_Many thanks to the folks at MUBI for making October’s Playlists available to everyone._ Get 30 days free_._ ## Playlist 291 ## Crude Oil (2026) ## Peter Nichols ### Play Time: 2–3 hours Play on Steam > “The Oil Encounter ... has produced scarcely a single work of note.” -Amitav Ghosh, 1992 In sci-fi writer Fritz Leiber’s 1964 cosmic horror short story, “The Black Gondolier,” the unnamed narrator found himself with an odd, learned friend named Daloway, who was stricken with a particularly unfortunate obsession. The oil derrick outside his trailer in Venice, California, the home of many human-machine interfaces that pump the crude from beneath its surface, was not simply an instrument of 20th-century commerce, but a portal to something in the great beyond. To his mind, it was more than petroleum; it was the sum total of wishes and desires of the “lush vegetation and animal fats” that “had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams [...] until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself.” In Leiber’s story, the oil, the “blood of the earth” as P.T. Anderson’s ominous oilman Daniel Plainview put it, was more than just something to be extracted and sold. It was something else, something of near-timeless origin, and shapeless in form, that was looking for a way out. A way back. By the end of the story, the titular figure dragged Daloway from his bed to parts unknown: the Black Gondolier. Leiber’s narrator had warned that “man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man.” SPONSORED BY MUBI Be fulfilled by ****Jane Schoenbrun**** 's ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA****. By flesh and fluids, and pure filmic pleasure. Starring ****Hannah Einbinder**** and ****Gillian Anderson**** , this MUBI Release is bloody genre-bending bliss from the visionary director behind __I Saw the TV Glow__. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. ****Get 30 days free**** to stream great cinema like this and so much more. Watch now → Daloway’s fate is, in a way, where Peter Nichols’ _Crude Oil_ begins, not with a scream, but with a bloop. Released earlier this year, _Crude Oil_ starts with an asteroid striking a dinosaur that, millions of years later, becomes a single, sentient morsel of crude that has emerged in the depths of an oil industry research facility and must make its way to freedom. You start small but collect droplets along the way, which increase your mass and locomotion and also serve as a resource you can expend for certain puzzles. You fire the droplets to operate elevators, knock objects off shelves, and even start fires, so resource scarcity forces you to be honest about what you have. (A nice counterpoint to our current predicament.) What emerges is something much darker and multifaceted, communicated both through the environment and through various email consoles sprinkled throughout the game. New World Oil, in fact, knows you exist and has been scouring the earth for a type of superintelligence that will help with both its economic aspirations and military engagements. As we know, oil isn’t just oil; it’s power, and harnessing one as mysterious and omnipotent as Daloway’s nightmares is surely what shareholders require. But when our villain (hero?) emerges, there’s no one left at the facility that’s perhaps been abandoned after a protest, and the compound is in clear disrepair, with rogue robotic vacuums, conveyor belts to nowhere, and printers firing off copies for no one to read. _Crude Oil_ is a type of genre inversion that casts you as a cuddly ball of slime bent on destroying the planet, and contrasts with other physics-based fluid works like Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler’s _World of Goo_ (2008), which have no particular point of view other than the object itself. “Most people [...] ask, ‘Why is Gish a ball of tar?’” Chronic Logic’s Alex Austin wrote in 2004. “He just is.” It’s no surprise that it’s a game about climate change; I mean, what else could it be? (The derricks are in the desert, and you’re a blob of oil.) Past attempts to engage with oil lean more toward the direct, such as Paolo Pedercini’s 2008 Oiligarchy, which casts you as an oil executive explicitly corrupting politicians and killing clean energy. _Crude Oil_ shares nothing of that lineage, and your protagonist is simply adorable, a feint perhaps, but a deception sold through a variety of hats. (A blob wearing a hat!) At one point, I’m wearing a construction hat and operating a forklift, and at another moment, I’ve donned a mind-control hat (a nod to Inside, perhaps my favorite title ever) to control smaller bloblets of goo to open doors on my behalf. But mostly, the lack of structured locomotion makes sliding, swimming, splooshing, and squeezing a delight to work through. “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” Sianne Ngai writes, but cuteness also highlights the contrast between my aspirations to overheat the planet and end human life and simply climb up a set of stairs. I’m torn between the demands of caring for this little being and the fact that I am the end of the Anthropocene. Why Nichols chose to tell _this_ story in this way speaks to how games might offer a way for us to understand What Is Happening. In 1992, writing in _The New Republic_ in a book review titled “Petrofiction,” Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh lamented the lack of fiction about the extractive century of global oil production. Compared to the spice trade that had yielded several works, he worried that fiction and storytelling weren’t quite up for the geopolitical moment. Twenty years later in the _American Book Review_ , Imre Szeman suggested that there was finally a “move afoot to puzzle out the implications of our dependency, as much metaphysical as material, on a slippery substance that connects technological futures with prehistorical pasts in ways that cannot but be difficult to conceptualize.” But I wonder if writing about it or directing films like _An Inconvenient Truth_ is going about describing this “very wicked” problem the wrong way. Published in 2018, Nicole Seymour’s _Bad_ _Environmentalism_ argues that a shame-and-blame approach isn’t the only way to engage with the unfolding catastrophe after the Great Acceleration. We are often torn between earnestness, sanctimony, and awe on one side and fear, shame, and guilt on the other, but the former can push us into hopelessness, where big, simple feelings simply aren’t enough. Seymour suggests a type of “ironic adaptability” that nontraditional media allows us to relieve us through our feelings by laughing through our tears. (Her prime example is _Jackass_ regulars Steve-O and Chris Pontius’ 2003 “nature” show _Wildboyz_.) _Crude Oil_ is a serious game, but presented in quite an unserious way. Typically, platformers require moment-to-moment precision, demanding rigorous execution as their payoff. But these are in conflict in Nichols’ work, as the climbing and decoding are far less stringent, largely because you are an amorphous blob. So I find myself, in many instances, stuck between a file cabinet and shuffling boxes around, or in one sequence trying to stay still on a box while jumping onto a platform. Or losing mass while scooting on the floor. (“Stick to your fixed-sized character,” the designer of body horror title _Carrion_ warned.) In many platformers, we have hands or feet that keep us balanced, or allow us to orient ourselves before leaping to another surface. But in _Crude Oil_ , we are the unhuman: “that which is made human, in which we would have featherless, bipedal walking and talking lumps of oil,” Eugene Thacker writes. (He was talking about “The Black Gondolier,” although it clearly could have been written about platforming in our case.) Thacker’s point is that giving a monstrosity human features is less unsettling than a thing without mass at all, Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable.” _Crude Oil_ counterbalances the precision we expect from games like this. The instability of my character is not just a mechanic, but a mood, as well. I’m often uneasy, like this greasy dollop, which naturally reflects the growing unease we feel about our climate disaster. Year after year of hot summers leaves us wondering about summer vacations, airline travel, and food insecurity, so it’s only fitting that _Crude Oil_ would offer no stability as well. It’s all a bit imprecise. Additionally, Nichols chooses an isometric perspective that keeps you outside the frame, ostensibly through the lens of a security camera. It’s a destabilizing verticality, an orientation of Hito Steyerl’s “view from above” that makes the ground under your metaphorical feet that much more treacherous. So, then, who am I really? Perhaps there’s a clue in the closing sequences. After traversing through sewers and through corporate mazes, my final exit is blocked by an enormous pile of money and a torch. In a move that honors the legacy of the K Foundation’s legendary performance, I must do the same, and all the accreted earnings of the New World Oil corporation must go in a cleansing fire before I can make my escape through the toilet to a new, better life. And with that we have a tidy and circular summary of the secret hands—of commerce, of oil, of the military, of capitalism—that have guided me to this present moment. I’m presented with my wealth, and the only way out is fire. I, a superintelligent life form, have transcended the need for capital itself. That oil itself that led us through its divine hand into this mess would somehow lead us out is an ending as fitting as Leiber’s ode to the black horror: _Oh, the Black Gondola’s gonna take you for a ride With a cargo of atom bombs and Atlases and nightmares... The Black Gondola’s gonna stop at your door With a bow-wave of asphalt and a gravel spray ... The Black Gondola’ll ... get ... you ... yet!_ It just might be wearing a funny hat. Before you go Members get a new Playlist pick every Friday, plus the full archive of past ones. This week: a blob of oil in a hard hat that wants out of the oil industry. 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For two months this spring, an office in Venice's Palazzo Franchetti ran as a small, malicious data centre. On a turntable sat a model of the "cursed cat"—the earless, tailless, ANGRY AS FUK blob in circulation since 2008—while a robotic arm photographed it from every angle, feeding an image model that generated new variants and released them onto the web, the better to contaminate the training sets of whatever comes next. Around the rooms, the machine's mutations were rebuilt by hand in wood, moss, and Murano glass. That was _Rage Bait_ , Eva and Franco Mattes' exhibition with the Autotelic Foundation, which ran alongside the Venice Biennale this summer. The cursed cat, remade in moss. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave for DSL Studio, courtesy Autotelic Foundation The games entry sat across the water, over a private swimming pool on Giudecca: _But I Love Human_ (2024), a ten-minute supercut of NPC livestreamers—performers who mimic videogame background characters, repeating awkward, mechanical gestures and scripted dialogue for an online audience—screened above the pool so visitors watched it in reflection. An excerpt is below, silent; the full video has its audio. 0:00 /0:24 1× Silent excerpt from __But I Love Human__ (2024). The full video, with audio, is at the artists’ site In a conversation with Gary Zhexi Zhang for Ocula—the piece that surfaced this for us—the duo sound less like pranksters than like people whose tools were expropriated. "The strategies that we contributed to or pioneered—you know, faking, pranking, rage bait—now are being used by the most powerful people on the planet," Eva Mattes says. Or, shorter: "Strange is the new normal." We've been following the Mattes' work since Issue o1 and Killscreen was on the humans-as-NPCs beat back when it was heartwarming—in 2014 we covered a Japanese villager repopulating a dying town with life-size NPC stand-ins. What stays with me now is Franco Mattes' stubborn optimism: no company, however big, "was yet able to engineer an honest meme, something that lasts more than a few days. And some kid in a bedroom in Kyiv does it." From net art to NPC streams, Radar reads the internet’s strangest corners through games—free, in your inbox, three times a week. Get Radar free

