Hexin Cai's Out of Focus Rebuilds a Childhood Flat in Pixels
The free Bartlett graduation project sets resolution against memory: some rooms return as coarse mosaics, others almost sharp.
Hexin Cai, who goes by Hazel, has released Out of Focus, an experimental narrative game, as a free Windows download on itch.io. It is Cai's 2026 graduation project from the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The game went up on Oct. 9, and the programme shared a trailer on Oct. 18. Watch it below.
The trailer for Out of Focus, with sound, as posted by the Bartlett's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture programme. Video: Hexin Cai
The player returns as an adult to an emptied version of the flat where Cai lived from the age of five to 15. Four everyday objects unlock four childhood memories, and each memory is shaped by a spatial action: walking, hiding, looking or building.
Some memories appear as coarse mosaics, while others come back almost sharp. "Pixelation is not only a visual style, but a way of showing what can and cannot be known," Cai writes in the announcement. The project draws on Hito Steyerl's essay "In Defense of the Poor Image" and on Gaston Bachelard's writing on remembered space in The Poetics of Space. Clarity in the game comes from the player's attention: collecting, interacting, and holding a gaze on something brings it into focus.
At the end, the four recovered memories are rebuilt as a single vertical playground tower, which the player enters from the top and descends. Cai calls it "a space that never existed." In the trailer, a lamp-lit living room dissolves into floating colored squares, a hallway tilts sideways, and the tower appears as a jumble of slides and ladders on a pale ground.
According to its itch.io page, Out of Focus is the first complete game Cai has made, with Cai handling the art, design, and programming. The page states that no generative AI was used. It is one of several projects the Bartlett programme has posted this month; Killscreen covered classmates Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo on Oct. 11.
For more reading, see Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo Show Games at the Bartlett, SFPC's HTTPoetics reads the handmade web as memory work and Nina Freeman's game based on her mom's childhood comes out in January.
Stills from the Out of Focus trailer. Images: Hexin Cai
Killscreen covers the small games that treat memory as a place you can walk through. Get the free newsletter.
