you don’t know what love is

Can love die like a coral turning white? you don’t know what love is is a narrative video game that immerses the player in a dissolving underwater world. Taking the role of a sentient marine creature, the player navigates a dreamlike coral reef — slowly fading due to bleaching — while exploring emotional themes of loss, separation, and memory. Inspired by both scientific data and personal experience, the project connects the physical phenomenon of coral bleaching with the psychological experience of heartbreak. The narrative unfolds through minimal, meditative interactions: moving, observing, remembering. Coral species appear not as passive backdrops but as oversized, breathing actors — embodying fragility, life, and disappearance. The game challenges the player not with goals or victories, but with decisions whose consequences are irreversible. Some actions revive the corals’ original colors; others erase them completely. In this way, the work becomes an emotional and ecological metaphor — inviting us to reflect on how care, presence, and inattention shape the marine world and our relationships within it..