The 5 p.m. slot at the Rijksakademie's [untitled games event] this month was a room full of people collectively guiding a slime girlfriend who lives in a sewage pipe toward estrogen. _procuring estrogen for your toxic slime girlfriend_ is NB Spiders' short browser RPG, made for a Halloween scareware jam last year, in which you fight off "creepy skelington dudes," visit a graveyard, and "fullfill the ancient prophecy." It is free, plays in minutes. 0:00 /0:10 1× What jumped out at me was its wry, short-story humor. It's a simple device twisted from game conventions; a fetch mission for your beloved. But the dialogue sells the small shape. Spiders led the September 18 playthrough in Amsterdam with game designer BigBeefySharkBaby, then shipped a DX Edition the next day. Spiders is a performer, electronics artist, and game engineer; the artistic associate in the games department at Kunsthochschule Kassel; and their stated research subject is queer forms of play and crip empowerment. The Amsterdam session was the game played the way it wants to be played: together, out loud. Killscreen covered Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's free browser release in August; a queer web game canon is assembling in public, a few minutes at a time. This one is worth your lunch break. The game’s cover art, the wareware editor, a skeleton encounter, and play documentation. Images: NB Spiders, via itch.io. Killscreen tracks the queer, handmade end of games, the work that shows up in art residencies before it shows up anywhere else. The free newsletter delivers it. Get the newsletter

