Fogbound, a short psychological horror game set in a 3D modelled Lahore, is scheduled to release at the end of this year from independent developer Ibrahim Hisham, an 18 year old student working under his studio Minidevs. The game takes its inspiration from the smog season that returns to Lahore every year and grows worse each time, imagining a future in which a poisonous, mind-eroding fog spreads through the city and forces it into quarantine. The idea comes from lived experience, since Lahore has again been ranked among the most polluted major cities in the world during the current smog season.
The game is a story based walking simulator in which players take the role of Riaz, a member of the Air Quality Task Force inside the sealed city. Riaz explores different pockets of Lahore, decontaminates zones, and places monitors to keep the city running as well as possible. The fog turns people into sayahs, a word that means shadows, describing residents who have become hollow versions of their former selves. With the city fully locked down, getting Riaz and his partner Amara out becomes a bureaucratic ordeal of its own, and the conflict between the two over her return forms the emotional centre of the story. Hisham describes the project as mostly interactive fiction, with light combat and a few puzzles, but the focus rests on dialogue, exploration, and a linear narrative lasting around one and a half to two hours, with themes such as dissociation and guilt.
Hisham has been making games since before the age of ten and has already published an arcade shooter called Pointblank on Steam, along with several game jam projects on Itch.io. He recalls that smog first came up in morning school assemblies when he was in grade four or five, and that students later had to start wearing masks during the season. In 2024 his school closed for about two weeks because of hazardous air quality, and that break gave him time to turn the situation into a horror idea set in an imagined future where it goes completely out of control. Fogbound is built by a team of three. One artist handles the low poly models, designed deliberately to resemble old PlayStation games, while a musician based in Russia, recruited through Discord, composed between 20 and 30 dark ambient tracks. Hisham carries out everything else himself. The game will launch in English, and a roman Urdu translation is planned for later, though Urdu script remains out of reach for now because right to left text is notoriously difficult to localise in games.
A trailer is expected in November, and the game is due on Steam at the end of December. Hisham says his target audience is players who enjoy narrative driven indie titles and explorable worlds, and that people who only want action packed big budget releases will probably not find what they are looking for. For him, success is less about revenue and more about finishing the game exactly as he imagined it and having people talk about it. He hopes it leaves a mark on the Pakistani indie scene, which he describes as fragmented, and shows other young developers that making something ambitious from their own surroundings is possible, even if the impact stays local rather than global.
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