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An ominous plaza with malformed pillars in front a large concrete building looming in the void.

Forgotten Halls

An experiment in surrealism

An interior plaza with a skylight, flower beds, benches, large concrete dividers, and a tree in the center.

What is Forgotten Halls?

Forgotten Halls is a map for the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that I made over the course of one week in September 2023. I wanted to experiment with non-standard features of map design, and surrealist architecture.

An ominous concrete hallway with a tipped over chair illuminated by an off screen red light.

Deciding the Tone

Originally, Forgotten Halls was going to be pure surrealism, however as the project evolved I decided to move in the direction of inciting dread or discomfort. The map’s aesthetics were built around that core idea. It still embraces surrealism and the dread it tries to invoke is more existential rather than anything explicitly gruesome or creepy.

A large room filled with a shallow body of water. In the center of the room a couch is pointed toward a TV on a TV Stand.

Designing Liminal Horror

Forgotten Halls very deliberately taps into a current Internet aesthetic of “Liminal Spaces.” The most basic premise of Liminal Spaces is an image of a place taken out of it’s intended purpose. One of the most common could be as simple as an empty mall, a place designed to be bustling with shoppers, left empty. Forgotten Halls pushes into the more surreal side of Liminal Spaces and into a sub-culture of it called “Liminal Horror.” The map was built to purposely mismatch the items in a room with their surroundings or to create a scene that is almost familiar but it is within a surreal context.