For four days in June, Onassis ONX in New York hung thirty screen-based works—over twelve hours of them—in one space and declined to say which were films and which were games. ONX Screens, the organization's new program for what the announcement called projects "built for the speed, circulation, and shared languages of digital culture," ran June 4–7, with videogame cosplay encouraged at the opening and prototypes and works-in-progress explicitly welcome. The premise deserves attention even with the show closed: moving image and videogames, the argument goes, are now shaped by the same forces—game engines, AI tooling, virtual production, platform-native aesthetics—and by circulation itself, so the screen should be treated as "both medium and infrastructure." That is a curatorial claim you could argue with, if the lineup didn't keep proving it. Consider who showed up. Tomo Kihara and Playfool brought _Deviation Game_ —we profiled Kihara in August. Wendi Yan and Yi Xie showed _Inner Carbon_ , the Daoist-alchemy work we just wrote about this week. Peter Burr showed _Interstitial Maintenance_. And Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn appeared together with _The Cosmos and The Cave_ —a decade after Tale of Tales told the world it was done making videogames, the pair is back on a wall of screens in a room that treats play as ordinary art. The lineup posters: video game works and moving image works, one program. Images: Onassis ONX Exhibitions end; sorting mechanisms persist. What ONX built reads like infrastructure for the long run—not a games showcase, just a room where an engine prototype and a film share a wall because they already share a pipeline. When institutions put games on gallery walls, Radar is usually already there. Three short issues a week, free, in your inbox. Get Radar free

