3.3 Agency and Ergodic Literature

Run From Mount Shackles is ergodic: the player must act, decide, fail, and try again for the game to unfold. For example, in Act 4 with the wilderness knowledge test, the game rules force the player to interact with that knowledge, treating it in logic as real survival skills.

The online interactive mini games are important ergodic sites in the game, and their ergodic forms remain diverse. Each requires a different kind of active effort: the patrol dog puzzle requires spatial planning, the wooden bolt lock requires visual pattern matching, and melody recognition requires sustained auditory focus and cross referencing with physical props. These games require embodied participation from the player, allowing them to experience, in a gamified way, some of the cognitive and emotional labor required for escape, creating embodied empathy: they are not watching someone flee, but participating in the escape with their own efforts.

4. Game System Design

4.1 Card Mechanics

The game cards are divided into five colors, each corresponding to different mechanical functions.

Red cards and blue cards are both item cards. They are the only cards that can be combined with each other. Players add the number on a red card to the number on a blue card, then reveal the new card with that number, triggering new items, clues, or scenes. Red cards cannot be combined with other red cards, nor blue cards with other blue cards.

Green cards are mechanism cards. Players open the companion app, enter the corresponding card number, and receive a hint or enter an online game to solve a puzzle. The app then tells the player the number of the next card to reveal.

Yellow cards are lock cards. Players obtain a password by solving puzzles in the game, enter it into the "password" function in the app. Correct answers unlock new scenes or story progress; incorrect answers trigger a penalty that deducts game time.

Grey cards are general purpose cards, covering four uses: scene cards marked with numbers and letters; clue explanation cards that supplement story and puzzle hints; penalty cards revealed when a red blue combination is wrong; and result cards generated after a correct red blue combination.

Card combination is the core mechanism of the game. Each card has a number in the upper right corner. When players think two cards should interact, they add the two numbers together and reveal the card with that number. A correct combination advances the story with a synthesis result; an incorrect combination deducts a certain amount of game time.

4.2 Online Companion Application

The companion web application works together with the physical cards throughout the game. Core functions include: a countdown timer; input interfaces for green card mechanisms and yellow card passwords; a clue interface where players enter card numbers to receive hints; and background music playback control. All mini games are launched by entering corresponding codes in the application, which redirects to the respective web pages.

5. Online Interactive Mini Game Design

The game includes six online interactive mini games, each launched via code entry in the companion application, tightly integrated with the card narrative. As a whole, the six mini games are the most direct expression of the game's ergodic design principle: the knowledge embedded in each puzzle requires players to exert a different kind of active effort to acquire it.

5.1 Interview Exploration Map

Players use keys to move a character freely across a grid map representing the entire mountain village. The map has three key locations that must be visited in sequence: the elder's courtyard, the terraced fields, and the mountain cabin. During movement, random events trigger tests or conversations with villagers; the conversations contain subtle warning signals that foreshadow later events. After using clues collected during the interviews to solve the final puzzle, the protagonist is drugged and loses consciousness, beginning Act 1.

5.2 Small Door Wooden Bolt Lock

Players need to unlock the door to the backyard of the village head's house. The screen shows two keys that can be dragged left and right, each with gaps in the middle. By adjusting the relative positions of the two keys to correctly align the gaps, and then combining with a letter clue in the lower right corner of the web page, players derive the correct answer. Successfully unlocking allows them to reveal a new card and enter the study scene.

5.3 Patrol Dog Avoidance Puzzle

The screen shows an 8x8 grid map representing the terrain near the village entrance, with the patrol dog's fixed position and patrol range marked on the map. Below the map are 14 straight or bent path fragments. Players must drag each fragment onto the grid one by one, assembling a continuous safe path from the starting point to the end point that bypasses all dangerous areas, allowing the protagonist to pass safely. The dog's position corresponds exactly to the markings on the hand drawn map card, creating a direct link between the physical card and the digital game.

5.4 Flashlight Illumination

The web page initially shows a completely black screen, simulating the dark mountain forest environment. Players move the mouse to control a limited range flashlight beam that moves across the screen, requiring systematic scanning of the entire image. When the beam illuminates the correct areas on tree trunks, hidden circle marks appear one by one. There are five circles scattered. Players connect the corresponding letters on the map in the order they are found, eventually spelling out the full name of the neighboring village.

5.5 Four Melody Recognition

The web page shows images of four strangers. When clicked, each sings a unique melody remixed from the background music, performed by four distinct vocal styles. Players compare the rhythmic pattern printed on the handkerchief with the harmonica rhythm in each of the four melodies, looking for an exact match. The number sung in that person's voice is then added to the number on the token card, granting the opportunity to make a phone call.

5.6 Phone Dialing

After obtaining the dialing opportunity, players enter the parents' contact phone number from the teaching application form into the dialing interface of the companion application. When the call connects, the screen fades to black and text appears one by one. Players then reveal the ending card to complete the game.

6. Art Style and Visual Design

6.1 Overall Style

The game uses a hand drawn style as its unified visual language. The lines retain natural variations in thickness and slight tremors, giving each card a unique handmade texture and a sense of imperfection. Details such as wall textures, wood grain patterns, and tangled vines stimulate players' active imagination of the imagery, producing immersive visual resonance. The hand drawn style runs through all cards, making them visually form a complete, self consistent narrative space.

6.2 Tonal Narrative System

The game's core visual design strategy uses tonal shifts to carry plot turns.

