Back to Home

Back to Home is a mixed reality game about war, developed in Unreal Engine for the Meta Quest Pro. It is built on a single contrast: the cruel reality of a ruined room, and a beautiful virtual world laid over it. The player moves between the two in search of clues, and the game gradually exposes the tragic truth beneath its warmth — in the hope that whoever plays it comes away with a clearer understanding of war, and a firmer attachment to peace.

The work is played standing inside a physical set. A wall of broken breeze blocks, scattered rubble and bent rebar fills the room; projection washes drawn, ruined imagery across the fabric screens around it. Through the headset, the same space carries another life. Mixed reality is not a display format here but the argument itself: the home and the ruin occupy the same floor, and the player stands in both at once.

In the game

Inside the headset the ruin gives way to an attic in warm light — sun through a skylight, a made bed, shelves of boxes and papers, an electric fan, a potted red flower with a name, Sonya, written on its pot. It reads as a home someone has only just stepped out of. The clues are domestic ones: handwritten letters on the dresser and the rug, notes pinned by the window, plants on the sill. Searching through them, the player pieces together what happened to this room, and the beautiful world thins as the truth comes through — until the warmth of the attic and the rubble underfoot read as one place.

In the room

From outside, the piece is an installation: a figure in a headset standing quietly in the debris, facing a wall that no longer keeps anything out, while projected ruins move across the screens behind. What the player sees and what the room shows are two halves of one image, and the distance between them — a warm attic, a broken wall — is where the work makes its argument.