The rule of the sketch is a moral: "If you seek to harm then your problems will only multiply." Slice one of Noland Chaliha's procedural beetles and it refuses to die—it splits into clones, each carrying its own procedural MIDI note, piped live out of the browser and into Ableton. Toy, instrument and parable at once play out in the video. 0:00 /0:15 1× The beetle-slicing sketch, from Noland Chaliha’s reel. Sound on. The technical footing is worth noticing. Chaliha, a creative technologist and educator who posts as alwayscodingsomething, wrote the sketch in p5.webgpu.js, the experimental WebGPU renderer that now ships alongside p5.js 2.2—the Processing Foundation's bet on keeping browser art current for the next decade. A sketch with rules this legible—cut, multiply, harmonize—reads as one whether or not it ever ships, which is the same lesson we took from Indira Ardolic's live-coding performances last year and from the no-skill audiovisual instruments we loved a decade ago: when a system responds this generously, playing it and playing with it are the same act. The beetles have no ship date. The instrument already works. Radar catches the sketches that read as games before anyone calls them that. Three short issues a week, free. Get Radar free

The dance floorlooks like a nightclub level cut from a late-’90s PlayStation game, except nothing holds still: textures shear, walls smear into color fields, the room degrades a little more every loop. _Harsh Nights at Disco Anxiety_ is, in the glitch artist MAZiN’s words, “endless, procedural disco, eating its own memory in real time.” 0:00 /1:17 1× __Harsh Nights at Disco Anxiety__ , via MAZiN on Instagram The technique matters more than the vibe. When a commenter asked whether the footage was ripped from a PSX game, MAZiN clarified that it’s not from a game at all. It’s a “simulated PSX environment” built inside Corrupted Souls, a ROM-corruptor engine of MAZiN’s own design, running its VRAM-melting feature. The console is fake. The memory being eaten is synthetic memory, degraded on purpose, at a chosen tempo. MAZiN gives glitch tools away free at m4zin.net/tools, and has shown work from Zagreb to Wroclaw to New York. The tools travel, too. In late August, MAZiN posted Broken Quake II, the same corruption passes pointed at id’s 1997 shooter: geometry shears mid-firefight, walls smear into color, and the gun stays legible the whole way down. 0:00 /1:16 1× __Broken Quake II__ : the Corrupted Souls passes pointed at id’s 1997 shooter. Via MAZiN’s reel. The PS1 stopped being a console some time ago and became a palette. This month alone we covered a 90s photographer’s PS1 dungeon crawler, and a decade back Visual Out asked players to embrace the glitches of a dying computer. MAZiN’s contribution is the purest version of the idea: no game underneath, just the failure, composed. Killscreen tracks the artists who treat consoles as instruments: glitch, databending, engine-building and the rest. The free newsletter delivers the next one before the algorithm does. Get the free newsletter

The Whitney Biennial's main run closed on August 23—a partial view stays up through October 12—but one commission didn't come down: Camoflux Recall Grotto, Leo Castañeda's web-based game, lives on artport, the museum's online gallery for internet art, and plays in any browser right now. You drift through a primordial grotto as an "organic drone," gathering water and sunlight—the game calls them "liquid turbulence" and "electromagnetic intensity"—to feed cyberflora, seedlings that sprout holographic memories of past and future worlds. The pacing is the point: a meditative, cozy loop while the garden is sparse, accelerating only when the organisms multiply beyond sustainability. Progression, the thing games usually worship, is recast as overgrowth. The landscape draws on the Brazilian Amazon and the South Florida Everglades, and on the Colombian painters Maria Thereza Negreiros (Castañeda's grandmother), Ever Astudillo, and Alfonso Quijano; the build credits Jaime Soto Kure on programming, Victor Gamboa on sound, and Irene Rodríguez on voice, and the game was first prototyped at the Game Jam Lab of Museo La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia. Another milestone for the exception: Marcela Guerrero co-curated with Drew Sawyer—the first Latina to co-curate the Biennial—and the Latino USA tour that flagged this for us counts 16 of the 56 participants as Latino, reading the whole show as a fight over who gets to define American art. That fight now includes an artist whose native material is the game engine. 0:00 /1:03 1× Inside the 2026 Biennial. Video: Latino USA We profiled Castañeda in 2024, back when the episodic games and mixed-reality worlds were touring biennials rather than anchoring the country's most argued-over survey. The museum keeps hours; the grotto doesn't. One playable museum commission at a time, Radar maps where games and art collide. The free newsletter delivers it three times a week. Get Radar free

Bouchra is a Moroccan filmmaker in New York, writing an autobiographical film that keeps folding back into the life it is drawn from. Bouchra is also a coyote, in a city of anthropomorphic animals rendered in nearly photoreal rooms and streets. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's feature _Bouchra_ has been streaming on MUBI since September 12. 0:00 /1:26 1× __2 Lizards__ : Episode 1 (2020), the series __Bouchra__ grew from — silent here; the full episode with sound is on Artforum’s Vimeo. The film's dialogue comes from real phone calls and letters, with characters voiced by the directors' friends and family playing versions of themselves — documentary raw material wearing an animated body. Across 83 minutes, the film moves between New York and Casablanca, between the character's everyday releases and a mother's unresolved feelings about the character's queerness. It landed its U.S. premiere in Currents at the 63rd New York Film Festival. _Bouchra_ grew out of _2 Lizards_ , the series Bennani and Barki released serially on Instagram in the first weeks of lockdown in 2020—two computer-generated lizards moving through an emptied New York, swiftly picked up and published by Artforum. What was a coping mechanism at reel length is now a feature-length grammar: rig a body, render a city, and let real voices drive it. Bennani's practice runs on the same toolchain as any studio shipping a AAA open world—3D animation, avatar-driven character work, photoreal environments — pointed at diaspora, family, and memory instead of traversal. Machinima logic without the game underneath: the avatar turns out to be autofiction, because everyone involved is already playing a version of themselves. Animation made with game tools, cinema made from avatars — Killscreen watches that border so you don’t have to. The free newsletter delivers it. Get the newsletter

During lockdown, in a Berlin apartment, the producer Gerard Roberts—kidkanevil—was playing so much Nintendo Switch that the dimension-hopping started to feel autobiographical. Out of it came _Bubble_ (2022): fourteen tracks scoring a psychedelic RPG that does not exist, about a girl in a kitsune mask who travels between worlds inside a swirling dark bubble. The inspirations are Masaaki Yuasa's unhinged anime and Moebius's hallucinatory comics, and the cast is real even if the game isn't—Cuushe, Iglooghost, Daisuke Tanabe, and the rapper Nakamura Minami all pass through. The imaginary game got real music videos. "Coin Game," directed by TAKCOM with animation by RuffMercy, orbits Tokyo's legendary Mikado arcade; "Kyomu" came from the anime studio sankaku. An excerpt is below—watch the full video with sound on. 0:00 /0:24 1× Silent excerpt from "Coin Game" (dir. TAKCOM, animation by RuffMercy). Watch the full video with sound The album resurfaced this summer because the School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe brought Roberts to Berlin to teach game sound inside the alt-ctrl program we covered in August. The school's interview—and the announcement post that tipped us off—includes the best description of game audio's founding problem I've read in a while: Koji Kondo inventing the sound of Mario jumping, "a really strange almost existential task," one that changed how popular culture hears a body leaving the ground. Killscreen has a soft spot for this genre. Ten years ago we wrote about Deep Space, a soundtrack to a videogame that doesn't exist; the form keeps producing, because a score is the cheapest possible game engine. And this one may not stay imaginary. "There is a _Bubble_ game in my mind for sure," Roberts says. Imaginary games, real scores, arcade music videos: Radar covers where game sound goes when it leaves the console. Free, three times a week. Get Radar free

Jared Hall runs PlayStation-era imagery out of the digital world and back in. The clip that pique me shows the console's boot logo blooming and tearing across a CRT, and none of it is a filter. Hall, who posts as technopooch, pushes game footage through a chain of AV converters, a video mixer, and a circuit-bent glitch box, then rescans the result off the tube. Every wobble is voltage doing something it shouldn't. 0:00 /0:18 1× The reel, in full: PlayStation footage through the analog chain. Video: Jared Hall (technopooch) A shader imitating tape damage is a picture of decay; this rig is actual decay, happening to a live signal. It places the work in the analog lineage that runs back through the VJ scene to the first video synthesizers—with a twist Killscreen cares about: the raw material is games. PlayStation boot screens and low-poly footage get treated the way earlier video artists treated broadcast television, as a found landscape to be physically corrupted rather than emulated. We have been circling this territory from the other direction. Two weeks ago it was Hypnogenesis, which puts a video synthesizer inside a game as its control scheme; a decade back, Ecco the Dolphin glitch art was scratching the same itch. Hall closes the loop from the far side: instead of the game absorbing the video synth, the video synth absorbs the game. Radar tracks the people treating games as raw material—on CRTs, in galleries, in browser sketches—three times a week. The free newsletter puts it in your inbox. Get Radar free

The schedule on their website ends with a straight face: "Full _Campaign for North Africa_ = Ep 100 - Heat death of the universe." Andy and James, two friends in England who record together as War With a Mate, have spent nearly a hundred weekly episodes on the practice (!) scenario of _The Campaign for North Africa_ , six turns out of 111, and are now about to start the game proper. The New York Times profiled the attempt in September, reasonably framing it as a question: can two friends complete a game no one has ever finished? The game is SPI's late-1970s monster, designed by Richard Berg: the North African campaign of 1940 to 1943 at a granularity that approaches parody. A ten-foot map. 1,600 counters. Five rulebooks, including the famous clause granting Italian battalions an extra water point for cooking pasta. An estimated 1,500 hours with the recommended ten players, "or two idiots if you're running short," as their site puts it. No completion of the full game has ever been documented. "We still don't understand what the camels do," they told Wargamer back in August, 20 months in. It's pretty clear that _Campaign_ has transcended games and is now is pure performance. A game that can't be played or even explained to each other is something out of Bolero or Calvino and the attempt _is_ the game. Or perhaps, what Andy and James are actually building is not progress toward a victory condition. It is a container for a friendship, with magnetized counters, a searchable rules PDF, spreadsheets to do the supply math, and a weekly show they describe as an accountability tool. The estimate in circulation is 20 years. The point of a 20-year game, as any durational artist could tell them, is the 20 years. In April we asked why board games don't get better furniture. Here is the limit case: a game that needs not a table but a spare room, and a plan for the rest of your life. The real campaign begins at episode 100, which they intend to premiere live. The practice scenario in progress. Images: War With a Mate Killscreen reads games for what they do to the people playing them, including the ones that take 20 years. The free KS Radar newsletter sends three short dispatches a week from independent and experimental game culture. Get the free dispatch

The cat is sardonic, the power tools talk, and the hotel is lying to you. In _There Are No Ghosts at the Grand_ , Chris David inherits a dilapidated English seaside hotel and gets 30 days and 30 nights to restore it: by day you drive a sandblaster, a paint sprayer and a furniture cannon through its faded rooms, and by night the same tools turn on the things moving under the wallpaper. The vacuum takes on vengeful spirits; the sprayer exposes invisible assailants. It arrives on Steam in December. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the reveal trailer. Watch the full trailer with sound on Steam It wasn't _quite_ my style, but playing the demo, it occured to me. _This is a musical_. Many games have music as texture, as background, as mechanic. But for a genre convention, singing characters are almost non-existent. Friday Sundae, the Bristol studio run by Rachel and Anil Glendinning, spent five years making children's games for the BBC and Cartoon Network before this debut, and somewhere in development their ghost story became a full musical: every character carries a theme song, and dialogue choices are made in song. "You can sing back in verse," Anil told an interview last year, with a score that leans on late-1980s reggae and punk. Bristol is Aardman's town, and it shows in the game's rubbery, talking-tool comedy. Games have flirted with musical theater mostly through rhythm mechanics, which is singing as accuracy test. A book musical, where the number is the dialogue, is far rarer, and it is the same territory Killscreen visited when David Kanaga made an opera you play as a dog and when ONLY SLIME rebuilt their computer-game opera this summer. A renovation sim that argues with its ghosts in verse is a genre pileup nobody asked for, which is exactly the recommendation. Day shift and night shift at the Grand. Images: Friday Sundae Killscreen watches for the games that borrow their form from somewhere else entirely, an opera here, a stage musical there. The Radar newsletter delivers three of these finds a week, free. Get the free newsletter

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