Trespasser

Featured in USC Games Expo 2022

Showcased at Games, Learning, and Society Conference 2022

Trespasser is a 3D environmental exploration/puzzle game where players delve into a forbidden underground space to help Bhabha, the protagonist, discover the truth of her people’s identity. The game focuses on postcolonial power dynamics and how they play out on a personal level, allowing the player to feel the tragedy of discovering a culture’s lost history- and the hopeful, revolutionary act of reclaiming that history- by exploring through the eyes of an individual from that culture.

Design goal:

Trespasser aims to have players feel the tragedy of encountering and discovering one’s own lost history, and the hopeful, revolutionary act of reclaiming that history.

The Language

To depict the language of this "lost" culture, we created a fictional language that utilizes linguistic concepts of radicals and morphemes in a realistic way. This allowed us to embed the deeper themes of the narrative within the language itself so that the understanding of the language can be meaningfully built within the player.

Additionally, creating words from component parts allowed us to use the combinatorial nature of languages as a puzzle mechanic, requiring players to use the language effectively in order to proceed.

The Space

The language is not the only game element to reflect the narrative themes, however. The murals along the walls depict the stories that Bhaba remembers the Elder telling her, and her memory of these stories allows her to interpret the language embedded in the murals.

By weaving the environment, the narrative, and the puzzles together, we aimed to create a cohesive and meaningful narrative experience that the player felt they had agency in creating.

The Message

Our goal was to respectfully depict the tension between devastation and survival that individuals from oppressed communities feel when they try to connect to their past through a culturally ambiguous setting.

We also wanted to offer a commentary on traditional “tomb raiding” narratives and tell a story where, in exploring an ancient space, the knowledge of the culture is the treasure itself.