EXODUS is a speculative game exploring how social conditions, particularly language barriers, can become tools of oppression for migrating individuals. Language limits access to essentials such as healthcare, education, and finance, rendering people secondary to the spaces they inhabit.

Set in a hidden London Underground lab, players navigate alien-occupied spaces, decoding a mysterious language to gain resources and end the assault of nocturnal creatures. The game’s asymmetry reinforces these barriers: one team races to decipher codes and puzzles under pressure, while the other, as creatures, has unrestricted access — a dynamic reflecting local privilege and bringing to the forefront the reality that migrant navigation is a lived challenge that cannot simply be explained. Interactive elements like a “Talking Fish Head” clue-giver and a door-keypad simulation immerse players in restricted communication systems.

Developed as a game-design brief for Punchdrunk, EXODUS explores merging theatrical storytelling with gamified interactivity to examine power, access, and inequity.

An app designed to represent ‘Keypads’ that our team of ‘investigators’ will have to confront in order to win or gain access to rooms within our fictional concept and world. 

This simulation is a two-phase interactive code-breaking puzzle, first involving a solo search for fading symbol-letter matches, then a collaborative challenge between two separated participants who must combine symbols and scattered clues to crack the final code.