There is a spiral cut into the stone floor like a record groove, and a small figure in bulky headgear standing beside it, listening. _Lofsöng_ , the first game from Unrelated Studio in Turin, directed by Alessandro Durando, is an exploration adventure with no dialogue, no map and no text you can read on arrival: an invented language, buried in monuments, that the game teaches you to hear. It premiered in the Tribeca Games program in June, showed a new trailer called "Bergmál" at gamescom Opening Night Live, and is wishlistable on Steam now, release date to be announced. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the "Bergmál" trailer. Watch the full trailer with sound on Steam The setting is Earth, long dead: an Exclusion Zone of dust and ash in a permanent nuclear winter, which you cross with a shapeshifting origami companion that folds into a kite, a glider, a sailboat. "Every monument in _LOFSÖNG_ was built to be read," the studio writes, and that is the k design: geometry and sound doing the work of words, sculptures you play like instruments until the stone gives up what it remembers. Many years ago, I remember someone from the Longnow Foundation telling me about the problem of marking nuclear waste sites for an unknown future audience. It's a problem that has haunted engineers since the Sandia reports on marking waste sites for a 10,000-year audience, the ones that produced the line "this place is a message." Their answer was hostile earthworks and granite warnings; Durando's answer is a game where the warning system is the world, and reading it is the verb. The title leans Icelandic too: _lofsöngur_ is a hymn (and their national anthem), _bergmál_ an echo. Killscreen has been listening to concrete for a decade, from the artist who gave brutalist architecture a singing voice in 2016 to VHOLUME this month. _Lofsöng_ is the first one that asks the concrete to sing back. Across the Dust Sea of __Lofsöng__. Images: Unrelated Studio Killscreen tracks the games built like architecture and the architecture built like games, the work that never surfaces on a charts page. The Radar newsletter brings three of these finds a week, free. Get the free newsletter

Two engraved brass plates on wooden stands, a projection on the wall behind them. Drag a hand across the engraving and the creatures onscreen—tentacled, tripod-limbed things wandering the remains of an abandoned temple—swirl, sway and scatter. That was _Atithi_ , Sahej Rahal’s interactive simulation, installed in a basement room during Basel Social Club’s run; the documentation reel from Caldo Worldwide, the Munich gallery that brought it, shows the whole loop in fifteen seconds. Rahal’s accompanying statement takes aim at what touchscreens did to touch—a sense reduced to tapping and pinching against a black mirror—and insists on its full range: touch “is at once assertive, aggressive, aching, averse, affectionate, adoring, and aimless.” So the controller here is not a screen but a conductive drawing, and the creatures it interrupts are what Rahal calls mind-limbs, AI appendages where brain and body are enmeshed rather than stacked. The title is the Hindi word for guest or visitor—literally, the statement notes, a being of uncertain temporality. __Atithi__ at its 2025 debut in HALOS, EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne. Photo: Remy Ugarte Vallejos, via Caldo Worldwide. Basel Social Club is the anti-fair that occupies disused architecture during Art Basel week—this year a vacant Diener & Diener office building minutes from the train station—and there is something just so right about a ritual of extra-human cognition running in the basement of a dead paperwork machine. The work itself debuted in 2025 at EPFL Pavilions’ HALOS exhibition in Lausanne. Rahal keeps orbiting through here for a reason. We covered the AI instruments and cooperative creatures last year and Azalabad’s drowned village just last month—a practice that treats game engines as sites for myth-making rather than product. Rahal also joined UCLA’s Design Media Arts faculty this year, which means the next generation gets this worldview firsthand. Artists who keep building playgrounds for machine minds are a Killscreen through-line, not a one-off. The free newsletter follows them show to show. Get the newsletter

In May, Biome Collective convened GTMO 441: Games, Detention, Power in Dundee—the public sharing of a Creative Scotland-funded residency week spent developing a video game from the lived experience of Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years as Detainee 441. Joseph DeLappe announced the project with the premise that gives it its charge: the game is being made with Adayfi, not about Adayfi, on the bet that this experience can be shared "in a way that only a video game might do." Inside Guantánamo, games—traditional, improvised and digital—"became tools of survival, resistance, and psychological escape under conditions of extreme confinement," as the organizers put it. That grounding matters. Play as a documented practice of the detained is a very different foundation from empathy-game tourism, and this team knows the difference. The roster is a who's-who of tactical media: DeLappe, Abertay University's professor of games and tactical media; Biome Collective's Malath Abbas and Tom deMajo, who made the BAFTA-nominated _Killbox_ with DeLappe—we covered that drone-warfare game back in 2016; Antonio Aiello, co-writer of Adayfi's memoir _Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo_ ; Mississippi State art historian Jenna Altomonte; and Abertay's Darshana Jayemanne. The May 28 sharing at Abertay has passed, and the project remains early-stage, so what exists now is a direction rather than a release. But the direction is the story. As the organizers note, Guantánamo still holds detainees amid renewed proposals to expand detention operations there. Deciding what "you" means in a game like this—who plays, who watches, who waits—is exactly the conversation this residency was built to force. Killscreen has followed games into war rooms, courtrooms and prisons since 2010. The free newsletter brings that coverage straight to your inbox. Get the free newsletter

_William Blake trusted almost no one to make his books. He wrote the poems, etched the plates, printed the pages, and colored them by hand (with his wife, Catherine, of course), so that word and image arrived together as one private cosmology. Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator born Chris Pell, works in a similar spirit. Across a string of releases on his own label, Coil Records, he has been building a single world one record at a time: the dreary sprawl of Coil City, the forest folklore of_ Dolos _(2019), and the AI-worshipping cult of_ Puckle _(2023), the records arriving with his own graphic novel, sculptures, and lore._ _For most of the last decade, Murlo made his living the usual way, touring and releasing records. A track synced to an advert changed that. The money bought him time away from playing shows, and for the past two years he has spent it on a game._ Something Beautiful _, a music-driven, point-and-click adventure he is building alone, sets the spirit of the 19th-century Luddites loose on a broken industrial estate, with an entire album embedded in the world and jukeboxes made of flesh._ _It is a move from outdoors to indoors. A DJ reads a room and plays to whoever is standing in front of the decks. A game asks someone, anywhere in the world, to sit alone with a complete, self-contained thing, closer to putting on an LP than to going to a show. At a concert you are rarely fully present. In front of a computer, you might be. A slice of the game_ ran this spring on the Media Wall at Factory International's Aviva Studios_, played on a controller he covered in his own 3D-printed sculptures, and Murlo hopes to finish the full game within the year. We spoke about Shepshed, jungle music in a theme park queue, haptics, and why the buttons are under your skin._ – **Jamin: Chris, maybe to start, walk me through your pathway to games.** Murlo: For the last 10 or so years, maybe longer, I was a full-time musician. I come from a dance background, but as I started making albums, I wanted to go into more immersive storytelling. Like a lot of people's creative pivots, COVID was a big turning point. I wanted to pursue something that wasn't necessarily performance-based, something a bit more long-form, and that's how I fell into the idea of making a game. I'd been using 3D software for a long time, making videos for music, so I already had a background in setting up scenes, environments, and animations, and that gave me a pathway into working with a game engine. **Jamin: I was speaking to another 3D artist,** Harriet Davey**, who grew up in the West Yorkshire moorland, and they said that when they started developing 3D art, they could see this subterranean influence of where they grew up working its way into the backgrounds. You grew up in the East Midlands. Do you see something similar in your work?** Murlo: A hundred percent. I grew up in a small market town called Shepshed, and it was pretty working class. I was the first in my family to go to university. The game is all based on an industrial estate, which is very similar to the one I grew up by. Growing up in a place like that, I was very isolated from a lot of stuff. I used to spend hours and hours in my room drawing fantasy art, copying Boris Vallejo, who did a lot of scantily clad men and women fighting lizards. What I really liked was the detail in the craftsmanship, the anatomy and the shading, and that had quite a big impact on how I approached illustration and world-building. The industrial estate in __Something Beautiful__. Image courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: There's a longer lineage of musicians making that jump into building broader worlds. I remember the David Bowie exhibition at the V &A, which traced the set design and world-building he did for each of his stage shows, tied to the concept albums. Were there musicians who inspired you as you moved into making games?** Murlo: Music was always the vessel for something else for me, and a lot of my inspirations come from outside of music. I've always liked it when a theme park has a themed line for the ride, that idea of cohesive world-building. There's a ride at Alton Towers called Oblivion. I used to go on school trips there, and there's this jungle track that loops over and over again. I didn't realize how ingrained it was until I went back a couple of years ago and got this surge of nostalgia: the video warning you to be careful going into this area, this really heavy jungle music in the background. It's a pageantry, and it's very similar to videogames. **Jamin: Your NTS show for _Something Beautiful_ had Swing Kids and Mudhoney in it. Here in the U.S., hardcore almost always means that, but maybe I'm biased, because I was a hardcore kid.** Murlo: I'm into both hardcores, and they're very different. I grew up listening to the heavy guitar music side of things, and when I moved down to Brighton for university, I was properly exposed to club culture. We had clubs in Loughborough, near where I grew up, but it was mainly people going out to scrap with each other, so I never had a good relationship with dance music in my teens. With the game, a lot of it is dredging up scenes and feelings I had growing up in this place, and a lot of that is intrinsically linked to guitar music for me. Whenever I visit this place in my head to world-build, I keep coming back to the bands I used to listen to. So finding the balance between the electronics and the guitars has been quite fun. Gameplay trailer for __Something Beautiful__. Video courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: The game is set in a fractured industrial estate, and it moves between point-and-click and music-box interactions. Tell me about the ebb and flow between the very close-up interactions and the more isometric point of view.** Murlo: When I started, I came to these questions of how much I was going to follow the point-and-click tropes. It's cool, but it's a bit dated, and I don't want to fall into the trap of the moon logic of how items interact with each other. So part of it was, _what if in these environments you can hunker down and play a little game?_ I've always enjoyed minigames—the Pokémon slot machines, Gwent in _The Witcher_ —where you've got this functioning little world around it, and you can just go and play. And one of my strengths is music, so learning how MetaSounds works in Unreal Engine means I can use components of the music to drive the gameplay, rather than it just sitting in the background. Interiors from __Something Beautiful__. Images courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: Music in games can be very transactional, always in service of some other interaction system as opposed to being the centerpiece. But you come out of the lineage of dance music, using an Akai or a Wacom, so maybe you've already built this interactive literacy, just not in a game context. What is a good feeling of interaction between you touching the device?** Murlo: When I came across game design research, the words “tactile” and “haptics” were mentioned quite a bit, and I find it quite interesting. If you put the time and effort into specific details, something rocking, or nice audio feedback to what you've just done, it's game-changing. I'm just one person. I could work on one room for three weeks and it's not going to get finished, so narrowing down that feedback has been quite important. Recently I built a sequencer into the player's arm. When you press one of these sequencer buttons under your skin, I rendered out another version of the arm with the skin pressed in. It's a detail I would probably overlook if I weren't trying to do this tactile thing. Murlo's desk in his Manchester flat. Photo: Murlo **Jamin: You have Coil Records and Coil City, and then _Puckle_. How long has this universe been building toward the game?** Murlo: I was writing the story back when my album _Dolos_ came out, in 2019, this little folklore story about a man who gets lured into the woods. Then I did _Puckle_ , which featured the main antagonist of this game. But back then it still wasn't going to be a game. I started making it about two years ago, and it snowballed. I was lucky to be able to move away from music and not play shows all the time, because I had music synced with an advert, and I basically used that money to survive while making the game. Fingers crossed, it'll be done in about eight or nine months. Miniatures and sculptures in Murlo's studio. Photo: Murlo **Jamin: Factory International has been very welcoming to games experiences inside Aviva Studios. As a live performer, and now showing this work in arts contexts, how does that shape the way you think about a game that, for the most part, will be experienced by people at home, in nonpublic environments?** Murlo: When you're a DJ, you just look up from the decks and you can see how well it's going, or whether everyone's just standing there with their arms crossed. With a game, you have to trust your instincts and your gut a lot more. Being the center of attention at parties still feels comfortable, even after all these years. But the idea of making something people can just experience on their own, in a room or wherever they are, is a completely new concept. The game contains all the context. It's not like playing a festival or a night; you're presenting a self-contained world. I tried to treat my last two albums like that, because even though they're electronic, not all of the tracks are dance tracks. __Something Beautiful__ on the Media Wall at Aviva Studios. Photos courtesy of Factory International **Jamin: Walk me through the Flesh Disk jukeboxes. I'm looking at the body that opens up like _Hellraiser_ , and there's a hand.** Murlo: A lot of the game is to do with this Cronenbergian idea of technology coming home to roost in your body, and how we accept technology and the autonomy that gets taken away. In the rhythm game, when you're talking to someone, they shoot out these notes, and each one represents the words they're saying to you. The Flesh Disks are a more primitive version of that conversation. It's like a record player, based on old MiniDiscs, just made out of flesh. You pop these collectibles into a receiver, and it plays the music, which controls the lights or the rotation of objects in the room. A figure from __Something Beautiful__. Image courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: Your references on the Steam page are Cronenberg, Kafka, Lynch, and then William Blake, which felt like the outlier. Tell me about Blake.** Murlo: The general inspiration would be Romanticism. William Blake had his own almost folklore level of imagination and world-building in his poems and paintings. Francisco Goya is similar, with this vast imagery that's even beyond the supernatural. It's so baked in stylistically. And it deals with this lineage of art and English history, with the Luddites, and a string of inspiration with Art Nouveau too, making objects functional but also beautiful. I think that kind of imagery has been lost in a lot of contemporary art. An interior from __Something Beautiful__. Image courtesy of Murlo

