Still Warm
A climate grief narrative game, exploring how players process loss and hope.
Still Warm is a branching narrative game designed to help players sit with climate grief rather than look away from it. Set in a near-future Boston, it follows Wren, a former therapist who's stopped believing anything they do matters, and Mara, a physicist arriving from 2137 with a hope Wren finds hard to trust. Player choices ripple across both timelines through a 3-axis decision framework, adapted from Pihkala's Process Model of Eco-anxiety and Ecological Grief, that lets players move between action, distancing, grieving, self-care, and emotional engagement rather than forcing a single "correct" response to climate anxiety.
The project is still early: we've completed the design requirements, narrative architecture, and decision framework, with user testing and full deployment still ahead. A work-in-progress paper on this design process has just been accepted at GoodIT, and a fuller write-up will follow here once that's finalized.