Analytical psychology driven game design in Jung’s Labyrinth

Ing. Jan Jileček
10 min readAug 28, 2020

Jung’s Labyrinth is a psychological exploration game I made in 3 months. The game is unlike any other. I noticed a niche on the market, for games that would utilize Jungian psychology. There are literally no games (or movies) that would go in-depth into archetypal/analytical psychology and use its concepts literally.

I compare Jung to Einstein, but unlike Jung, you can understand how Einstein came up with his theories. As he himself says, he just thought about a problem longer than normal people. But Jung… he was sort of an archeologist for the mind and the roots of consciousness. The depths of his understanding of the mind are scary. Each time I read his books I feel like reading something out of a Lovecraftian story, except it’s almost always scientific and provable.

But Jung’s opponents often claim that Jungian psychology is pseudo-scientific. Reading 10 pages of any of his books would prove them wrong, if only they tried it.

Jung came up with the concept of the Collective Unconsciousness, and he proved it. It means that there is a sort of a collective basis of our minds, from which everything stems. That means that a newborn’s mind is NOT a clean slate, but it’s already full of predetermined neural structures that form its character. Kind of like instinct in animals. Those things are shared among people and are called archetypes.

Archetypes exist in everyone, and each person has his own activated version of the archetype, a personal complex. The archetypes that are activated the most in you are shaped by the circumstances of your life.

Those archetypes include the Shadow, Anima and Animus (contrasexual identity), Wise Old Man and the Self.

The Shadow consists of repressed parts of your conscious personality, and are both good and bad. The Shadow holds your untapped potential, both negative and positive. Hitler was controlled by the vicious Shadow of everything he ever repressed and what his father Alois did to him. All that…

Ing. Jan Jileček

INTP, UE5 dev, Master’s degree in comp-sci, Creator, indie game developer, director, writer, photographer. I like BJJ, Jungian psychology, mythology and memes.