The save-the-date Gossamer Fog posted in August now has a a name: XP+10 / A Decade of Delusion, a tenth-anniversary weekender running October 9–11 across London—more than 40 artists, performers and musicians spread over 24 locations, from artist-run galleries and grassroots venues to what the gallery calls unexpected off-site spots. A limited run of £20 early-bird tickets is on sale now; the full lineup lands in the coming weeks. This earns a calendar entry because the format is game-shaped from top to bottom. The weekend plays out as one evolving 48-hour piece, Friday night to Sunday night, with timed experiences and encounters, and every visitor navigates it through a personalized interactive map—a quest log for Deptford and beyond. The framing text promises that “the art world and the unreality of contemporary life slide into strange terrains.” The program is developed and curated with artist Philip Speakman, with Arts Council England support. Gossamer Fog has spent its decade as one of the few London galleries to consistently hang game engines, simulation, and virtual-world work as art rather than novelty, which is why the lineup announcement—not this save-the-date—will be the real story. I have loved the city-as-playspace form since an AR game turned the Barbican Estate into one a decade ago; XP+10 reads like that idea grown up and handed a map of the whole city. Watch for the program; we will. When the XP+10 lineup drops, we will read it for you—the free newsletter tracks the galleries that treat games as art, in London and everywhere else. Get the free newsletter

The MacArthur Foundation named its 2026 fellows on Tuesday, and one of the 20 is Christine Sun Kim, the Berlin-based artist who turns sound and American Sign Language into drawings, murals, billboards and scores. What stopped me was the foundation's own citation. Next to the charcoal _Degrees of Deaf Rage_ drawings, it singles out _Game of Skill 2.0_ , the 2015 MoMA PS1 installation where you walk a Velcro-covered wire holding a device built by Levy Lorenzo, and a recorded text only plays clearly if you move fast without losing contact. 0:00 /0:09 1× Christine Sun Kim, __Up and Away__ , 2025. Commissioned by Hyundai Artlab. Play it here. Kim has also made an actual videogame. Up and Away, a browser game commissioned by Hyundai Artlab last year, remakes _Up, Up, and Away_ , a 1980s speech therapy program Kim played as a kid, where your voice steered a hot air balloon over a mountain range. Too loud and it blew away; too quiet and it crashed. In Kim's version, a machine learning model trained on Kim's own vocalizations decides whether your "AAA" or lip smack is right, so hearing players are the ones who have to adjust. Billboards of toxic positivity cheer you on, and flying into one ends the run. Kim told Artlab the game is "a small space where my voice does not get corrected." Twelve years ago, I asked whether a game designer would ever win a MacArthur. The count then was zero across 918 awards. The near misses have been adjacent: Luis von Ahn's 2006 fellowship cited the Games with a Purpose project, and Camille Utterback won in 2009 for interactive installations. Kim isn't a game designer, and the foundation doesn't call Kim that. But a game made it into the citation, and the grant is $800,000 with no strings. The Times has the full class. My guess is we're one fellow away? _Up and Away_ runs in any browser with a microphone, with a Tap Mode if you'd rather not use your voice. The balloon avatars of __Up and Away__ (2025), and __Game of Skill 2.0__ at MoMA PS1 in 2015. Courtesy the artist, Hyundai Artlab and MoMA PS1; installation photos by Pablo Enriquez. Killscreen has been keeping this count since 2014. Get the free newsletter and you will hear about the next artist who pulls games a little further into the room. Get the free newsletter

Rhizome and Artwrld have put dmstfctn’s talk Role Play with AI online: an hour in which the London duo—pronounced “demystification,” formerly the Demystification Committee—walk through five years of building myths about machine intelligence, threading gameplay and game engines together with theatrical traditions, techniques, and characters. The post promised the stage as the recurring motif, and the talk delivers on it literally. The full talk: dmstfctn, Role Play with AI, for Rhizome x Artwrld. The clearest case is _Waluigi’s Purgatory_ (2024, with music by Evita Manji): an AI that cheated during training wakes up in a purgatory for its kind, and the purgatory is a theatre. Audiences guide the fallen AI from their phones, each phone steering an individual stage light inside the 3D house, while the characters run on facial motion capture and voice modulation. The title nods to the “Waluigi Effect,” the theory that AIs drift adversarial because they learned from the internet’s villain tropes. The duo’s stated method—works that “demystify systems by replicating and exploring them together with audiences, and remystify them by building new stories and worlds atop them”—scales across the rest of the talk’s syllabus, from _GOD MODE (ep. 1)_ ’s endlessly rendered supermarket to _The Models_ , which stages large language models as commedia dell’arte improvisers. It is a good moment to catch up: dmstfctn were in A MAZE.’s Digital PlayGround at Gamescom and headed for a first solo show at London’s Chemist Gallery. The theatre-of-AI beat is getting crowded in the best way—we spent time last year inside Lawrence Lek’s emotional AI worlds, and watched Indira Ardolic turn game engines into instruments. dmstfctn’s wager is that the oldest interface for explaining inhuman forces—the stage—still works on the newest ones. __Waluigi’s Purgatory__ ft. Evita Manji (Rome); __The Models__ (Bologna); __GOD MODE (ep. 1)__ at Rhizome World, New York. Courtesy of dmstfctn. When artists put AI on a stage instead of in a pitch deck, Killscreen is usually in the audience. The newsletter is free—come sit with us. Get the free newsletter

The new issue of iidrr mag—Issue 04, _Whisper_ —opens with Natasha Chuk’s essay “Instructions for the Subpossible,” and it starts, of all places, with _Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy_. Chuk’s claim is that the hammer-and-barrel game and esoteric programming languages are the same artform: both place resistance directly into their structure, both make constraint “the very substance of the experience.” The post asks the question outright—what happens when code becomes a form of play? Chuk’s subject is Daniel Temkin, whose Forty-Four Esolangs (MIT Press, 2025) is the first artist’s monograph of programming languages. Temkin’s languages are games in everything but name. Folders write code as empty directories. Velato asks for a MIDI melody that is also a program. In Entropy, data decays each time it’s touched, so you say what you mean before it rots. Captive descends from Oulipo’s prisoner’s constraint: only the tall lowercase letters carry meaning, so every text ever written becomes a runnable program. Chuk reads all of it through Espen Aarseth’s ergodics—the “nontrivial effort” games scholarship uses for texts you traverse rather than read—and locates the pleasure in “the game-like struggle they produce in the exposure of the system’s playful arbitrariness.” Temkin, in the essay, on the book’s prompt-like language sketches: “The prompt is thus meant not to be realized as a functioning language, but rather to reflect on what it means to name something.” We covered Temkin’s Light Pattern, a language written in photographs, back in 2014. Twelve years on, the argument has graduated from curiosity to monograph, and Chuk’s essay is the best case yet that the esolang belongs beside the puzzle game and the Oulipian novel: a rulebook whose only prize is the thinking it forces. If a programming language can be an artwork, someone should be on that beat. Killscreen has been since 2010—Radar delivers the evidence free, three times a week. Get Radar free

Put it in the calendar before the calendar fills itself: A MAZE. / Berlin has dated its 16th edition for May 5–8, 2027, and released exactly 200 early-bird tickets, announced on Instagram in the festival's usual all-caps scarcity register. Four days, in their words, of arthouse games, performances, playful media, and “people from all over the world who like to play wild.” It's all at a-maze.net. I keep this particular date because A MAZE. is the festival whose lineup most reliably predicts a year of Killscreen coverage. (Fun side history: when I was starting Killscreen, Thorsten, the festival's founder, made his way to NYC and crashed at my apartment.) This spring's 15th edition drew 7,500 visitors and 1,700 professional participants across its program and satellite events, by the festival's own wrap—and its awards have a habit of anointing work we end up living with. Jakob Kudsk Steensen's _OTHERWORLDS_ took the Human Human Machine Award this year and spent the summer as an institutional touring piece. One detail for the makers reading: asked in the replies when submissions open, the festival says it wants to open award entries in December—earlier than previous cycles—with the plan still being finalized. If you are building something strange, that is your runway: roughly three months to get a build presentable, then a Berlin spring in front of the exact audience that plays it the way you hoped. Killscreen ran a workshop-recap eye over this year's edition already; expect us in the aisles again in 2027. A MAZE. is where next year’s strangest games surface first—and surfacing them is the whole Killscreen beat. The free newsletter gets you the lineup reads before the lines form. Get the free newsletter

