The Last 1%

About the project

The Last 1%

We’ve all had that moment.

Your phone is at 80%, so you don't think twice before opening social media, checking a map, watching a video, or answering messages. Then, hours later, you're staring at 1% and suddenly every tap feels like a decision.

The Last 1% turns that familiar panic into an interactive smartphone survival experience.

We wanted to explore a simple question: Why do we treat resources differently when they feel abundant versus when they become scarce?

Instead of explaining that idea through a traditional game or presentation, we built an experience where the player discovers it through their own behavior. Players interact with a simulated smartphone, open apps, scroll through social media, use Maps, respond to messages, change settings, receive notifications, and make decisions while their battery gradually becomes more valuable.

At the beginning of the experience, battery feels almost meaningless. At 1%, suddenly everything matters.

The game is designed around choice and consequence rather than a single correct solution. A player might conserve their battery carefully, spend most of it doomscrolling, rely on Maps, ask other people for help, spend money on a charger, or simply make chaotic decisions and hope they survive. Their behavior influences what happens later and ultimately shapes their ending.

One of our biggest design challenges was avoiding the feeling of a traditional text-based choose-your-own-adventure game. We wanted the player to feel like they were actually using a phone, so we built the game around an interactive smartphone interface with apps, notifications, settings, battery states, and interconnected systems.

We also learned that making something feel simple to a user can require surprisingly complex engineering behind the scenes. Battery consumption, time, app usage, notifications, player decisions, events, and endings all need to share the same underlying game state so that actions in one part of the phone can affect another.

Another challenge was figuring out how to communicate our underlying idea without forcing a "lesson" onto the player. Instead of ending with a message telling players what they should have learned, we designed the experience so that the player's own decisions create the outcome. Two people can reach the end with the same battery percentage and have completely different experiences because of what they did along the way.

Ultimately, The Last 1% is a game about battery, but it is also about attention, scarcity, and the decisions we make when we suddenly realize that something we thought was unlimited was never unlimited in the first place.

And, hopefully, it makes you think twice before opening TikTok at 12%.