During the village interview phase, the card backs use a warm yellowish paper background, bordered with green vines and leaves, emitting an overall rustic atmosphere. The numbers use a dark brown handwritten font set within carved window frames, echoing traditional Chinese architectural patterns. The companion online game interface simultaneously uses beige as its main color, with green navigation tags and plant icons, creating a gentle rural atmosphere that lulls the player into lowering their guard.

When the protagonist is locked in the room and enters the imprisonment escape phase, the card back design changes fundamentally: the background becomes deep pure black, and the border transforms from lively green leaves to withered, cracked dry vines. The companion online game interface simultaneously shifts to dark tones, creating visual narrative unity with the oppressive feeling of the cards. In the final phone call stage, where help arrives, a color representing life and hope, green, reappears in the visuals, completing the entire color narrative arc.

7. Sound and Music Design

The game features an original background music composition, with a mysterious, dark, and suspenseful style. It uses low frequency strings as a foundation, interspersed with irregular percussive rhythms, sustaining a sense of pressure and crisis throughout the escape process. The music incorporates traditional Chinese folk elements such as plucked zither strings, echoing the closed, gloomy atmosphere of the mountain village. The looping structure ensures players remain immersed in a tense, suspenseful mood for the entire two hour gameplay.

The four character melodies in the melody recognition mini game are all remixes based on this background music. By copying and repeating track segments, they present four distinctly different rhythms performed on a harmonica, each sung by four vocalists with different personal styles. The middle aged man's melody rhythm exactly matches the pattern on the handkerchief token, making it the correct answer players must find.

8. Educational Value and Social Significance

Run From Mount Shackles takes edutainment as its core starting point, integrating a serious social issue into the game narrative and achieving multiple levels of educational value beyond entertainment. The game reproduces common tactics used in real human trafficking cases through artistic methods, embedding typical danger signals such as fake interviews and unusual words or actions by villagers into the narrative. As players advance through the immersive story, they learn to recognize threats they might encounter in real life, building subconscious alertness to similar situations. Meanwhile, Act 4 integrates practical wilderness navigation methods such as using the Big Dipper to find north, reading tree rings, observing moss growth, and using midday tree shadows to determine direction into puzzle mechanics, driving players to actively explore and remember, so that knowledge acquisition is naturally blended into the gameplay. On an emotional and value level, the game uses the storyline in which the protagonist chooses to escape while the strange woman, also trapped, chooses to stay but still reaches out to help, guiding players to empathetically understand the situations and choices of trafficking victims.

9. Game Flow Overview

9.1 Main Flow

The overall game flow is as follows, with each stage tightly connected through card numbers and app password entries.

START → Preceding Storyline Interview Exploration Map Mini Game → Drugged Unconscious

Act 1 Imprisonment Escape → Reveal Village Overview Map

Branch A Mysterious Shop → Obtain Travel Money

Branch B Village Head's House → Obtain Photo, Application Form, Mountain Map

Act 2 Mountain Pass Roadblock → Patrol Dog Puzzle Mini Game → Roadblock → Broken Bridge Puzzle

Act 3 Strange Cabin → Repair Compass → Hunting Notebook Puzzle → Discover Another Application Form → Obtain Token

Act 4 Mountain Survival → Wilderness Knowledge Test → Flashlight Illumination Game → Spell Place Name

Final Act Melody Recognition → Melody Comparison → Obtain Phone → Dialing Web Page → Successful Ending

9.2 Puzzle Summary

The following are all key puzzles in the game and their solution elements.

Puzzle 1  Key through door crack + rusty lock on window → escape earthen room and obtain village overview map

Puzzle 2  Mysterious patterned object + mysterious shop → enter shop and meet shopkeeper

Puzzle 3  Shopkeeper pours water: solving water flow order puzzle → "ESCAPE" hint + travel money

Puzzle 4  Vase pattern as example + cabinet pattern puzzle → cabinet code "9056" + mountain map

Puzzle 5  Move two wooden bolts to align them → letters I and arrows inside + corner puzzle → answer F → enter village head's study

Puzzle 6  Signature "Ed." in photo corner + flip photo → card 63 → teaching application form on back

Puzzle 7  Patrol dog game: move grid pieces → assemble path avoiding dog

Puzzle 8  Travel money + roadblock → broken bridge puzzle

Puzzle 9  Strange woman appears + hidden card number 58 → enter strange woman's home

Puzzle 10  Coat sewing needle + broken compass → repaired compass + four direction cards

Puzzle 11  Doodle patterns in hunting notebook → cabinet key

Puzzle 12  Cabinet key + cabinet → open cabinet

Puzzle 13  Hidden number 81 on application form inside cabinet → strange woman's application form

Puzzle 14  Odd capital letters on two forms together spell "FREEDOM" + strange woman gives handkerchief token + points way forward

Puzzle 15  In northern hemisphere: Big Dipper shape → North Star direction is true north

Puzzle 16  In northern hemisphere: more moss on tree trunk → north side

Puzzle 17  In northern hemisphere: sparser tree rings on south side → points south

Puzzle 18  In northern hemisphere: midday sun due south → tree shadow due north

Puzzle 19  Flashlight illumination: circles + arrow connections → spell place name

Puzzle 20  Handkerchief token pattern + four sung melodies → matching kind person Puzzle 21  Enter contact number from application form on dialing web page → trigger ending

The Companion App for Run From Mount Shackles UNLOCK! Game: