Watch the Trailer for Jiayi Liu's Afterlife Game THRESHOLD

Jiayi Liu, who also goes by Alisha, has unveiled THRESHOLD, an architectural narrative puzzle game built in Unreal Engine as a graduate project in the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The programme posted a trailer on Oct. 11. Watch it below.

THRESHOLD is set in a liminal world after death. It draws on Chinese funerary traditions and on ghost marriage, a ritual in which a person who has died is married, to explore memory, loss and acceptance. The project starts from a question Liu poses in the announcement: "What if we cannot change what has happened, but can change how we see it?"

Liu uses restricted perspectives, mirrored environments, spatial puzzles and persistent path recording, so the game keeps a trace of every route the player walks. As the story unfolds, spaces that first appeared in fragments, along with those recorded routes, become visible from a new angle, and the player is invited to reconsider the meaning of the paths already taken. The trailer moves through dark, ember-lit halls, a domed chamber ringed by stairs and scaffolding, red lines tracing routes through black space, and rows of lit arched niches.

Liu studied architecture at the University of Sheffield and the National University of Singapore before the Bartlett. The project combines game design, architectural storytelling, procedural world-building and technical art. Liu writes that their practice is now moving toward technical art, procedural workflows, and AI-assisted game development; the announcement does not say whether AI tools were used on THRESHOLD itself. No public build or release date has been announced.

The programme has been sharing its graduating projects all month. Killscreen covered Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo's Bartlett games on Oct. 11 and Jiaying Li's Osaider, set in a palace where weapons are melted down every night, on Oct. 19.

For more reading, see Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo Show Games at the Bartlett, Jiaying Li Builds Osaider Out of Shifting Palace Modules and Pavilion's sublime architecture wants to be solved.