🕹️ How to Play

• Put on your AR headset and step into a quiet museum scene.
• Look around: the Mona Lisa hangs on the wall. A cat sleeps on the floor.
• Suddenly, a fire breaks out — smoke, sparks, and urgency surround you.
• Using hand gestures, grab either the cat or the painting.
• Walk toward the exit. Your decision will be carried into the next scene.
• Enter the Rewind Room, a surreal VR space where floating memory bubbles reveal the outcomes of your actions — praise, protest, grief, or nothing at all.
• You may go back to the museum. The decision feels familiar, but you are no longer the same.

💭 What Will You Learn?

Unlike traditional moral education, built on hypothetical texts, this game asks: what happens when your body is part of the question?

Inspired by EU values like Human Dignity, Freedom, and Cultural Heritage, Ashes or Breath invites reflection that is:

• Embodied: Moral discomfort arises from physical action, not narration.
• Emotional: Players feel regret, justification, empathy — not just thought.
• Unresolvable: The story ends with reflection, not reward.

🎨 Designed with Cultural Play Methods

Built during the EPIC-WE Cultural Game Jam, the game followed a structured reflective design process:

• Culture + Value + Game Collage: Exploring legacy vs. empathy through fire, art, and vulnerability.
• Game Sketching: Ideating player roles and moral stakes from multiple perspectives.
• Concept Convergence: Refining a focused design around a single, irreversible ethical decision.
• Future Culture Worlds: Designing post-choice narratives that ripple emotionally and culturally.

👥 Team Reflection

Designing Ashes or Breath made us rethink what it means to teach ethics through interaction. From the beginning, we weren't interested in giving players the "right" answer. We wanted them to feel the weight of the question—and carry that feeling even after the game ends.

Initially, we considered building this as a digital storytelling experience. But after reflecting on our Culture + Value + Game Collage and the EPIC-WE framework, we realized that embodied choice in AR—reaching for a cat or a painting with your real hand—would be far more powerful than abstract dialogue.

Through visits to museums and conversations about European values like dignity, freedom, and cultural heritage, we found that this fire scene could carry more than visual drama—it could be a reflection of how society treats the past, the present, and what it chooses to save.

Playtesting showed us something surprising: players didn't look for "what earns points." Instead, they paused. They asked: "What would I regret more?" That's when we knew this wasn't about answers. It was about creating space for reflection. The Rewind Room, with its memory fragments and looping structure, was our way of honoring that internal dialogue.

As a team, we also learned how to balance philosophical depth with interaction clarity. AR is immersive but fragile, too much complexity can break the moment. We iterated constantly on fire timing, object placement, and pacing to keep players focused on the emotional center of the game.

In the end, Ashes or Breath taught us that even the simplest interaction—a reach, a choice—can be powerful when it asks the right question. This is more than a game about saving a cat or a painting. It's about who we are when there's no time to think—and what our choices say about the future we're trying to protect.

👥 Credits

• Concept, Code, Design Lead: Chengdong "Black" Sun
• Art & Interaction Design: Ge "Kacy" Fu
• Narrative & Philosophy: Shichao Guo
• Created for: EPIC-WE Cultural Game Jam