RE:SEED (2025)

Created by Laurel Green, Ian Hayward, Sherri Lam, Sonomi Modica, & Maureen Navera
Playtested: April 17, 2025

Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts & Technology, York University

In a post-collapse future, the ruins of an ancient Botanical Gardens hold the last five viable seeds capable of restoring life. Representatives from five communities have been called to gather them. For generations, these communities evolved in isolation — their cultures, technologies, and survival strategies differ greatly — but every region shares the same challenge: no life will grow. When they arrive at the Gardens, they find the seeds locked inside a vault controlled by a terminal programmed to protect them until the communities can demonstrate they are capable of working together for the first time in generations.

Blending role-playing with escape room puzzle games, players embody the communities and use their distinct character skills to decode the Botanist's log and unlock the vault. But as puzzles are solved, the story of past conflict and fracture is revealed. Will the communities be able to forgive each other in time to save their barren planet, or, will they decide to leave the seeds in the vault, in hopes that a future generation will be better able to tend them?