Dot Hawkins isn’t a superhero, but the star of the App Store Award–winning adventure game Dot’s Home has an unusual power: She can travel into the past to change her family’s future.

Playing as Dot, you use a mysterious key to open a time-traveling portal in your grandmother’s Detroit home. Warp back to when your grandparents were young adults facing a difficult choice: Should they sign a predatory contract to make their dream of owning a home come true?

It’s a tough decision—one you’ll help them with when you select a response.

Advise them to ignore the offer and they risk losing a lifetime of homeownership; tell them to agree and they risk a lifetime of debt. The game remembers your moves—and in the end your decisions will land Dot’s family in a different place, both physically and emotionally.

Housing discrimination may seem an unlikely theme for a videogame, but to coproducer Christina Rosales, a world that offers players a finite number of options perfectly mirrors the experience of many disenfranchised Americans.

“When you’re engaging in America’s housing system, you don’t have a lot of choices,” says Rosales. “You rent or you buy. You pay your corporate landlord or you pay your bank. As a society, we didn’t make this choice set, and we can’t really exit out of it. And that sounds a lot like a videogame.”

In fact, Dot’s Home sounds a lot like the life of Renee Willis, whose family history was one inspiration for the game.

Now senior vice president at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Willis spent her childhood summers in rural Virginia, where her grandparents told her stories about working as sharecroppers—and how one bad harvest could jeopardize the family’s finances.

“They weren’t able to build anything,” says Willis. “A lot of Black people have a family story that’s very similar.”

Dot’s Home doesn’t shy away from exploring the underpinnings of unfair housing practices. One scene, for example, shows how shady developers take advantage of sellers by exploiting racist fears to drive down home prices, then profit from the buyers through predatory contract-for-deed sales.

Rosales and Willis built a team through their membership in the Rise-Home Stories Project, a collective of artists and activists that has explored social-justice issues via children’s books, animated web series, and other media. But home ownership felt too complex to be contained in a traditional narrative, so they enlisted Evan Narcisse—coauthor of Rise of the Black Panther comics with Ta-Nehisi Coates—to write an interactive story.

“We had a goal in mind to teach players about the history of these policies and experiences,” says Narcisse. “But we didn’t want players to feel like they were eating their vegetables.”

Narcisse, who has written about videogames for The New York Times and The Atlantic, had experienced housing anxiety of his own.

“My parents were immigrants, and my mom raised me and my siblings by herself,” he says. “The precarity of that situation meant I didn’t have the luxury of not knowing how our family was doing financially. And, as an adult, I’ve been right on the razor’s edge: ‘Hey, I can’t pay my rent. What remedies are available to me?’”

Weathered Sweater, an independent Black-owned developer based in Vermont, was brought on to craft the game’s interactive elements. Every choice Dot makes reverberates across the years—and changes the family’s fate.

“We call our endings the ‘good’ ending, the ‘bad’ ending, and the ‘neutral’ ending,” says Weathered Sweater founder Ryan Huggins. “But none are meant to be objectively right or wrong. It’s really about exploring how the decisions you make can change the direction your family takes.”

As for the game’s authenticity, the creators relied largely on their own experience and gut instinct.

“It was built and critiqued by a team of BIPOC people,” says Huggins. “If the game resonated for us, we felt like it was going to resonate for people like us.”

Like the story itself, players’ responses have been heartfelt and, at times, personal.

“The feedback that’s meant the most to me has been when players say, ‘My family experienced stuff like this,’” says Narcisse. “There are also people who didn’t know this history, so to broaden people’s horizons is really gratifying.”