WAKE

An illustration of a life preserver character with a speech bubble reading “AHOY THERE!”

Welcome to the McSwifty II! Please step aboard.

An abandoned ferry boat floats on the water. In the distance is a flooded lower Manhattan, New York City.

New York City has been underwater for decades. You step aboard an abandoned ferry looking for your lost love, Halle. What you find instead is everything she left behind. WAKE is a puzzle video game about love, queerness and building community at the end of the world.

PLAY THE GAME

WAKE is a 3D, first-person narrative puzzle game in the tradition of Gone Home, Firewatch, and Myst. Set in the drowned New York City of 2071, players explore an abandoned ferry as Inez, a rebel environmentalist searching for her lost love, Halle, piecing together what happened to the crew through journals, voice recordings, and artifacts.

The thesis is a polished 30–45 minute vertical slice of the full game focused on the ferry helm, outer deck, and engine room. Environmental storytelling drives the experience, with every object and recording contributing to the narrative. Thematically, WAKE explores survival, intimacy, queerness, and community, offering a bittersweet but hopeful vision of life after climate collapse.

The control panel of a ship in front of a broken window through which frames the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

A folded map of New York City's waterways on a table.

An electrical panel with two gauges, one for fuel and one for pressure.

A computer program called BilgePump3000, open on a terminal computer showing different tanks for routing water.

WAKE began as a salve for my own existential fears of the end of the world. We are well past the point of stopping climate change and the rest of my life will be spent living with climate change. Even as I write this, New York City is seeing unprecedented regular flooding as it shifts to become a humid, subtropical climate. The question is not if the floods will come but when and how high.

In the world of WAKE, the floods have come. But the story is not the violent setting of many post-apocalyptic crises. Instead, it is a story about queer love and survival by a found family floating through what’s left of their world.

My artistic career has been a long, winding and circuitous path, but it makes sense I would end up here. For me, WAKE is everything converging. My own journey to queerness and survival through found family. My love of transportation and the culmination of my artistic work as a designer, storyteller and worldbuilder. Welcome to WAKE, welcome to my world.

The deck of a ferry boat looking up towards the bridge.

Thesis Exhibition

A large grey booth reads “HORIZON” and a window shows a faux reflection of a flooding NYC.

Two people sit in the booth playing the demo game on the screen inside.

The back of a large grey booth which depicts a map of NYC Waterways and a compartment padlocked shut with a small note pointing to the lock.

For the MFAVN thesis exhibition at SVA’s Gramercy Gallery I felt it important to give viewers an opportunity to actually try out the game, and feel the success of solving puzzles as they learned more about the story. To that end, I built a partially enclosed booth, inspired by arcade cabinets, which allowed viewers to sit inside and play a demo of the game on a screen. The back of the booth featured an additional, physical puzzle with a map and a padlock that opened a small compartment with a reward inside.