What Keeps Us Here

This narrative game was created during Game Writing SIG Arcjam 2025 with the theme of "Resilience." It is best played in Full Screen Mode.

Set in a small dying town where ambition is unheard of, you take on the role of a worn-out convenience store worker who dreams of becoming a video game writer. Every day is a battle against fluorescent lights, impossible customers, and the crushing weight of bills that never stop arriving. Yet you keep showing up, keep surviving, and keep imagining something better, even when the world seems determined to shrink their possibilities to the size of a breakroom.

Across branching choices filled with dark humor, quiet heartbreak, and the soft brutality of ordinary life, players guide themselves through the grind of their dead-end job and into the terrifying territory of trying. 

At its core, What Keeps Us Here is a story about the microscopic victories that keep people alive in unremarkable places: showing up when it’s hard, trying when you’re scared, and daring to believe you might be more than what the world expects.