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Autumn Show 2025
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OBSCURA

Project details

Programme
Group CVA Group 1
Year 1

Obscura is a narrative puzzle game exploring the loss of place-based cultural identity in the digital age. Set in 2055, it examines how memory, myth, and nostalgia shape our relationship to place, and how digital overlays blur preservation and distortion. The story follows a character revisiting their childhood home, where they uncover a degraded neural interface device known as an Obscura chip. Once replacing the smartphone, it projected memories and media directly onto reality. As its archives fragment, familiar landscapes collapse into surreal, unstable environments. Inspired by the coastal towns of North East England, the game reconstructs them through three sensory mechanics: sound, collision, and light. Players align sensory traces with fractured memories, each restored scene revealing a stage in the town’s decline. The work combines linear puzzles with emergent mechanics that adapt dynamically to player movement. Glitch-based systems allow environments to grow, collapse, and reconfigure in response to interaction, spatialising memory as unstable. At its conclusion, Obscura asks whether digitally preserving a fading town constitutes memory, distortion, or mythmaking.

Game Development Portfolio

Game Development Portfolio

The project development utilised archival photos and references of towns along the North East coast. Various teleportation and visibility techniques were used to create non-Euclidean spaces that redefine traversal in the digital environment.

Set in memory of a declining coastal town, the environments flip between empty seafronts, abandoned factories, closing high streets, and a persistent shifting house that warps and responds to the player throughout the game.

OBSCURA Poster

Set in memory of a declining coastal town, the environments flip between empty seafronts, abandoned factories, closing high streets, and a persistent shifting house that warps and responds to the player throughout the game.

In the ending of the game, players confront cultural loss and digitisation, questioning whether archiving is preservation, distortion, or the creation of a new collective myth.

Ending Level

In the ending of the game, players confront cultural loss and digitisation, questioning whether archiving is preservation, distortion, or the creation of a new collective myth.

Gameplay Demo

Gameplay Demo

OBSCURA’s gameplay involves players recovering corrupted virtual memories through sensory mechanics: listening, touching, and inferring data to navigate unstable worlds and reconstruct fragments of place.

Glitch objects grow and array around the player, forming bridges and cover to traverse obstacles. These shifting forms spatialise memory as a cybernetic architectural system that adapts to both circulation through the space and personal experience.

Sound Level

Glitch objects grow and array around the player, forming bridges and cover to traverse obstacles. These shifting forms spatialise memory as a cybernetic architectural system that adapts to both circulation through the space and personal experience.

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The Bartlett
Autumn Show 2025
23 September – 5 October
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