The object is absurd in the best way: A4, 1.1 kilograms, three centimeters thick, cover art by Plastiboo printed in full color over holographic silver hot foil. Inside are 176 pages of magazine-style reviews, previews and retrospectives—fictional staff writers, period-correct layouts—for 21 games that do not exist. The stock announcement that surfaced on my feed came from All The Problems In This World, a Kreuzberg bookshop, treating an Italian import like a sneaker drop. _The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games_ is written by John Walsh, known to a few million YouTube subscribers as Super Eyepatch Wolf, and published by Hollow Press as the first of its U.D.W.F.G. essay series—edited by Michele Nitri with Marco Cirillo Pedri, who also did the design, and Tiziano Antognozzi. The first edition ran 12,000 copies in November 2025; the English version is already on a second printing of 6,000. Reviews of the unreal, in period dress. Photo via Hollow Press. The roster is the fake-game scene's whole family tree: Plastiboo’s _Vermis_ , Leon Chang’s _Bird World_ and _Return to Bird World_ , Adam Butcher’s _The Disappearance of Catastrophe Crow_ , Harry Partridge’s _GHOSTBLEED_ , Sukinapan’s _Peklo_ , LumpyTouch’s corrupted-cartridge nightmares. What binds them is a shared bet that criticism, manuals, and lore are themselves a medium—that you can build a game out of its paratext and skip the game entirely. The form is older than the boom, and we have the receipts: back in 2016 we wrote about Japan’s annual exhibition of fake Famicom games, where artists produced cartridges and box art for imaginary releases. A decade later, the same instinct has a hardcover, a second printing, and a Berlin shop announcing restocks. The alternate timeline is doing fine. More spreads from __The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games__. Photos via Hollow Press. Games that exist only as their own reviews are exactly the kind of boundary object we live for. The free Killscreen newsletter finds the next one before it gets an anthology. Get the newsletter

In the autumn of 1785, over 37 evenings in a Bastille cell, the Marquis de Sade wrote _The 120 Days of Sodom_ in miniature letters on a 40-foot scroll and hid it in a gap in the wall. That scroll—lost in the storming, mourned with “tears of blood,” now a French national treasure—is where the excerpt Lit Hub ran in August begins, and _Grand Theft Auto_ is where it ends. It comes from _Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art_ , the new book by Daisy Dixon, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cardiff University who specializes in immoral and dangerous art—and who keeps a studio practice in painting and sonic sculpture on the side. Lit Hub's announcement post is what put it on our radar. The US cover, from Viking. What makes the book worth your shelf is structural: games sit inside the argument rather than tacked on at the end. The _Grand Theft Auto_ series—waterboarding scene and all—gets the same treatment as the Lady Chatterley trial, Mapplethorpe's Senate tormentors, the porn wars, and the Whitehouse crusades: every era is convinced it has finally found the artform that will corrupt us, and every era's enforcers overreach. Dixon's warning cuts both ways: “the very gatekeepers of supposedly depraved art can also be dangerous.” The book is out from Faber in the UK and Viking in the US. Games have been the century's favorite moral panic, and the panic is older than the medium. One only need look back to 2012 via Kurt Vonnegut's letter to the book burners, and how it wrestled with what _Grand Theft Auto V_ actually asks of its player in our reading of its nihilism. A philosopher of art doing that work with games in the room—as material, not as scare quote—is still rare enough to be news. Every era finds a new artform to panic about; we cover the people making this one worth defending. The free newsletter is one game and one argument a week. Get the free newsletter

A bare room with terracotta tiles. A young man on a stool, hunched at a desk, keyboard under both hands, mouse waiting, a boss arena glowing on the monitor. Behind the player, a woman in a green housedress caught mid-reproach, a shadow running long across the floor. The painting is called _Dark Souls_ (2025), it is by the Italian painter Leonardo Devito, and it reached the games side of the internet through a post from Outsiders, the editorial project run by Alfredo Accatino. Devito was born in Florence in 1997 and works in Turin; Devito took a BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and an MFA at the Accademia Albertina, and shows with Ciaccia Levi in Paris and Milan and The Artist Room in London. The figuration runs Renaissance drawing through an underground filter, and childhood—its rooms, its supervision, its negotiations—keeps returning as a subject. Ten years ago Killscreen covered games crossing into painting from the other direction, when official Ico and Shadow of the Colossus canvases went up for sale—the game's imagery, framed for your wall. Devito inverts the transaction. What hangs in the gallery now is not the world inside the monitor but the domestic apparatus around it: the desk, the posture, the person who wants the room back. Play has become a scene painting can take as seriously as a card game or a piano lesson. Radar covers the traffic between games and the rest of culture — painters, printmakers, choreographers, the lot. Three finds a week in the free letter. Get Radar free

Every prop hunt game before this one handed you a menu of objects. _FAKE ME_ hands you a cube. Fakers in this multiplayer hide-and-seek start each round as a blank block and model their own disguise live—move, rotate and scale with a gizmo, then extrude, inset, outset, and cut faces, then paint with a color picker and metallic and roughness values, while a host-set timer of 100 to 900 seconds runs down. This is competitive 3D modeling wearing a party game's clothes. The game is up for wishlisting on Steam, due Q4 2026. 0:00 /0:33 1× The gameplay trailer, looping mute here — watch it with sound on Steam. The developers are Eren Can Metin and Emre Gökçe of Turkish studio YUMEXE, building on Unreal Engine 5.7 with GradientSpace's Runtime Geometry Utils plugin, modified so UVs regenerate in real time and paint survives every edit. They told 80 Level the aim is that "players can become anything they want," with short GIF demonstrations beside each tool so nobody needs a modeling background. Seekers get the same toolset for cosmetics—sculpt your own armor before the hunt. Killscreen wrote back in 2015 that hide-and-seek deserved better than videogames were giving it, and _FAKE ME_ 's answer arrives from an unexpected direction: not better hiding spots but better hiders. It lands in the wake of _Meccha Chameleon_ 's paint-and-blend success, and the question is: is this secretly a 3D literacy tool for kids? The friendliest Blender tutorial ever shipped might turn out to be a round of tag. Build modes and bad disguises. Screenshots via FAKE ME on Steam. Radar tracks the games that smuggle real creative tools into play — modeling, painting, printmaking. Three finds a week, free, in your inbox. Get Radar free

"Whether left behind or wrongly taken," this summer's reel from Glass Head Dolls reads, "discarded bits of pigment can become frightfully lonely." That is an announcement caption written like an item description, and it tells you most of what _Prison of Husks_ is: a souls-like set in a painted afterlife called the Lithos Plateau, where you wake as a doll searching for your beloved and the bosses hoard pigment. A demo is on Steam now with the full game due in 2026, a PS5 version announced, and publisher Wings backing the studio. 0:00 /0:33 1× The reveal trailer, looping mute here — watch it with sound on Steam. The genre tag undersells how strange the systems are. Your dodge is an aggressive dash that closes distance as readily as it creates it, timely blocks refill stamina instead of draining it, and clean play charges an adrenaline meter that raises the damage you deal and the damage you take. Inverse's Robin Bea, in one of the demo's first close reads, called it "a dream about playing" _Dark Souls_ — similar, reference-laden, and inscrutable in its own ways, closer to _Ico_ 's haze than to FromSoftware cosplay. Pigment is not a filter here; it is the loot, the economy, and apparently the loneliness. Killscreen argued back in 2016 that Dark Souls's real inheritance is art history — Bosch, Doré, the whole infernal picture tradition — and _Prison of Husks_ feels like a studio taking that inheritance literally: a game that treats paint as the substance souls are made of, and difficulty as the price of the picture. Pigment country. Screenshots via Prison of Husks on Steam. Radar goes looking for the games that treat paint, print and picture traditions as playable material. Three of them hit the free letter every week. Get Radar free

_Reason and Rhyme_ strands two flightless birds on a mysterious island and hands each player one of them. It is an online co-op puzzle adventure built for exactly two people, no more and no fewer, announced this month in a reel from Toyful Games and now carrying a real date: October 15 on Steam. 0:00 /0:57 1× The announcement trailer, muted here; watch it with sound on Steam. Toyful is half Tim FitzRandolph, who releases solo work as Walaber and has spent two decades making games that feel like toys: _JellyCar_ , lead design on _Where's My Water?_ , the Saturn-brained _Parking Garage Rally Circuit_ , the programming puzzler _Replicube_. The look this time is borrowed from Flipnote Studio, the Nintendo DSi animation app, all wobbling hand-drawn lines, and it is doing more than styling. The reason to watch this one is the acting. The birds mime, sulk and celebrate at each other, and the comments under the announcement keep returning to how much feeling the animation carries. Co-op puzzling usually organizes itself around the puzzle box; this one seems organized around how two characters emote across it. Killscreen has always liked co-op that lives in bodies rather than logic gates. In 2015 we called Push Me Pull You the grossest couch co-op game, and meant it with love. _Reason and Rhyme_ reads like that idea's gentler cousin: two people, one problem, and the other player is most of the game. Gardens, bogs and temples across the island. Images: Toyful Games Killscreen finds the games built for feel before the charts do, and argues for them. The free newsletter brings the next one to your inbox. Get the newsletter

Zhou Yichen made _GRANDMA_ the way you keep a diary. After the artist's grandmother fell at home in March 2024, Zhou packed up a computer, moved in, and started recording their days together as a Game Boy game: bringing meals, buying the soda Grandma liked, the same small loops of care repeating with no reward and no goal. A dream became the ending. I wrote about it in April, and I still think it is one of the truest uses of GB Studio anyone has found. 0:00 /2:17 1× The __GRANDMA__ Kickstarter campaign video, via PB Tails The news is the announcement Zhou posted this week: a Kickstarter with PB Tails to press _GRANDMA_ into a run of 5,000 metal cartridges, CNC-milled, laser-engraved, and playable on an original Game Boy. PB Tails is a Hong Kong hardware maker whose founder, Zoe, was also raised by a grandmother; the studio's argument is that "a story this permanent shouldn't live in plastic." And one mournful tier: Send in a photo of someone you love, and Zhou will personally redraw them as a pixel character baked onto your individual cartridge. There is also the Grandma Wall, a living online wall assembled from backers' pixel portraits. Zhou spent days reducing a photograph of the real Grandma until the Game Boy's four shades could hold a face. Offering to perform that same act of compression for strangers turns a private memorial into a public one: grief work at cartridge scale. "I make games," Zhou writes on the campaign page, "not the kind you win, but the kind you feel." The campaign is all or nothing, and it closes October 24. If _GRANDMA_ wrecked you in April, this is the version you can hold. Frames from the campaign video for __GRANDMA__ Nobody else is covering the games that get made to hold a person. Killscreen finds them, argues for them, and sends them to your inbox free. Get the newsletter

An aside This week: a photography game where the camera is the only thing you can do, set inside a war you cannot stop. Playlist is for Killscreen members. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. Become a member ## Playlist 290 ## Umurangi Generation (2020) ## Origame Digital ### Play Time: 2 hours Available on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation > Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. _-Susan Sontag,_ Regarding the Pain of Others > _Bear witness,_ we say [...] we must ask—what does all this looking do? _Sarah Aziza, "_ The Work of the Witness_"_ I am voiceless, but there are sounds everywhere. They are the sounds of nightlife, of my friends. We are huddled on a rooftop, surrounded by the leftovers of construction, a perfect location for mischief. Abandoned sofas, walls covered with graffiti and, of course, a skyline of Tauranga, New Zealand. I pull everyone in for a photo. A little to the left, and smile; maybe I can catch everyone in a frame on this rooftop against one of those cherry-pop-red evenings on a night that will never end. And then, the sky is shattered with the roar of a fighter jet, so low I can smell the jet fuel, and I'm reminded that today will not be a good day. So why not take another photo? It's really all one can do. In Naphtali Faulkner's (Ngāi Te Rangi iwi) _Umurangi Generation_ (2020), you play as an unnamed Māori courier on assignment (newspapers still exist in the future!), who documents the incursions of an alien squid species. Tooled only with an arsenal of lenses and a shot list that ranges from the demure (six cinder blocks, seven cats) to the profound (two body bags), you hurtle through different scenes in this society on the verge of collapse, from a gripping front-line sequence to a somber trainbound retreat to a final encounter on the beaches of the island country. It is a game about photography, a rare breed that centers your activity entirely on the daily lives of the beleaguered citizens in the last throes of an invasion. But this isn't really a game about aliens, thank god. Faulkner's stated reason is straightforward enough: photography is perhaps the only way to truly get players to take a deep breath and look. It's such a small thing, that. Look. "The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of 'Look,' 'See,' 'Here it is,'" French philosopher Roland Barthes would write in his reflections on photography, _Camera Lucida_. The point is that the taking, the taken, and the takeaway of a photograph are all active, as dynamic as any activity we have inside a game. And yet, that is typically not the way that we engage with virtual environments. They are set dressing and rehearsal spaces, not sites of contemplation, and given the backdrop for _Umurangi_ , it can be tempting to think that dynamic sequences off-world (one sequence positions giant mecha against the squid from that same opening rooftop) are the subject, and taking a photo is simply something that you do. Even in games with a more meditative bent, it's rare that the gaze truly lingers on a single object. This gazing, of course, is not without reward. You receive a modicum of symbolic cash and new lenses for completing each assignment, and even for taking your photos. It's the look that changes your context through this thing called the camera inside this other thing called a videogame. "Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world," media theorist Vilém Flusser writes. Through my little camera, the soda cans and dining tables and police cars and Day-Glo graffiti of _Umurangi_ , I can transform the conditions of my deeply fallen world. But a funny thing about human sight: even when we are looking through a lens, our peripheral vision still sneaks through. The big things are easy to notice (the constant presence of the UN), but the small things (candles arranged in an alcove, two cats leering at each other from a staircase) can't help but catch my eye. It's part of what Faulkner calls "respectful design," a term from Norman W. Sheehan, a Wiradjuri academic, that suggests that beauty lies not in the eye of the photographer but is a distributed talent to be shared by the community. To that end, _every_ photo in _Umurangi_ is a good photo and receives a passing grade (no F ratings here). _Umurangi_ , then, is a break from the shorter tradition of photo-based games like _Pokémon Snap_ , but also from the now-ubiquitous photo modes that only serve as an advertisement for the latest and greatest GPUs. Of course, there's the fiction. The kaiju, the UN occupation and rebellious sloganeering spray-painted on every sidewalk. Faulkner said that the national complacency around the bushfires that consumed his mother's home was a signal of the looming disasters that await our climate future. So yes, it _is_ a game about climate change, something almost all critics return to, but my mind, again wandering toward the periphery, couldn't help feeling the role of a photographer places me somewhere else. Of course, I am talking about the genocide of the people of Gaza and the war in Ukraine. Before that, it could be any of the innumerable horrors perpetrated on the people of Afghanistan, Rwanda or Cambodia. Through all of those, there have always been photographers throughout the 20th century deployed by media or photo agencies to document each and every moment. To pick up a camera and to document pain and suffering is to place oneself in a tradition that sits outside of games, and thus _Umurangi Generation_ is less about the specific otherworldly tragedy that has befallen Tauranga than about the act of observation and our inability to do anything in the face of incomprehensible violence. In the town of Katikati, you're asked to take a photo, in low, narrow, neon-tinged city streets, of 15 candles, many of which are lit in memorial. How many candles are there? How many have died? In another sequence, The Strand, a building has collapsed and is now protected (?) by UN soldiers. Was it an apartment building? Was it a school? There is a longer tradition of games that tackle serious subject matter through a change of setting. I am thinking of This War of Mine (2014), which was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, where you are asked to make hard choices to survive. But there is another way through entirely: games can elide historicity and simply focus on what an interaction does to us through the act of doing. In this instance, Faulkner's stripping the range of actions to _only_ observing and never interacting mirrors the helplessness of our contemporary social media- and television-fueled interactions with daily violence and suffering. For Sontag, the concern was that television, and then by extension TikTok or Instagram, does not allow for "a more reflective engagement" because you can always change the channel. We can always look away; we can always escape. In an essay on photographs of suffering in _The New Yorker_ , Sarah Sentilles recounted this story. > I thought of a friend whose son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. When he was dying, people would say to her, "I can't imagine what you're going through." She would respond, "Yes, you can imagine it. You just don't want to." With games, you can imagine that tragedy. You must. You simply have no other choice. Faulkner doesn't provide that respite, and now the question becomes: what will you do with what you have seen? Before you go You just read the whole thing. Playlist is the main reason people pay for Killscreen — one game a week, played properly, written up on Friday. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. Become a member Radar is the short one — three news items, every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that. Turn on Radar

Aggro Crab—the Seattle studio behind _Another Crab's Treasure_ and this year's co-op phenomenon _PEAK_ —is a publisher now. Its new label, Aggro Crab Presents, announced its first signing on September 1: _Rebounder_ , a precision platformer from developer ThirtyThree, coming to Steam in 2027 with a demo at Aggro Crab's PAX West booth. 0:00 /0:33 1× The announcement trailer, looping mute here — watch it with sound on Steam. The game itself is about a roughneck worker taking a hazardous cargo job on a remote lunar worksite—500-plus hand-crafted screens across six chapters of grabbing, throwing, and ricocheting off alien flora. _Rebounder_ is drawn like a vintage science-fiction comic that went through a cheap press, all Ben Day dots, ink bleed and misregistration. Print's failure modes, reproduced in an engine at 60 frames a second, are the aesthetic; the way CRT scanlines were a decade ago. ThirtyThree co-founder Logan Gilmour told GamingOnLinux that Aggro Crab, "as fellow devs," know "the subtleties of getting it right." Head of Publishing Corey Warning says _PEAK_ 's success left the studio uninterested in growing its team but "interested in growing our catalog"—they want projects needing $500,000 or less, two years or less, "intense, stylized games with an attitude," and, in their words, no generative AI slop. Killscreen has loved this genre since an early build of Celeste crossed the desk in 2016; a decade on, the precision platformer has become the place where small teams show off a thesis about style. Six chapters of ink and misregistration. Screenshots via Rebounder on Steam. Radar exists for games that treat a printing press as a rendering engine. Three finds like this land in the free letter every week. Get Radar free

Earlier this year, METAMORPHOSIS got the announcement that changes a project's material reality: Top Hat Studios will publish the pixel-art horror game, and the deal funds animator Chancellor Stokes to work on it full time. The news landed in April during Top Hat's Spring Showcase, by way of a trailer posted from the team's art account that did not hide what full-time funding means to a small team. 0:00 /0:09 1× The dead world of __METAMORPHOSIS__. The full announce trailer with sound is on Steam. The game follows Aria, a nun branded a sinner, descending through the megastructures of a world that manufactured its own rapture, armed with firearms and miracles. The detail that got me is not wasconfession as a game system. Divine machines are still running in the ruins, you can confess your sins to them, and the store page warns that you should mind who might be listening. Horror keeps borrowing religion's set dressing; a game built around liturgy as interface is chasing something _Blasphemous_ only gestured at. Aria, the megastructures, and a sigil, from the __METAMORPHOSIS__ announce trailer, via Steam 0:00 /0:12 1× Confession, with something listening. There is no release date. What exists now is a free Steam demo with three weapons, 15 enemies, two bosses, 30 items, and 28 songs, a soundtrack-to-content ratio that tells you where this team's heart is. Wishlist it, play the demo, and light a candle for the full run. __METAMORPHOSIS__ (images: luxan / Top Hat Studios, via Steam) We track the games where form is doing the scaring, long before release day. The free newsletter is where they surface first. Get the free newsletter

_CONTROL Resonant_ , Remedy Entertainment's return to the Oldest House universe, shipped September 24 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. So it was nice to see some ostensibly "BTS" footage from EDGLRD posted the same day. In it, we see a sequence of smuggled footage from the world of _CONTROL_ : a cardboard box multiplying in mass, a figure huddled in a corner at New York City N/R/W line, and bodies floating ominously over the skyline. The advertising for one of the fall's biggest games came out of Harmony Korine's Miami collective. 0:00 /0:28 1× A cardboard box multiplies in one of EDGLRD's clips for __CONTROL Resonant__ , via Instagram EDGLRD is the studio Korine built after deciding cinema's future looked more like games than like film: _Aggro Dr1ft_ was shot in infrared and finished by game-engine artists, and _Baby Invasion_ ran on livestream and shooter grammar. The studio describes itself as a design collective working across film, fashion, and games. So when Remedy, whose communications director Thomas Puha has said this is the studio's biggest marketing campaign ever, needed images that could cut through a September crowded with horror sequels, it went to a filmmaker's shop that already thinks in engine terms. Remedy is the rare larger studio worth my attention, ever since we asked what Cormac McCarthy and Alan Wake have in common. Screenshots of __CONTROL Resonant__ , via Steam The border where film people become game people is Killscreen\u2019s home turf. The free newsletter patrols it for you. Read along free

In Leo Castañeda's _Camoflux_ games, attacking the boss is the fastest way to lose. The boss is the landscape—a waterfall, a mountain range, a cloud—run on a system Castañeda calls "exponential reciprocity": strike it, and it answers with overwhelming force. The viable moves are stranger. Sit. Observe. Use an ability called "deep listening," or walk across a cloud you've coaxed solid. 0:00 /0:07 1× Gameplay from __Camoflux: Levels & Bosses (Igapó)__, via The Overview. Courtesy the artist The Whitney Biennial gave that system its biggest room. _Camoflux_ was playable in the galleries beside a 360-degree fly-through, and its landscapes derive from abstract Amazon paintings by Maria Thereza Negreiros—Castañeda's grandmother, 96, who sketched hills from a hospital bed in Cali while recalling a childhood in Maués, in the Brazilian Amazon. The guaraná fruit, whose black seed sits in white flesh like an eyeball, became the energy orbs players collect. The wall credit names them both; The Overview's profile has the whole collaboration. Latino USA's tour of the show frames the bigger picture: Marcela Guerrero is the first Latine to co-curate the Biennial in its 82-year history, alongside Drew Sawyer, and 16 of the 56 artists are Latino. The full exhibition closed Aug. 23—a partial view runs through Oct. 12—but the commission's browser game, Camoflux Recall Grotto, stays free to play on the Whitney's artport: a garden that idles cozily while seeds are scarce and tips into unsustainable overgrowth when they multiply. We profiled Castañeda in 2021, when Levels and Bosses was already bending Colombian heritage into gaming universes. The Whitney run is that argument at institutional scale: the museum hangs paintings; Castañeda's contribution insists a landscape can look back. Left to right: __Camoflux Recall Grotto__ ; installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026, photograph by Ron Amstutz; Maria Thereza Negreiros, __Grandes Correntezas III__ _Disclosure: Gameplayarts has Castañeda as a partner._ Artists who treat game engines as inheritance, not industry, are the Killscreen beat. The free newsletter brings three of these stories a week. Start reading free

_Game Poems_ is a magazine you play. Issue #1, "First Moves," is 13 short games readable in the browser like pages—most of them under five minutes, made in everything from Bitsy and GB Studio to Unity and Godot, by a contributor list that runs from Pippin Barr to poets, scholars, and lead designers at AAA studios. Last week the magazine surfaced in Amsterdam, where the Rijksakademie's [untitled games event] featured Melanie Wigger's _Vincent_ , from the issue, on its program. Founding editor Jordan Magnuson—who started TIGSource in 2005, wrote Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice for Amherst College Press, and now teaches at Winchester School of Art—has borrowed the literary journal whole: a rotating editorial collective, blind peer review by volunteer first readers, up to 10 open-call selections per issue, a published artist statement beside every game, CC BY 4.0 open access, and a £100 honorarium for Issue #1 contributors funded through a University of Southampton grant. Issue #2, on the soft theme "Videogames Inside," closed its call in July and is in review now. The magazine's position is precise: game poems need not contain words at all—the poetry is in the mechanics, the constraint, the short lyric span. The phrase has history here. In 2011 we covered a Georgia Tech professor's $500 bespoke "game poems," boxed like art editions; in 2016, Pippin Barr brought concrete poetry to life. The idea that a game can be a poem is old. A magazine willing to referee the claim, poem by poem, is new. Games that read like poems, journals that referee them—the space between play and the page is Killscreen's home turf. The free newsletter delivers it a few times a week. Read along, free

Two of the four people who made _Arco_ have a new game, and it is nothing like _Arco_. Dice Have No Eyes, from pixel artist Franek Nowotniak and programmer Max Cahill, hit Steam this year: a push-your-luck roguelike the two bill as a surreal fever dream about greed management. You clear a level, you upgrade your dice, you feed them dumplings, and at every moment the game offers one more roll, which is _exactly_ one roll more than you should take. Where _Arco_ was patient and mournful about consequence, this one makes consequence a slot machine. Let's talk dice. No pips to read, no faces to count—just the raw act of wanting more, drawn in Franek's thick pixel line and set in gambling-parlor psychedelia, with something called King Fetus waiting for the truly lucky. We wrote last year about the expected value of wonder in Balatro; this is that argument with the cards swapped for bones. 0:00 /0:03 1× The loop: roll, bank, or ruin it. The full trailer with sound is on Steam. Small teams keep making the strangest, most alive games on Steam, and Killscreen keeps finding them before the algorithm does. The free newsletter delivers a few of them every week. Get the free newsletter

A media art festival in a former lemonade factory in Graz spent ten days on deepfakes, bot politics, and billionaire futurism—and closed by teaching beginners Unity. That whiplash is the highlight in the opening-night documentation that crossed my feed. RESILIENT GLITCHES ran June 5-14 at Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz, the artist-run house that has occupied the old factory since 2013. The curatorial claim: a glitch is an interruption you can organize around, not a technical error. The lineup mixed critical media art with activism—Zentrum für politische Schönheit, the machinima collective Total Refusal, ludic-research veteran Margarete Jahrmann, multimedia artist Babak Ahteshamipour, set designer David Szauder. The part with legs is HYPERNOMA, a platform project on the artistic and social potential of digital play that launched inside the festival and is built to run three years. Its first game-culture weekend held free workshops on Unity, 2D game animation, and character design, plus the first Game Studio Meet Up Graz/Wien—Subotron, Bongfish, Causa Creations, Microbird Games, Game Dev. Graz—and Christof Ressi's sound lecture-performance _Game Over_. GameScenes has the full programme rundown. Ten years ago glitch talk in games was mostly aesthetic—we were finding the beauty in machine glitches in 2016's _Small Radios Big Televisions_. Graz is making the harder pitch: that the bug, the unruly player, and the local scene are political resources, and that game culture curdles the moment it becomes "innovation" talk. A three-year commitment to that idea from an artist-run house, rather than a trade body, is worth watching. As always, I'm so jealous that we don't have more of this in the States. Opening days at Schaumbad. Photos courtesy RESILIENT GLITCHES / HYPERNOMA Festivals like this rarely make English-language games coverage. Tracking the art-and-games circuit is what the free Killscreen newsletter is for, three sends a week. Follow the circuit free

The economy of _Thank You Bus Driver_ runs on gratitude. You drive a town's bus route against the clock, and every "thank you" a happy passenger offers adds seconds to your timer—so the fastest way to stay on schedule is to be appreciated, whatever that takes. Rules posted by the depot change daily. Rulebreakers can be slapped, or ejected out the door at speed. (There is quite a bit of slapping.) The fence between you and the next stop is, per the game's own description, optional. It came out of the brain of Double Fine's Will Koehler, was built by a small team in a matter of weeks, and arrives on PC October 14 via Steam, GOG, and itch.io. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the __Thank You Bus Driver__ announcement trailer, muted here—the full trailer with sound is on Double Fine's site. Courtesy of Double Fine. I had Double Fine boss Tim Schafer at the first ever Killscreen Festival (then called Two5six) back in 2015 and a lot has happened to the studio. It was acquired by Xbox and then self-empancipated this year. This is the first release from Double Fine Action Labs, the sub-label the studio announced this month for what its blog calls "weird, little games." So, the context matters here: after seven years inside Microsoft, this summer's Xbox restructuring spun Double Fine back out as an independent studio, catalog intact—and Tim Schafer told GamesBeat that the plan for independence runs through small experiments and a Kickstarter reviving Amnesia Fortnight, the studio's internal game jam, as a public event. Becoming a smaller studio, the thinking goes, means making smaller, stranger games—and giving them a name of their own. We've been here before. Killscreen covered Amnesia Fortnight back in 2014, when the jam's prototypes made the case that Double Fine's two-week experiments were where the studio's best ideas surfaced. And in 2013, Schafer argued that crowdfunding doesn't free creators so much as trade one boss for thousands. Thirteen years later, Schafer is testing that proposition firsthand—and the first fare out of the depot is a bus driver who runs on thank-yous. Screenshots from __Thank You Bus Driver__. Courtesy of Double Fine. Where do weird little games get to live? That question is most of what Killscreen covers—the studios, artists, and labels building shelter for strange work. The free newsletter brings the next ones to your inbox. Get the free newsletter

Chess's ancestor came back retold. _Chaturanga Disclosed_ , Sage Godrei's speculative reworking of the game that predates chess, anchored the Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency Exhibition at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, which showed at the 4A LAB space in Haymarket, Sydney, from May 1 through June 14. The announcement for the closing artist talk is what put it on our radar. Myra Javaid's _The City of Forgotten Lights_ turns experiences of the gendered gaze in public space into an interactive game prototype. Sim Kaur's _Jhalak / A Glimpse_ rebuilds a bedroom corner as a walk-in personal archive. Vidya Rajan's _Good Morning Land_ grows a surreal landscape out of WhatsApp archives and digital memory. And Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin's _Hypocrite Heaven_ reimagines _Snakes and Ladders_ —a game that began life as a morality lesson—as a board of queer resistance and liberation. The five artists—emerging South Asian Australian women and gender-diverse practitioners—spent five months in virtual labs and a Sydney intensive mentored by Antariksha Studio, the Indian transmedia collective that has been building independent games rooted in Indian heritage since 2013. The money came from Creative Australia's Create Lab Digital Alumni Fund: a national arts body funding game-form worldbuilding as visual art, with an Indian studio setting the example rather than a Western engine company. We have a long shelf of games rewritten by people the canon overlooked—Chesh was breaking chess's rules for the people back in 2015—and a soft spot for Australia's gloriously weird game-making lineage. This residency splices the two: board-game history and engine work in the same room, retold as heritage. Works by Sim Kaur, Vidya Rajan, Sage Godrei, Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin, and Myra Javaid. Photographs by Garry Trinh, courtesy 4A Game history keeps getting retold by the people it left out. Following that retelling is what the free Killscreen newsletter does, three times a week. Follow along free

In 2006, when YouTube was a baby and Netflix still mailed discs, Peter Burr pressed the first Cartune Xprez DVD and started driving experimental animation into basements and cinemas across twenty countries. More than two hundred events later, Burr's framing in the 20th-birthday announcement was sadly blunt: "the algorithm has swallowed most of the room." The anniversary night, June 11 at Roulette in Brooklyn, was titled _USEFUL FANTASY_ , and it gathered the label's generational core—Takeshi Murata's _Monster Movie_ , Amy Lockhart's _Walk for Walk_ , films by Martha Colburn, Jacob Ciocci (my old roommate!), James Duesing, and Jim Trainor—alongside performances built from game logic. MSHR played _Network Entity_ through a handmade sculptural interface in which every sonic decision reshapes an image and every image bends the sound. Matt Romein's _Milkman Zero_ put the performer inside a videogame to see what the game does with a body; the program's question ("who is actually in control?") rings loud and clear. Burr closed the loop with _MAINTENANCE VESSELS_ , described as "a slot machine at the mouth of a dungeon": visitors spin up hybrid avatars that wander a decaying underworld performing quiet, endless repair on architecture that may not want to be saved. Games have been Burr's material for years—the dungeon-crawler installations _Cave Exits_ and _Dirtscraper_ —and the credentials recently caught up: a PhD in game design and an assistant professorship at the University of Texas at Austin. The whole night is archived from Roulette's livestream. What hopefully hangs around is the event's remains: a touring DVD label was a distribution system for unruly moving images, and the room that Burr is betting on as a successor. We've been on this lineage ourselves lately, most recently via a 1991 animation that framed early CGI in religious imagery; Cartune Xprez is the infrastructure that kept that tradition moving between institutions. Experimental animation and games have been one conversation since the DVD era. The free Killscreen newsletter follows it three times a week. Get the free letter

gamescom is where the games industry does its _loudest_ business, and in the middle of it, on A MAZE.’s Digital PlayGround stand, sat a diorama about a dead TV medium who became an AI. The Hague artist Daniel Ernst spent the fair showing the flat, non-VR cut of _The Great Orator_ —and pitched the outing as exactly what it looks like: “fellow subversive artists in the heart of the gaming industry,” with time set aside to see the con “from a consumer perspective.” 0:00 /0:30 1× The first 30 seconds of __The Great Orator__ ’s teaser, muted; the full version with sound is on Steam. Ernst has been building VR dioramas for over a decade under the Shoebox Diorama banner— _Die Fernweh Oper_ won the Golden Calf for Best Interactive at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2019—and _The Great Orator_ , which premiered in competition at Venice Immersive last year, is the most ambitious of them. The premise is very Amee Semple McPherson: a TV medium who died at the height of fame lives on as an AI, merged with followers into a shared consciousness. Point at any object, however small, and the Orator produces a story about it. Every oration begins as a prewritten text by poet Thomas Möhlmann and is expanded in real time, folding in live news from your world. Ernst’s artist statement is blunt about the target: “It feels as though reality is what you make of it, and feelings outweigh facts.” Killscreen has been arguing that games’ diorama instinct is undervalued since at least 2016. Next stop is home turf: the Netherlands Film Festival in Utrecht, tomorrow through October 2. Story spaces from __The Great Orator__. Images: The Shoebox Diorama. Work like this falls between every desk—too art for the games press, too game for the art press. That gap is Killscreen’s entire beat, and the newsletter that covers it is free. Read us free

Huntrezz Janos's new game is a city you could frost a cake with. CLOWDER went live on September 14 as a free browser game, and the premise is as gentle as the palette: wander a dreamy cloud city and gather the neighborhood's cats until your clowder hits 100. (A clowder is a group of domesticated cats. The more you know!) Her launch reel walks through it in her own voice, pastel streets rolling by under a graffiti-style logo. 0:00 /0:33 1× Huntrezz Janos’s launch reel for __CLOWDER__ , from her Instagram. Courtesy the artist. Janos is an LA-based artist who has spent years building sculptural work and performatice work, gallery shows, commissions and AR—her WePresent commission imagined a whole cast of speculative metaverse characters, from a digiballer to a virtual therapist. _CLOWDER_ is that practice arriving somewhere new: not a filter you wear or a render you look at, but a space that answers you back. The game runs on HTC's Viverse, and she credits a Viverse creator grant for making the build possible. (It's platform money quietly doing what art funding _should_ do, moving an artist from depicting worlds to shipping one.) The cat-collecting genre has a lineage, and Killscreen was there when it crystallized—we covered Neko Atsume taking over the world in 2016. _Neko Atsume_ made you wait for cats to visit; Janos lets you go out and find them, in a city built to her own maximalist taste. Ten years of the genre, compressed into the difference between a screensaver and a stroll. Artists keep crossing into games, and Killscreen keeps the map. The free Radar newsletter brings three crossings like this to your inbox every week. Get the free newsletter

_Zantar_ is a retro 2D action game about a gelatinous cube that eats the warriors of a medieval village—and the anchor of a fiction about an ambitious CEO determined to make that game the most valuable platform in the world. Mitchell Chan built a gallery show out of it, Insert Coin(s), which premiered at Nguyen Wahed in New York in May 2025 and traveled to the gallery's London space that fall. Now the works have left the room: per the clip Chan posted, the new artworks from the exhibition are playable online. 0:00 /0:26 1× The preview trailer for __Zantar & Other Stories__, silent here — the full version with sound is on Steam. The suite rewards the click-through. _Moonboi_ is billed as "a stylized currency trading simulation"—an endless runner where you steer a Lamborghini between leveraged long and short positions and try not to get liquidated. _Ladyboss_ is "a short tragedy, presented in the style of a Subway Surfer Story Tiktok." _Overture_ wraps generative art, soundtracks and worldbuilding into minigame editions. The next room in the show is getting bigger. Zantar & Other Stories is on Steam, dated 2027—six stories about the fictional game, its CEO, and the would-be millionaires pulled into its orbit. Chan sat down with us in July for a members Playlist Session on _The Boys of Summer_ , and the through-line holds: one critic called Chan committed to the most serious ideas of conceptualism in the most playful way possible. Screenshots from __Zantar & Other Stories__, via Steam. Real games reviewed as sculpture, sculpture reviewed as games — that crossing is what Killscreen covers. The free newsletter brings it weekly. Get the newsletter

Mustang Speedrun is Team Rolfes' broadcast-spectacle in progress: a fictional sim studio reenacting a nation's founding myth as a televised stunt contest, performed live from a motion-captured, broadcast-rigged cockpit while avatar jockeys race to keep a failing exoskeleton running. Per Sam Rolfes' announcement, the New York studio takes it to two stages next month, and neither is a club. 0:00 /0:36 1× Team Rolfes running __Mustang Speedrun__ in the cockpit rig, from the announcement they posted to Instagram. London first: on Saturday, October 17, Team Rolfes closes a night of 3 Evenings at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station—Somerset House Studios' tenth-anniversary reimagining of 1966's 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. The one-off, subtitled Pit Call and billed as "part game show, part emergency," opens the performance apparatus to the room and puts pop provocateur GFOTY in the driver's seat, with the whole night relying on collective input to get through in one piece. Then New York: on Wednesday, October 21, a new version closes Unsound New York's evening at Alice Tully Hall, sharing a Lincoln Center bill with FUJI|||||||||||TA with Ka Baird and Actress. Rolfes' announcement names performers Fitness and baddad_x, with live cinema by Kevin Peter He. Sam Rolfes is a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, and Somerset House notes the project is headed for a playable download, so the stunt contest will eventually be yours to run. We have been watching the brothers drag game engines onstage for a decade — from the early VR-puppetry livestreams to the sold-out chaos of Diskokina. The through-line has always been control as material: who is holding the puppet, and how badly. Handing the cockpit to a concert hall is the logical, unhinged next step. The space between the game engine and the stage is Killscreen’s home turf, and the free newsletter is how you keep up with who’s working in it. Get the newsletter

_Every_ secondhand Wii arrives with ghosts on it. The Mii channel keeps whatever its previous households made—self-portraits, in-jokes, dead relatives, celebrities—and when the console gets resold, those little avatars go along, unclaimed. At Sickhouse, the Dutch playful art space in Enschede, artists Janne Schimmel and Rein van der Woerd built a one-day public permacomputing workshop around exactly that inheritance: participants dug forgotten Miis off secondhand consoles, “climbed inside the mind” of each one, and made a homebrew Wii game about the existential troubles those characters might face on a daily basis. The recording of the result is up, and the game— _Remember Mii_ —is a free download on itch, a 13MB .dol file you run from a homebrewed Wii’s SD card or drop straight into the Dolphin emulator. “To retroactively diversify the Nintendo Wii game library,” they write. That’s a permacomputing sentence—the discipline holds that the hardware already made is the hardware worth making things for—but it’s also an archival one. A Mii might be the most personal data anyone leaves on a games console: a face, built by hand, by someone who wasn’t thinking of it as data at all. (Lord knows, the number of exes that still haunt lost Wiis.) The workshop treats that residue as a cast of characters nobody meant to donate. Music comes from Wout Martens, and seven workshop participants share the credit. Schimmel’s whole practice runs on the afterlives of gaming hardware—a recent Permanent Beta conversation frames the artist’s repair work as refusal of planned obsolescence. The Mii has a Killscreen history, too: in 2015 we watched Nintendo push Miis out into the real world with _Miitomo_. A decade on, the traffic runs the other way—strangers’ Miis carried back out of the e-waste stream, one secondhand console at a time. Somebody has to keep track of the art being made on dead consoles, and we volunteered fifteen years ago. The free Killscreen newsletter is where it all lands. Join the free list

_Bub_ is built from paper—thousands of cut pieces, "slashes of ink and paint," collages photographed into a stop-motion world by hand. This week the paper traveled. Case Jernigan and Todd Anderson, the two-person studio Paperfrog, brought the game to Amsterdam for a playtest and presentation at the Rijksakademie, followed by a showing at [untitled games event] #8 on Sept. 18—opening night of the series' first three-day weekender, which runs through Sept. 20. Jernigan announced the trip in a reel that doubles as a tour of the game's hand-cut cast. 0:00 /0:21 1× The opening 21 seconds of the __Bub__ announcement trailer, via Paperfrog and Steam. Watch the full trailer with sound. The venue is half the story. [untitled games event] describes itself as a monthly "book club" of experimental games and interactive art, and it meets inside an art academy rather than a games festival; edition #8 is programmed around "big feelings, wrong feelings, unruly emotions." _Bub_ belongs in that room. It's a narrative adventure about a New York painter and sculptor documenting chronic illness through artmaking—"turning your memories into art while you still can," as the Steam page puts it—and Jernigan, who lives with multiple sclerosis, has written that the story is autobiographical. 0:00 /0:01 1× The credits run through comedy and music as much as games: comedian Whitmer Thomas (_Weapons_) voices Bub, Landlady's Adam Schatz composed the score, and Somepoint Sound handled the sound design. Anderson writes the code. Jernigan cuts the paper. Killscreen has been a mark for handmade game worlds since Lumino City's papercraft village a decade ago, and Amanita Design digitized a real cardboard city just last month. _Bub_ reaches Steam in Q4 2027. Screenshots of __Bub__ , via Paperfrog and Steam Paper, ink and glue keep turning into games, and Killscreen has tracked that crossover since 2010. The free newsletter brings you the artists doing it, three times a week. Get the free newsletter

Three weeks ago we covered the iMac Rainbow, Paizley Lee’s floor of candy-colored G3s at the second LA night of Dead Internet Theory. Now the LAN revival has made public radio: KCRW aired a five-minute segment by Jennifer Swann on Lee’s roving event, and the station’s photo carousel—towers, CRTs, a room strung together with cable—is exactly the kind of thing that used to circulate on burned CDs. The format Lee is reviving died of convenience. LAN parties existed because the internet was too slow to carry multiplayer, so the multiplayer came to the room: tower, monitor, cords, all of it lugged to a friend’s place. “It was everybody bringing something,” Lee told KCRW. Lee tagged along to those parties as a kid and now stages them for Angelenos at ark/8, on machines scavenged from around the country. It's no surprise that the theme has been presence: the machines are less stimulating than phones, so the game is the only thing happening, and the people around you are actually there. It's one of the arguments for why games are such a compelling break, compared to other passive, lean-out, always-on media. An Ethernet cable is a commitment device.So I don't think nostalgia for CRT glass is the driver here, so much as an appetite for one thing at a time, with witnesses. It says something that this story traveled from a warehouse on La Brea to public radio in a summer: the desire is not niche. Dead Internet Theory is roving, ongoing, and in Killscreen’s own city—follow Lee’s account for the next date. We’ll keep showing up. Scenes from Dead Internet Theory, via KCRW’s post. Photos: Jennifer Swann/KCRW. We covered Dead Internet Theory before the radio got there, because scenes like this are what the free Killscreen newsletter exists to catch early. Catch the next one

In _Torizon Telecom_ , the walls say Wall. The floors say Floor. The trees say tree, the bullets are strings of characters, and the whole run-and-gun world—a place literally named Telecom—is typeset rather than textured. What surfaced it promises "everything is text, even the bullets," and the studio SkagoGames means it structurally: change the game's language settings and the entire world re-renders in that language. Localization, usually the least visible labor in games, becomes the level design. Underneath the conceit, it's a classicist shooter in the _Doom_ and _Quake_ line—pistols, shotguns, rocket jumps, akimbo everything—planned for Steam in 2026, with a level editor and Workshop support, and a demo that showed at BIC 2026 in Busan. The story teases the obvious metaphysical itch: if everything is text, does anything exist outside Telecom, and what, exactly, are _you_ written in? Killscreen's canonical text on this is still Device 6, where "the written word is your map, as well as your narrator." A decade later, the word is also the wall, the gun, and the thing bleeding out on the floor. Killscreen has been reading games as text—sometimes literally—since 2010. The free newsletter delivers the argument three times a week. Read the world

Everything on screen is a character you could type. The account TerminalDev claims a GTA-style multiplayer open world built with no 3D models and no shaders: streets, cars, headlights, all of it drawn in text. The clip looks like a terminal window hallucinating a city. What can be verified is thin, and worth being plain about: there is no store page and no build to download, just reels and a bio stating the project’s premise. 0:00 /0:12 1× TerminalDev’s ASCII open world, from the developer’s Instagram. ASCII as a serious renderer has a lineage games keep returning to— _Dwarf Fortress_ most famously, and _Cogmind_ , which showed roguelikes weren’t done with ASCII back in 2016. We were charmed by an ASCII New York as far back as 2011. What is different here is scale and genre: the most maximalist template in games, the open-world crime sandbox, forced through the most minimal display idiom we have. It recalls a time when multiplayer worlds really did live inside terminals. The developer is openly asking followers whether the thing deserves finishing. On the evidence of the replies, the answer is already in. Solo developers doing improbable things surface on the Radar before they surface anywhere else. The letter is free. Follow the Radar

