The game integrates Jungian shadow theory and the VIA Character Strengths framework to explore how interactive media might open up shadow work to a wider audience — and what gets lost when psychological models are turned into systems. It began with a question that quickly split in two: Can gaming and virtual reality make the insights of Jungian shadow work more widely accessible, and what happens when those insights are filtered through game mechanics and AI?

At its core, Jung’s theory of the shadow suggests that each person carries a neglected, suppressed part of the self. Traditional shadow work creates a structured encounter with this inner figure. To translate that encounter into an interactive experience, we designed a process of self-reflection that brings the shadow into view while acknowledging players’ fears, motivations, desires and memories.

We treated this tension as material. Our working assumption was that the traits players mark as lesser strengths might point toward areas of insecurity or overlooked aspects of the self, while also showing how neatly a therapeutic framework can be captured by an interface. Generative AI is used to assemble a personalised narrative journey in a virtual cave, drawing on the player’s responses, but its voice is never neutral: it recombines patterns from its original training data and from our prompt design, echoing familiar scripts of guidance, care and self-improvement.

Through this embodied VR experience, participants are gently guided into self-exploration via a series of fixed and generative questions, boarding a small boat to revive a dried-up, dark river with words drawn from their inner life. Their responses become tangible elements in the world, but the piece also invites them to notice when the AI’s reflections feel uncannily accurate, when they feel generic or wrong, and what it means to outsource parts of introspection to a system that is always trying to sound therapeutic.

Rising River is not presented as treatment, but as an experiment in how AI, psychological frameworks and VR together reshape the way we talk to ourselves.