Kai UnEarthed
Kai UnEarthed is a meditation on unpoliced futures and climate justice. You can reflect on what it means to be an ancestor to liberated young people in a world healing from climate change. You can imagine and make contact with them through a paper journal, an interactive visual novel with multiple endings, and a videogame world. As you chose how the story unfolds, you can:
- fall in love with your crush
- go through a coming of age ritual
- explore the reclaimed ruins of an abolished youth jail
- go on a psychedelic journey imagining the volatile final decades of the Capitalist Era, as seen through the eyes of the revolution's children.
With two versions of the game, which should you play?
Play the multisensory meditation (made in Unity) to enjoy a more immersive audiovisual experience, a story-driven videogame. Explore Kai's unpoliced future world and converse with animated characters like Kai's crush, Tempest. Reflect in your analog journal, which is included in the downloadable zip file.
Play the text-only meditation (made in Twine) to immerse yourself in the story and let your imagination free. You can play the text meditation by clicking "Run Meditation" at the top of this page. Please download the journal "Kai UnEarthed Journal for Text-Only Twine Version" below to play this version; please note, it is a different journal than the one that comes in the downloadable multisensory meditation. If you have laptop specs lower than 16 GB of RAM, this text-only version may be a better-quality experience.
If you can, try playing both! They both have multiple endings.
Download
Install instructions
Please prepare your journal before starting the game. The game will prompt you to draw and write in it as you go. Once you download the PDF you can open it in a web browser like Edge or Chrome and print it from there. Please print it in booklet mode, double-sided, like a zine. (If you're playing the multisensory meditation, the journal is included in the zip file; if you are playing the text-only version in your web browser, there is a different journal PDF to download.)
If you prefer to engage with the journal on your computer without printing, you can do one of the following:
On Mac: in the Finder window, right click the icon of the journal PDF document, and then click on "Markup".
On PC: open the PDF in the Microsoft Edge web browser and click on the Draw icon (looks like a pencil) in the upper right-hand corner.
On Both: download the free Acrobat Reader software, then use it to open the PDF of the journal. Click on "Tools" then "Comment" and find the drawing and writing tools at the top of the screen.
Please email us at KaiUnEarthed@gmail.com if you have any questions. If you want to play the game without an internet connection, we can send you an html document that you can run in a web browser offline.
Development log
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