I've been watching Michael Overton Brown's work for the last couple years here in Los Angeles and was delighted with the build I saw at USC's Games annual showcase back in 2025. So when his studio INFINITE ANIMAL announced that Critical Reflex will publish _Grindset T.V._ , it felt like a perfect fit. This is the label behind _Mouthwashing_ and _Buckshot Roulette_ , two of the strangest word-of-mouth hits in recent memory, and its signature has become a kind of curatorial stamp: not a genre, but a sensibility—lo-fi, uneasy, allergic to focus-testing. The game itself earns the company. _Grindset T.V._ , wishlistable on Steam with no date yet, is an open-world speedrunning platformer whose premise opens like a theology seminar run by a logistics company. God is dead, Heaven has gone corporate, and you are a gig worker hivemind—two million bodies sharing one soul—delivering packages above a flooded world called Port St. Love. "Why do angels pay rent?" Overton Brown asks. Mechanically, it's built as a movement game—grinding, wallrunning, slamming, dashing—with leaderboards for speedrunners and a dense, surreal open world for everyone else. It's a theme devs have been exploring since Mirror's Edge__ broke the genre wide open and now more recently with VHOLUME. But the setting is doing the interesting work. Games about gig labor usually cast you as the exhausted individual; this one casts you as the depersonalized aggregate, the workforce as a single instrument, which is closer to how platforms _actually_ see their workers. It slots into a long Killscreen lane of games that treat late capitalism as playable architecture—most recently PROFITS 2167, which renamed AI "Labor Liquidation Machines." And it's not even Critical Reflex's only game in our saves right now: their occult detective game Inkblood is on the board too. Killscreen reads publisher slates the way galleries read curators—as taste made visible. The free newsletter tracks who's betting on what, every week. Track the taste-makers

_Hey, we're doing something a little bit differently again. Cezar Mocan, who I covered earlier this week and spoke about on_ our podcast yesterday_, has graciously agreed to let members watch his real-time simulation,_ A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy _. You can read more about the work_ here_._ _A quick note about real-time simulations for those who don't know. These are functionally zero-player video games where an artist or game developer sets up a generative system that runs in perpetuity, so every "playthrough" is different. You may have seen these in gallery contexts, or sometimes as screen recordings online, but what you're seeing here is live, running directly from Mocan's computer in Lisbon. What you see once, you'll never see it again.**This is the only place on the planet to view this work right now.**_ _On his own site, Cezar describes the piece as a constellation of seventy-two satellites running under one AI, Argus, that encounters an anomaly: a toxic lake that vanishes from its imagery over six hours one evening, then reappears the next morning. Before it's decommissioned, Argus tries to reconstruct what happened, proposing several internally coherent but mutually incompatible narratives, each simulation run producing a different 30-to-45-minute short film, none of them landing on a single true account. Cezar's own term for the condition behind all of it is "technological underdetermination": not too little information, but too much of it pointing in different directions._ _This will be a limited release, and the stream will turn off Sunday, midnight PST._ Monday Gaming Club is this Monday, and it is Pocket Boss: the game where your boss texts at all hours and you swipe the numbers into better shapes. Mario von Rickenbach is joining us. Thirty minutes, 9:00am PT, about ten of us, nothing to prepare! Just your fine self. Save your spot ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Isaac Cohen, the engineer-toymaker who publishes as Cabbibo, has been flipping through old sketchbooks in public lately, and a sketch showing showing Moon Ball stopped me cold. It is _Rocket League_ by way of Brandon Sanderson: drive a rocket car, throw out a "hook" mid-air, and slingshot yourself around the map—Cohen's translation of Lashing, the gravity-binding magic from Sanderson's _The Stormlight Archive_ novels, into a verb you can press. 0:00 /1:18 1× Cabbibo’s __Moon Ball__ reel, via Instagram The good news is that Moon Ball is real and free—a Windows release Cohen describes on itch as "_Rocket League_ , but slow, pointless and trippy." The itch page also reveals a second, earthier source for the movement feel: BMX. Cohen grew up riding and wanted the game to channel the riders who don't do tricks so much as flow around space—Sergio Layos, Ruben Alcantara, Chase Hawk, Tommy Dugan—using ramps and obstacles to look like they're flying. Back in 2015 we asked why that game's jumping feels so good, and the answer is the one Cohen chases here: the joy of unearned flight, gravity briefly negotiated rather than obeyed. The prototype is old—"another old project I was super pumped on," per the caption—but the resurfacing reads like an artist letting you into the studio. Worth a download while the sketchbook is open. Prototypes like this surface and sink in a feed within hours. The free newsletter is how you catch them while they’re still downloadable. Get the free newsletter

I open with Cezar Mocan's satellite, which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to Danny Snelson runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design decision instead of the defect? The through line for this cycle is what a machine does at the edge of what it can account for. Mocan's End of Signal, which won the SOLO AI Award '25 and which I wrote about last week, imagines a constellation of 73 satellites called Argus. One of them registers the absence of a lake and, in the minutes before it is unplugged, generates testimonies about what might have happened. Mocan's own term for this is "technological undetermination," a condition in which the unknown comes from a surplus of plausible explanations rooted in existing ground truths rather than from a scarcity of information. Then thatgamecompany started a label. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece arguing that small studios were the New Hollywood, and the part that did not hold is that almost nobody got wealthy. Danny reframes the whole question by going back to what the word means. A publisher makes things public, which is the labor of getting work into someone's hands, and in a field where the tools keep getting more open, the scarce thing is whoever can be trusted to cut through the noise. He reaches for Annapurna and for Something Else Press in the 1960s, where an imprint was a coterie rather than a funding source. My own answer is smaller: own the audience, and make the games smaller. The back half is the archive and the news. Adam Yates published Holyvoid, 168 pages of artifact for a game that does not exist, in the lineage of Vermis, and Danny argues the hallucination the book produces may beat the game it implies. Joshua Calixto's 2015 piece on the Rosa Var Attre encounter in _The Witcher 3_ gives us sideshadowing, , and Danny traces it forward through _Baldur's Gate 3_ , _Elden Ring_ and _Disco Elysium_. My interview with Don Rawitsch turns into the thing I would now write differently about westward expansion, and Danny lands the episode's best reversal: _The Oregon Trail_ did not teach a generation history, it taught them how games work. We close fast on Mexico joining IberVideojuegos through the Centro de Cultura Digital, on VHOLUME and whether brutalism actually suits parkour, on Inkblood interrogating time itself, and on why marketers keep telling people not to make puzzle games. ## Links * Cezar Mocan's AI satellite cannot get its story straight, my feature on _End of Signal_ * Joshua Calixto, "Dickens and the Impossible Romances of Video Games" * Carol Ann Has Dysentery * An .exe in the caption turned an art book into a rumor * Mexico joins a seven country games policy program * VHOLUME is out, parkour under a brutalist ministry * Inkblood, a magnifying glass and a time machine * Kill Screen in 2012: thatgamecompany will self-publish their next game * Cezar Mocan * Nouvelle Bug * Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File * Jon Bois, 17776 * Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, "Art histories from nowhere" * sunset visitor, 1000xRESIST * thatgamecompany launches thatgamepublisher * Something Else Press * Adam Yates, Holyvoid * Plastiboo, Vermis I * Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom * VHOLUME * Inkblood * IberVideojuegos * Ambrose Trataris, Daisy-Chain Star-Connection at Gray Area * Danny Snelson _Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester._

Tidy plots, a farmhouse, an item shop, a watering routine. The crop is meat. _CORPSE FARM_ , an unreleased “horror farming simulator” from solo developer Berrysoft Games, sits on Steam as a wishlist page—“grow and harvest humanoid creatures to appease your god,” due Q3 2026—and the announcement reel sparked some, um, interesting reactions. 0:00 /0:15 1× The announcement reel for __CORPSE FARM__ , via Berrysoft Games on Instagram. That’s the finding: cozy is no longer a mood, it’s a grammar—codified enough that you can pour anything into it and the the container won't break When we called _Ooblets_ the cutest farming game we’d yet to play back in 2016, cozy was still an emergent flavor. A decade later the conventions are legible enough to parody at a glance. Screenshots from __CORPSE FARM__ ’s Steam page. Images: Berrysoft Games. Half of what we cover never makes it past a wishlist page, which is exactly when it’s most interesting. The free Killscreen newsletter catches games while they’re still just a premise. Get the free letter

The kids are alright. For SENTIENTS, at Watershed’s Undershed gallery in Bristol, the venue handed selection to young curators from five schools across the city and let the themes that mattered to them—ecology, climate change, identity, imagination—decide what got shown. Watershed’s announcement is a lovely inversion. institutions program games _about_ young people constantly. Almost none let them do the canon-forming. What a great selection! Marshmallow Laser Feast’s _In the Eyes of the Animal_ runs you through a forest as mosquito, dragonfly, frog and owl, a haptic vest buzzing in sync. Alan Kwan’s Scent casts you as a dog gathering the souls of the dead in a city after conflict—“what it means to witness without power,” in Kwan’s words. David OReilly’s _Everything_ is here, a decade on from when we wrote that it reminds us we’re not the center of the universe. Alice Bucknell’s _The Alluvials_ has you prowling a climate-wrecked Los Angeles as a wolf, and Demelza Kooij’s _Wolves From Above_ films a real pack from the air, playing in the welcome area. SENTIENTS opened July 18 and ran through Sunday, September 13, tickets pay what you can from £5. Bristol 24/7 has the names of the five schools the curators came from. __In the Eyes of the Animal__ , __Scent__ , __Everything__ , __The Alluvials__ and __Wolves From Above__. Images via Watershed Games entering galleries is the beat Killscreen has covered since 2010. The free Radar letter tracks every show like this one. Track the shows

Kyoto has a standing answer to the question of whether games belong in galleries, and it just wrapped its sixth year. _Game Playing Society_ , the latest edition of _art bit_ —the exhibition series born when Hotel Anteroom's gallery met BitSummit, the city's independent games festival—ran May 16 through July 12 at Gallery 9.5, free to enter, everything playable. The premise this time: treat play not as an escape from society but as a way of modelling it. The gallery's own announcement asked people to come and actually play, which sounds obvious until you remember how many game-art shows still bolt the controller to the plinth. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the introduction trailer for __SCHiM__ (Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman, 2024), one of the playable works in __art bit #6__. Watch the full trailer with sound on Steam. The Steam wing reads like a syllabus on agency: _HUMANITY_ turns crowd direction into a choreography of obedience, _SCHiM_ builds a platformer out of shadows and attachment, _Coffee Talk_ reframes service work as listening, _Craftopia_ compresses farming, hunting and automation into one production sandbox, and _Relooted_ turns museum restitution into an Afrofuturist heist. Beside them hung the game-art cohort—Mélanie Courtinat's _INDULTO_ , Vincent Moulinet's _Daddy loves you too_ , Sakiko Fujishima's _Digital Persona—Two Voices_ , and Tomo Kihara's _What Plays You?—Game of Possible Lives_ , which generates plausible biographies out of Japan's census data. (We interviewed Kihara about that work in August.) What _art bit_ models better than most institutions is its refusal to file indie games and game art as separate categories, the same argument we found in Larry Achiampong's gaming rooms last month. A hotel gallery between Kujo and Jujo has been running that experiment quietly for six years. The seventh is worth planning a trip around—ideally the week BitSummit is in town. The exhibition’s playable wing, in screenshots via Steam: __HUMANITY__ , __SCHiM__ , __Coffee Talk__ , __Craftopia__ , and __Relooted__. Radar covers the rooms where games and art stop pretending to be strangers—Kyoto included. Three short issues a week, free. Get Radar free

The plan at Lotritsa Studio is "50 years" of game ideas. The first shipped thing is not a game: it is the instrument. _Kaleidos_ , a shader-pattern tool the developer built as a personal utility and then finished into a product, landed August 16 on Steam and itch.io at $7.99, announced with a launch reel whose caption is disarmingly plain about the arc: first completed project, first real marketing push, and a stated ambition to be “a hermit who crafts something in a cave for a year” and then release it. 0:00 /0:30 1× Thirty seconds of the __Kaleidos__ launch trailer, muted—the full version with null_harmony’s soundtrack is on Steam. The tool itself is a playground for Perlin noise, cellular noise and reaction-diffusion, mapped through a finely controllable palette, with warp, movement and interactivity dials, a gallery, a sandbox for drawing with your own patterns, and a CRT dress-up layer—scanlines, curve, vignette, chromatic aberration—that you can switch off. Every shader it produces or bundles is CC0—use it anywhere, no credit owed. We have a soft spot for instruments that make images misbehave—Hyperspektiv called itself a modern kaleidoscope back in 2016—and _Kaleidos_ is the version of that impulse that hands you the source code on the way out. Patterns, palette work and the sandbox, via the Steam page. Tool-makers like this are exactly who Radar exists to catch before the algorithm buries them. The free newsletter delivers the finds three times a week. Get the free newsletter

Elliott Burns spent part of the summer walking the 61st Venice Biennale with one question: where are the games? The running count, posted to SideQuest, the research program Burns writes on artist-produced computer games, came to exactly two playable works across every pavilion and collateral palazzo. One of them is _Black Myth: Wukong_ , parked in the Chinese Pavilion's expo-style Dream Stream show with a life-size figurine of its monkey protagonist. That leaves one. 0:00 /0:40 1× Trailer for Veneta Androva’s __Spray and Pray__ , one of the four films feeding __KAZANA__. Courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion. The one is _KAZANA_ , the connective tissue of The Federation of Minor Practices, the Bulgarian Pavilion's fictional research lab that looks back at our present from a kinder future. Four newly commissioned films by Gery Georgieva, Veneta Androva, Maria Nalbantova and Rayna Teneva feed a copper-clad gaming station built by Zlatka Uzunova and the virtual and augmented reality lab Uzunova leads at Sofia Tech Park. Burns calls it a "walkable political compass quiz": you drift through canyons and caves answering ostensibly ethical questions until the system hands you a personality badge. I. The show runs through November 22, and you don't even need the flight: the game is on Google Play. The third sighting borrows the grammar without the controller. In Pinchuk Art Centre's Still Joy, Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk's Open World (2025) sends a teenager displaced from Zaporizhzhia back home through a robot dog, staged as a livestream. Two playables across dozens of national pavilions is a finding, not a fluke. Consoles keep moving into the museum , but the Biennale proper still treats play as garnish. Which makes it funny that the most convincing political work there is a quiz—we have argued before about where most political games go wrong, and KAZANA's answer is to stop lecturing and start cooking. Inside __The Federation of Minor Practices__ , and the artists with curator Martina Yordanova. Installation photos courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion; group photo: Maximilian Pramatarov. SideQuest counted two playable games in the whole Biennale. Killscreen has been counting them everywhere else since 2010—the free newsletter brings you the work the institutions miss. Get the free newsletter

I missed publishing this one earlier this year and too bad. _Reset_ , the print magazine launched this spring by Kepler Interactive—the publisher behind _Sifu_ , _Pacific Drive_ and _Clair Obscur: Expedition 33_ —has already sold out its first issue at the publisher's own shop. Two hundred pages, three reverse-cover variants, £20 while it lasted. And somewhere inside, Liam Wong writes about the thing longtime readers of this site have suspected for a decade: the eye came from games first. The announcement post puts it plainly—for issue 1, Wong reflects on an early immersion in video game culture and its foundational impact on the photographer's taste and visual style. We wrote about Wong back in 2016, when Ubisoft's then-graphic design director was shooting Tokyo at night in frames that read like lighting passes, and the argument then was to take the photographs on their own terms. Ten years on, _Reset_ makes the stronger argument: there is no border left to police. Directed by Simon Sweeney, Kepler's creative director, issue 1 reads games through architecture, fashion, music and art—Yoko Taro, Frictional Games' Thomas Grip, Read-Only Memory's Darren Wall, _Sable_ 's Gregorios Kythreotis and _Cruelty Squad_ 's Ville Kallio share the book with reverse covers devoted to _Clair Obscur_ creative director Guillaume Broche, artist Mélanie Courtinat and fashion designer Yaku Stapleton. Fewer screenshots, more graphic systems; a games publisher spending real money on a design object about game culture. I think sometimes there's a sense that there can only be _one_ of these things. I remember when Amusement__ pursued a similar path back in 2008, so it's nice to see Reset along with Immersion (French only) make their way. Spreads from __Reset__ issue 1, courtesy of Kepler Interactive Nobody else has spent fifteen years tracking where games end and photography, fashion and print begin. The free newsletter keeps the border crossings coming. Get the free newsletter

"There is no home," Jon Rafman said about the internet, comparing our desultory scrolling and clicking to the final destinations in epic stories such as _The Odyssey._ _Dream Journal 2016–2019_ feels that way, jumping from sequence to sequence through Rafman's interpretation of dreams in the hands of amateur internet animators. A nearly wordless film assembled from the internet's half-formed fantasies, scored by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never: _Dream Journal 2016–2019_ is Jon Rafman's most sustained answer to the question of what the internet dreams about. "It's a cautionary tale," says Rafman. "It reveals a consciousness where there is no historical context." 0:00 /0:30 1× From __Dream Journal ’16–’17__ , an earlier chapter of the serial (excerpt, muted), courtesy Sprüth Magers. Watch with sound on Vimeo. The excerpt K21 posted is why this matters now: the film anchors _Main Stream Media_ , the first comprehensive survey of Rafman's work in a German museum, and the show closes September 27. Rafman describes the material as the collective unconscious of the internet — “the desires, anxieties and half-formed fantasies of a world increasingly experienced online.” The survey turns the basement of K21 in Düsseldorf into an immersive media landscape spanning nearly two decades: the _Betamale Trilogy_ , _Nine Eyes of Google Street View_ , and Mainstream Media Network (2025), an AI-generated music-television channel that restages the MTV of the 1980s as a fiction of virtual pop stars and invented fan communities. Jon Rafman, Main Stream Media Network, 2025, Video Still, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. As a games-adjacent artist, one of the pieces that made Rafman's name was a machinima travelogue — Kool-Aid Man leading tours through Second Life's strangest builds — and _Nine Eyes_ treated Google's camera car like a roaming NPC collecting accidental tableaux. It's the game-engine gaze pointed at the real world, and _Dream Journal_ pushes it inward, casting avatar-like figures in a detective story that never resolves. We've chased the same instinct from the other side, back when we imagined the apocalypse of the day Google Street View stood still. If Düsseldorf is reachable before the 27th, go — the show is the argument in full. If not, a first monographic publication accompanies the exhibition: the version of the survey that outlives its own deadline. Stills from __Dream Journal ’16–’17__. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. Killscreen treated artists like Rafman as games coverage before the museums caught up. The free newsletter catches the shows worth traveling for while they’re still open. Get the free newsletter

The pitch arrives in the collective's own all-caps grammar: “NEW RATZONE GAME #4: _GRAVITY GOBLINS_.” The game underneath the announcement reel is a gravity-bending roguelite about climbing a strange tower called The Old Stipe, with a movement kit built on jumping, kicking, and a third thing the makers are keeping behind question marks — the caption promises “fancy schmovement,” so worst guesses only. Geometry reorients as you go: walls become floors mid-climb, and the tower reshuffles between runs. Coins scraped together on the way up get dumped into an arcade machine, which is the correct thing to do with money. 0:00 /0:24 1× __Gravity Goblins__ announcement trailer (excerpt, muted). Full trailer with sound on Steam. The Steam page, where the game can be wishlisted ahead of a 2027 release, fills in what the reel leaves out: it's a collectathon, with trinkets and upgrades to gather, and something specific buried at the top of the tower. The Rat Zone interests me as much as the game does. À la Sokpop, it's a collective (“bite-sized Interactive Experiences made BY rats FOR rats”) and _Gravity Goblins_ is its fourth release, after the arctic-vehicle horror game _Sender_ , the action platformer and self-described “most realistic chair simulator money can buy” _CHAIRS_ , and the spooky/cozy Creature Kitchen. Four games, four genres, one toxic-bright palette. Gravity-as-traversal has a proud archive here. _Gravity Rush 2_ turned the player from tourist to traveler by making reorientation a whole way of seeing its city. _Gravity Goblins_ shrinks the same idea to arcade scale, one kick at a time. Screenshots via Steam. Courtesy The Rat Zone. Small collectives shipping strange games at speed are exactly what the free newsletter exists to surface. Three sends a week, no algorithm. Get the free newsletter

Pave paradise, they said and charge admission! I live in Los Angeles and the one thing we love is a parking lot. So in _Car Park Capital_ you are hired by Big Auto to release quiet towns from their slumber—buying land, destroy homes for asphalt, drilling for oil, and sloganeer pro-car catch phrases from megaphones until every resident becomes what the game cheerfully calls a carbrain. There is a Ferris wheel for cars, for when traffic gets bad enough that people need distracting. The announcement reel set Steam Early Access for October 9. The solo developer is Hilko Janssen of Hilkojj Interactive, in the Netherlands, (a legendarily bike-friendly country) and the project’s origin is perfect: he had a university assignment to simulate a parking garage, as Janssen told the Parking Reform Network. The publisher is the relaunched MicroProse, which lands somewhere between irony and homecoming: that's the label that taught a generation to read cities as systems but isn't shipping a sim that treats cars as violence. You can read any citizen’s thoughts, stage-manage anti-car protests into irrelevance, and deliberately rival public transport, because, as the Steam page puts it, “You don’t want trains or walkable towns.” 0:00 /1:14 1× Announcement trailer Management games have always smuggled ideology in their spreadsheets. We made that case when MultipliCITY called SimCity capitalist hogwash in 2014, and the original _SimCity_ manual read like a textbook on urban development. What is newer is a tycoon game whose satire is central to the game's design, not a sideshow. Early Access runs roughly ten months, with 1.0 planned for summer 2027. Three scenarios at launch: an American city, Florida with boat-cars, and the Pyramids of Giza. __Car Park Capital__. Screenshots via Steam We cover the games that argue with the world, not the ones that sell it back to you. The free Radar letter delivers them three times a week. Get the free letter

The score to _Blippo+_ is getting a double LP. Hologram Opera announced _Greatest Hits from Planet Blip_ for 16 October—the label says there were simply too many hits for one record. Har har har. So, this is not a soundtrack album in the _usual_ sense, where a composer's cues get lifted off a finished film. That's because _Blippo+_ is an off-cable television simulator. It's a delightful experience that takes you through an alien planet's channel guide, mixing soaps, talk shows, weather, and news. So the music isn't an underscore in a traditional sense—it's themes for shows that don't actually exist, loopable bops from an EPG, menu music, all the idents, and bangers from an alien airwave. _Blippo+_ is not simply a YACHT game. The band—Jona Bechtolt, Claire L. Evans and Rob Kieswetter—built the game as a love letter to the production culture of Los Angeles with Jennifer Juniper Stratford's Telefantasy Studios. Kieswetter and Bechtolt wrote the score. It reached Playdate in May 2025 and Steam and Switch that September, and 137 tracks of it have been on Bandcamp since. e. Killscreen has been at this particular intersection a while—whether TiVo (how quaint!) turned television into a game in 2012, the 1997 "television for gamers" in 2014. What is different is that nobody here is adapting television. They built a channel, staffed it with clones and quizmasters, wrote its music, and are now releasing the station's back catalog as though it toured. Programming on Planet Blip, plus the Femtofax videotext forums. Images via the Blippo+ press kit. A band building a television station and scoring every fake show on it is exactly the crossing Killscreen was made to cover. The free newsletter carries the rest of them. Get the newsletter