Sea of Solitude

Preserving Cultural Memory Through Narrative Games

This paper examines four narrative-driven video games as vehicles for producing, mediating, and transmitting cultural memory: Last Days of Lazarus, Sea of Solitude, Season: A Letter to the Future, and Black The Fall.

• The paper argues that interactive narrative games function as a technology of cultural sustainability and social innovation, not merely as a representational strategy, and can complement museums, archives, and oral traditions.
• Four case studies (Last Days of Lazarus, Sea of Solitude, Season: A Letter to the Future, and Black The Fall) are analyzed through the T.R.E.E.S. framework (Tourism, Responsibility, Exploration, Environment, and Story), each showing a distinct remembrance mode from post-communist Romanian history to speculative future-oriented storytelling.
• Last Days of Lazarus is presented as a digital time capsule, preserving elements of Romanian intangible heritage through recreated locales, Orthodox iconography, and folkloric motifs.