Jiaying Li Builds Osaider Out of Shifting Palace Modules

The Bartlett School of Architecture's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture program has shared footage of Osaider, a narrative exploration game by Jiaying Li, who goes by Gaga. In the game, players reconstruct a palace's buried history by moving through fragments of its rooms, and the palace is assembled one module at a time as they play. It's a bit of the puzzle box of The Room with the axonometric perspective of Monument Valley. Watch the clip below.

Li describes a nation organized around fear of an unseen enemy called Osaider. Inside the palace, weapons are manufactured by day and melted back into raw material by night, locking the world into a cycle of violence and futility. Two secret factions compete: the Archivist, who decides what official memory keeps, and the Whalemen, an underground society planning an escape. Every collectible carries a hidden ideology value, and handing items in triggers a Dice Check that decides which faction's space opens next.

Li made the game as the practice-based half of a dissertation, "Spatial Storylets: Extending Ergodic Narrative into Three-Dimensional Space." Li writes that the game "tests the idea that spatial form itself can function as narrative grammar," using fixed text fragments, the spatial modules that hold them, and the dice-check rules linking one module to the next. "The palace does not pre-exist," Li adds. No public build or release date has been announced.

The Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch, whose students make films, games and VR pieces as design projects, showed its 2026 cohort in the Bartlett Autumn Show, which closed Oct. 11 in London and remains online.

For more reading, see Killscreen on two more Bartlett games from this year's show and the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch.