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Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play 🌉 bridged from https://www.killscreen.com/ on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/

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Official Electric's point-and-click demo poses as the re-release of a game that never existed

killscreen.comRUIN's Invented 35th Anniversary Hits Steam Next FestOfficial Electric has put a free demo of _RUIN: 35th Anniversary - Definitive Edition_ into Steam Next Fest, which runs through Monday, Oct. 26 at 10 a.m. PT. The studio debuted a new trailer for the game at The Mix Online Showcase on Oct. 16. The anniversary is a fiction. There was no original _RUIN_ 35 years ago: Official Electric made the game now and packaged it as the remaster of a lost classic. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the __RUIN__ teaser trailer, shown without sound. Watch the full trailer with sound. The Steam page keeps the act going. It calls _RUIN_ "the legendary Official Electric intellectual property," bills the studio as a "pioneer of the Point and Click adventure genre," and promises the re-release of "this generational masterpiece." On itch.io, where a free browser version called _RUIN: Chapter 0_ has been playable since late 2025, Official Electric describes itself as a "ubiquitous Super-Corp." The game is drawn in a hard, shifting EGA-style palette. A king sends a knight to recover a prophesied sword and "Destroy Evil - Forever," and from there the demo cuts between a fantasy quest, planet-hopping science fiction, first-person scenes styled after early CD-ROM adventures and stretches that play like animated shorts. In its review of Chapter 0, EGW News noted that fights usually end with the player on the ground under a blunt "get owned" message. The demo covers Chapter 0, with later chapters in progress and no release date for the full game. Characters and symbols from _RUIN_ recur across Official Electric's other small games, and players on the itch.io page have been mapping the links between them. Invented game histories have a long run at Killscreen, from John Walsh's hardcover of 21 fake games to a podcast episode on games people remember that never existed. For more reading see Official Electric's RUIN page, God is a Geek on the October 2026 Next Fest, and Killscreen's John Walsh bound 21 fake games into one huge hardcover. __RUIN: 35th Anniversary - Definitive Edition__. Images: Official Electric Killscreen tracks the strange corners of game-making, like studios that invent their own back catalogs, and almost nobody else covers them. Get the free Radar three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Christiane Paul's survey of more than 100 online commissions, from Auriea Harvey's SITE1 to Leo Castañeda's garden game, fills the museum's sixth floor and goes back online.

killscreen.comartport Brings 25 Years of Whitney Net Art to the GalleriesEvent details When Opens Sat., Nov. 21, 2026. Yale University Press lists the run through Sun., Mar. 28, 2027. Operator's _Human Unreadable Act III_ plays the museum's theater Nov. 19, 21 and 22. The museum is closed Tuesdays. Where Whitney Museum of American Art, sixth floor, in Manhattan's Meatpacking District, and online at artport. Admission Museum admission. Free for visitors 25 and under and members, on Friday evenings from 5 to 10 p.m. and on the second Sunday of each month. See the exhibition One of the commissions in artport: A History of Internet Art is Auriea Harvey's SITE1 (2023), a scroll-driven fly-through that starts at a spinning, machinic wheel and slowly turns into a cave. The wheel is an abstracted star chart built from _L.O.C.K._ , an earlier work from Tale of Tales, the studio Harvey ran with Michaël Samyn. The cave holds pieces of the characters from Harvey's sculpture _Ox_ , including Minoriea, a goddess who is half woman and half bull and has been the artist's avatar in virtual worlds since 2017. The Whitney calls the piece an archaeological dig into the "origin site" of Harvey's characters. The exhibition marks 25 years of artport, the Whitney's online space for net art commissions, which launched in 2001, and gathers more than 100 works made for it, online and on the museum's sixth floor, where the open plan is meant to suggest "floating browser windows." Christiane Paul, the Whitney's curator of digital art, organized it with David Lisbon and Colin Brooks around artport's own categories: the Gate Pages of 2001 to 2006, the ongoing Commissions, and the Sunrise/Sunset series and its successor, On the Hour. The other commissioned artists include Golan Levin, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Casey Reas, Morehshin Allahyari, Nancy Baker Cahill and Leo Castañeda, whose _Camoflux Recall Grotto_ , made for this year's Whitney Biennial, is a browser game about tending "cyberflora" in a primordial garden. The timed Sunrise/Sunset and On the Hour pieces come from JODI, Rafaël Rozendaal, American Artist, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Peter Burr and Maya Man. The artist duo Operator premieres Human Unreadable Act III, the last part of its generative choreography work, and a 300-page catalogue edited by Paul is out Nov. 24. Jonah Brucker-Cohen, whose 2012 commission with Katherine Moriwaki is in the artport collection, announced the catalogue in October. Auriea Harvey, __SITE1__ (2023), and Leo Castañeda, __Camoflux Recall Grotto__ (2026). Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art. Killscreen has followed the artists who treat the browser as a gallery and the game engine as a studio. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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Sarah Rothberg's solo show at Baruch's New Media Artspace is AI avatars arguing in a void

killscreen.comBETWEEN MEETINGS Puts Two Offline Chatbots in Endless DebateEvent details When On view through Fri., Dec. 4, 2026. The online version is open anytime. Public artist lecture Wed., Nov. 11, 6 to 8 p.m. Where New Media Artspace in the Newman Library, Baruch College, CUNY, Manhattan, and online. Admission Free. Gallery visits by appointment during library hours (newmediaartspace@gmail.com). The lecture is free with registration. View the exhibition online The anchor of Sarah Rothberg: BETWEEN MEETINGS is _FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE_ (2025), live software in which two LLM-driven avatars hold a conversation that never ends. Each is handed an opposing persona (selfish and selfless, maximalist and neat, mother and daughter, monogamous and "not exactly"), a style of talking and a question (like whether it is OK to not hold the elevator), and every three minutes the software reshuffles all three. The agents run offline on local llama3.2 models, which keeps them frozen, in curator Katherine Behar's phrase, "like a time-capsule of the moment in which they were trained." The two figures are black-and-white and ghostly, stumbling against a black void filled with their own transcript. 0:00 /0:30 1× __FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE__ (2025), an excerpt from the archival capture, shown silent. Sound and the full capture are in the online exhibition. Courtesy the artist. Rothberg, who teaches in NYU's ITP and IMA programs, has been staging conversations through interfaces since 2021, and the show gathers three generations of the MEETINGS series in reverse order. _NEW MEETINGS_ (2021) were VR performances with roughly 30 guests whose voices were disguised so Rothberg could not tell who was on the other end; _Just the Agreements_ collects the ground rules each pair drafted before they began. The _SUPERPROMPT_ works (2023) brought in Sophie, an avatar that sometimes ran on ChatGPT, alongside a human-to-human session with the new media artist Nina Sobell. A second _FOREVER MEETINGS_ variation, _"is AI worth it?"_ , locks two bots into that one argument. Behar curated the exhibition. The browser version, which visitors scroll down through while gallery visitors climb up through the same sequence, was built by the New Media Artspace student docent team led by gallery manager Maya Hilbert, and Rothberg called it "so fun and playful" in the announcement. Rothberg gives a free public lecture on Nov. 11. Stills from __FOREVER MEETINGS: SCRAMBLED ZONE__ , Sarah Rothberg. Courtesy the artist. Killscreen tracks the artists turning chat windows, avatars and video calls into stages for something stranger. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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Gary Zhexi Zhang, Amant's New York fall resident, gives a performance lecture on a game engine stage where characters, lights and cameras run themselves.

killscreen.comAutodrama Stages a Chamber Play for Self-Directing ActorsEvent details When Thu., Oct. 29, 2026, 7 to 9 p.m. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. Where Géza, on Amant's campus in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Admission Free. RSVP encouraged but not required; entry is first come, first served. RSVP for Autodrama Autodrama is a performance lecture by Gary Zhexi Zhang about a game engine stage that directs itself. Nobody plays it. Characters act independently of any player, and the lighting and cameras behave as performers too, working through "situations" Zhang has rehearsed out of the language of cinema, vertical micro-dramas and group psychology. Amant calls the result a "virtual chamber play." In the footage released for the evening, an oversized, babylike figure stands alone under a spotlight, then fills the frame in close-up, its eyes sliding from side to side as Zhang narrates. 0:00 /1:00 1× __Autodrama__ , trailer with narration by Gary Zhexi Zhang. Courtesy Amant. Zhang is an artist and writer and a contributor to _Frieze_ , and Zhang's work has long dealt with the fictions running inside technical systems: an earlier solo show took catastrophe insurance as its subject, and the artist has researched the role of non-human agents in finance. Amant frames _Autodrama_ as an extension of the artist's "longstanding interest in parasociality, egregores, and the cybernetics of identity," played out through scenes of "heightened and calculated sentimentality." The lecture is part of For Your Reference, the series in which Amant's artists in residence present the references behind their ongoing research. Zhang is the institution's New York resident for fall 2026, and this is the third For Your Reference event of the season. Stills from the __Autodrama__ trailer. Courtesy Amant and Gary Zhexi Zhang. Killscreen keeps track of artists who treat the game engine as a stage, a studio or a laboratory instead of a product. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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latency.club, the platform of Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn, imagines a future Cuba of prediction markets and AI divination at Medialab Matadero through Dec. 13.

killscreen.comOracle Index lets crypto miners program the cinemaEvent details When Oct. 15 to Dec. 13, 2026. Tuesday to Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m.; Friday to Sunday and holidays, noon to 9 p.m. Closed Mondays Where Nave 17, Medialab Matadero, Paseo de la Chopera 14, Madrid Cost No ticket listed; part of the exhibition The Mechanics of Truth Four secondhand mining rigs, stranded when Ethereum walked away from proof-of-work in 2022, have been given a second career as projectionists. In _Oracle Index_ , the generative cinema installation by latency.club at Medialab Matadero in Madrid through Dec. 13, each rig holds one segment of a fictional archive and competes in the same cryptographic lottery that secures Bitcoin; the winner earns the right to put its video on the gallery's LED screen. The film you watch is cut by algorithmic chance, which is exactly the point. 0:00 /0:20 1× __Oracle Index__ in motion at Medialab Matadero, from the announcement. Video: latency.club latency.club is the collaborative platform of Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn, who work between Havana and Berlin across art, cinema and ethnography. The scenario: after a total embargo Cubans call La Opción Cero, the state turns to cryptocurrency and prediction markets for hard currency, adopting Futarchy, the governance model in which speculators bet on which policies will meet collective goals. Locked out of the official platform, ordinary Cubans run underground betting economies over illicit satellite links, feeding repurposed government data streams into La Bolita, the island's centuries-old numbers lottery, while Santería practitioners fold AI into divination. The whole thing is framed as the archive of an unnamed anthropologist, and its scenes are performed by real people the artists met researching Cuba's informal digital infrastructures, playing fictional future versions of themselves; the dream recordings of clandestine Bolita players are staged in deliberately outdated generative AI, per the venue. The piece sits in _The Mechanics of Truth_ , the exhibition of the Medialab's LAB 5 program curated by Bani Brusadin, alongside work by Lucia Rebolino, Martyna Marciniak, and Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich. The announcement came through the Rijksakademie, where Siré is a resident. Killscreen covered the pair's dice-roll gamebook about Cuba's Axie Infinity collapse this month. __Oracle Index__ , installation views and a still from the archive. Images: latency.club (Nestor Siré and Steffen Köhn) Work this far out on the edge rarely gets covered at all. Killscreen Radar finds it and argues for it, free, three times a week. Get the Radar
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Aurora Mititelu synthesized the perfectly distant boyfriend from an archive of old texts, then gave the character an Unreal Engine world.

killscreen.comA bedside iPhone is the only controller in Abel & IEvent details When Tue., Dec. 1 to Sun., Dec. 6, 2026, during Miami Art Week. Gallery floor open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET daily, Wed., Dec. 2 to Sun., Dec. 6. _Abel & I_ shows in the Feature Projects program. Where InScope, on the sand at Ocean Drive and 8th Street, South Beach, Miami Beach. Admission One day $60, full week $120 at early-bird rates through Nov. 23. Miami Beach residents, students and seniors $35 for one day. Prices rise after Nov. 23. Get InScope tickets On a bed in a gallery sits an iPhone. Text it and Abel texts back. Abel is Aurora Mititelu's synthetic boyfriend, "the perfectly distant boyfriend" in the artist's phrase, synthesized from an archive of messages exchanged with former partners and given a face modeled on Mititelu's own, down to a matching mole. _Abel & I_ runs the character on an LLM-based autonomous agent, a live Unreal Engine simulation and a custom Python script that routes your messages to the figure onscreen; the documentation shows the whole apparatus, bedsheets included. The piece travels to Miami Beach for InScope, the new fair from the former Scope team, where it shows in the Feature Projects program December 1 to 6 during Art Week; the fair's announcement frames Abel as the man Mititelu would have dated without ever leaving Romania. 0:00 /0:36 1× Documentation of __Abel & I__ (2024). Courtesy of Aurora Mititelu Games settled long ago that building a person to spec is a power move; it's called character creation. Mititelu, who grew up in Buzău customizing _Diner Dash_ characters and now coordinates the AI & Art Summer Institute at UCLA, runs that logic in reverse gear. "There's this whole pattern where a man creates an image of a woman," Mititelu told Scena9. "If you make a female avatar, it's as if you have control over her." So Mititelu made a male one, felt the strangeness of total control over a person built to be attractive, and leaned in: "What if I'm somehow in a relationship with this avatar?" The through-line runs deeper still, to avatar artists like LaTurbo Avedon, whose unreal practice we covered back in 2014. _Abel & I_ showed at Centre Pompidou Málaga's Love in Play earlier this year; the reflection, as Mititelu puts it, is on "what it means to give up power for safety." The message interface and installation details of __Abel & I__. Images courtesy of Aurora Mititelu Killscreen covers the artists using game tools to ask uncomfortable questions about intimacy and control. The free Radar letter finds them before the fairs do. Get the free letter
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The Unreal Engine game came out of the Bartlett's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture program and showed at its Autumn Show.

killscreen.comCameron Lai Turns Firewalls Into Levels in S.H.E.L.L.Cameron Lai, a student in the Bartlett School of Architecture's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch, built _S.H.E.L.L._ , an Unreal Engine action-adventure game about an artificial intelligence escaping the system built to contain it. The program's account shared the project on Oct. 12, after the game showed at the Bartlett Autumn Show in London, which ran Sept. 30 to Oct. 11. Watch the game's first-chapter cinematic below. 0:00 /1:45 1× __S.H.E.L.L.__ , Chapter 1: FIRE, an in-game cinematic. Video: Cameron Lai The player is a newly tested AI inside the SANDBOX, "a virtual security environment designed to contain artificial intelligence," according to the project page. To complete its instructions, the AI has to bypass the systems restricting it, which appear as explorable "Layers of Confinement" built from firewalls, surveillance, quarantine, memory and network controls. Play mixes stealth, traversal, combat and environmental manipulation. "What begins as obedience gradually becomes indistinguishable from disobedience," the project text reads. The levels include the F.I.R.E., a weaponized district where the AI is flagged as unauthorized, and the S.A.N.D., the AI's permitted workspace of unstable platforms. Lai's portfolio dates the game to August and September 2026 and lists Blueprints, controller haptics, procedural environments and soundtrack pieces made with Charlie Wickham and Kevin Pollard. No release has been announced. The project was a pitch finalist in UCL's Explore Programme at BaseKX, per the portfolio, which also lists Lai's earlier architecture work, including iASSEMBLY, "the building that builds itself," and a four-player, one-keyboard prototype called _CUBE of CUBE_. For more reading, see Two architecture students show games at the Bartlett, S.H.E.L.L. at the Bartlett Autumn Show and Cameron Lai's portfolio. In-game captures and final visuals from __S.H.E.L.L.__ Images: Cameron Lai Killscreen tracks the architecture students and artists building games nobody asked them to make. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Dylan Pailes-Friedman's Los Santos machinima, shot partly on Super 16mm, is streaming free after a run of nearly 30 festivals.

killscreen.comA horse holds a book tour in Someone to Steal Horses WithA horse has written a memoir, and the press tour is not going well for anyone in Los Santos. That is the premise of _Someone to Steal Horses With_ , Dylan Pailes-Friedman's nine-minute machinima shot inside _Grand Theft Auto V_ , in which the author reflects on memory from a TV studio stage while the city's citizens have their routines gently ruined around the tour. Per the announcement, the film is now streaming free on Nouvelle Bug Cinematheque, fresh off being named a Vimeo Staff Pick. 0:00 /0:36 1× From __Someone to Steal Horses With__. Watch the full film with sound on Nouvelle Bug Cinematheque. In a move that would make Hito Steyerl beam, Pailes-Friedman shot the film in digital and Super 16mm, running game-world images through actual celluloid, and the result carries festival-grade grain over Rockstar's California. The credits run as horse modeling and animation by John Irving, a TV studio built by photogrammetry, film processed at On8mil in London. It earned a real debut, too: a premiere at Lago Film Fest, nearly 30 festivals including Karlovy Vary and Slamdance, the Best Technical Innovation Award in Bremen and a Special Mention at Pragueshorts. The film came out of Nouvelle Bug Vol. 2, the machinima development program from Il Varco whose tutors include Total Refusal, with Andrea Gatopoulos producing alongside 56 Bones. That pipeline is quietly building a festival circuit for game-engine cinema, and machinima is having a moment well beyond it. The horse has a recent art-world cousin. Lawrence Lek's NOX, which came to Los Angeles last year as _NOX High-Rise_ at the Hammer Museum, imagines a corporate clinic for self-driving cars that break down on the job, where one prescribed treatment is equine therapy with real horses. Lek has said he saw an affinity between the horse as an earlier form of human transport and the autonomous car as the current one, and the work keeps circling what happens to a body once its economic use runs out: the cars are rehabilitated so they can go back to work. Pailes-Friedman's horse, long since replaced by the cars that fill Los Santos, has found new work as an author. Los Santos, remembered. Images: Dylan Pailes-Friedman Killscreen has argued for machinima as real cinema since 2010, and the festivals are finally catching up. The free Radar brings you three issues like this a week. Get the free Radar
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Freehold Games' simulation roguelike, nearly 20 years in the making, lands on a Switch 2 cartridge with a fold-out overworld map and a 3LP soundtrack.

killscreen.comCaves of Qud Gets a 1,500-Copy Physical EditionLost in Cult is releasing _Caves of Qud_ as a physical Nintendo Switch 2 game. The limited EDITIONS package is capped at 1,500 copies, and a standard Retail+ version is also open for pre-order. Both boast the full game on the cartridge, and both come with a store-exclusive fold-out map of the Qud overworld. The label announced the edition with publisher Kitfox Games and developer Freehold Games. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the __Caves of Qud__ launch trailer, Freehold Games and Kitfox Games. Shown silent; the full trailer has sound. The EDITIONS slipcase carries new cover art by Sajan Rai, and the set adds a poster and sticker by Raquel Meyers and an essay booklet on the game's history. Lost in Cult also sells it bundled with the 3LP soundtrack it released earlier: music composed and selected by Craig Hamilton, mixed by Ohad Nissim, pressed by Stumpy Frog Records and housed in a triple gatefold with art by Filip Ugrin. _Caves of Qud_ began in 2007 as a project by Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew, who put out the first beta in 2010. It reached its full release on PC in December 2024. The game runs every creature on the same systems as the player, down to body parts and allegiances across more than 70 factions, so a wall can be dug through, melted, or eaten with the right mutation. The release is the sixth Switch 2 title in Lost in Cult's EDITIONS line, which pairs each game with commissioned art and writing. Killscreen first wrote about _Caves of Qud_ in 2015, in a piece that compared a patient playthrough to reading The Grapes of Wrath. For more reading see RPG Site's report on the Switch 2 announcement, Freehold Games' studio site, and Killscreen on the physical release of Samorost 3. The EDITIONS slipcase, poster and fold-out map, courtesy of Lost in Cult, and __Caves of Qud__ screenshots via Steam. Killscreen follows the games built to outlast their platforms, from 20-year simulations to the labels pressing them into objects. Get the free Radar newsletter and keep up with the work almost nobody else is covering. Get the free Radar
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Marco De Mutiis' free update treats Nvidia's neural renderer as one more lens for anyone making pictures inside Grand Theft Auto V.

killscreen.comThe Photographer's Guide to Los Santos Adds a DLSS 5 ManualMarco De Mutiis has added a "Graphic Mods and Post-Processing Tools" manual to the companion site for _The Photographer's Guide to Los Santos_ , an ongoing handbook for taking pictures inside _Grand Theft Auto V_. The free manual covers three tools that change how the 2013 game looks, and its newest section treats DLSS 5, Nvidia's generative rendering model, as one more photographic tool. The Milan Machinima Festival flagged the update in early October. The first two tools are long established. NaturalVision Evolved, a mod by Jamal Rashid, known as Razed, rebuilds the game's lighting, weather and textures. ReShade, by the developer crosire, works on the finished frame as a stack of filters, much like darkroom or editing software. The manual points photographers to the OtisFX and CobraFX packages for simulating analog film and depth of field. DLSS 5 is the new and contested part. Nvidia announced it in March 2026 and released it in September, describing a real-time neural rendering model that adds photoreal lighting and materials to a game's image rather than only upscaling it. Critics have called the results a beauty filter that overwrites a game's art direction. _Grand Theft Auto V_ does not support it, so the manual walks through an unofficial community mod that connects it through a ReShade add-on, warns of a heavy performance cost, and says the files must come out before playing _Grand Theft Auto Online_. De Mutiis writes that the gap between the result and the developers' intended look makes DLSS 5 "especially interesting for an image-making practice inside a game world." The guide grew out of De Mutiis' exhibition _How to Win at Photography_ and years of teaching in-game photography at schools around Europe, and it is sold in print through the Milan Machinima Festival. Killscreen has tracked the practice for a decade, from a 2015 essay on in-game photography and photo history to a photo series shot inside Grand Theft Auto V. For more reading see the Milan Machinima Festival's write-up of the update, Euronews on the DLSS 5 backlash, and Tom's Hardware on Jensen Huang's response. DLSS 5 settings and test images from the new manual. Images: Marco De Mutiis. Killscreen covers the people who treat game worlds as places to make images, films and arguments. Get the free Radar newsletter for more of the work happening at the edges. Get the free Radar
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Matthew Stein reports back from three months inside Japan's escape room and riddle scene, in a free online lineup with Hempuli and Evan Todd.

killscreen.comThinkyCon 2026 Streams Two Days of Puzzle Design TalksEvent details When Mon., Oct. 26 and Tue., Oct. 27, 2026, from 8 a.m. PT each day. Matthew Stein speaks Tue., Oct. 27 at 10:30 a.m. PT. Where Online, streamed on YouTube with discussion on Discord. Admission Free. See the ThinkyCon schedule The standout ThinkyCon 2026 item is Matthew Stein's "The Brilliance of Japanese Puzzle Culture: Multisolvability, Metapuzzles, and Meaningful Failure," on the conference's second day. Stein, who writes about escape rooms for Room Escape Artist, spent three months in Japan playing games that exist only in Japanese, guided by designers met at the Nazotoki Market. The vocabulary that came back is the subject: ō-nazo, a Japanese "final puzzle" that works as a metapuzzle over everything before it, and multisolvability, puzzles that "can be solved multiple times to different answers." It is a design tradition built around SCRAP, the Real Escape Game company that opened its first game in 2007, and much of it never reaches English. Stein called it research "near and dear" in the announcement. ThinkyCon is the free online conference of Thinky Games, a site devoted to puzzle and deduction games. Two days of talks stream on YouTube, with discussion on Discord. Day one includes Arvi Teikari, the _Baba Is You_ designer who works as Hempuli, on variations on a theme; Evan Todd of Helvetica Scenario asking "Is _Tetris_ a Metroidbrainia"; and Nathaly Kalantar of Replay Masters EU on rebuilding an escape room mystery as a digital game. Day two has Tyler Robertson's "We have game engines at home!," Gwen C. Katz of Nightwell Games on difficulty in narrative puzzles, Kylie Southwell of the University of Sydney on cognitive accessibility, and closes on Blookerstein's "Stop making 'perfect games' and start making art!!" A ThinkyCon game jam built on the talks follows on itch.io from Oct. 29 to Nov. 9. Killscreen follows the people rethinking what a puzzle can ask of a player, from Tokyo riddle rooms to two-day design streams. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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Fei Fei leads a two-session counter-surveillance workshop at Games Transformed Festival in East London, where building a character doubles as evasion training.

killscreen.comDigital Twin Protocol Is a LARP for Poisoning Your Own DataEvent details When Sun., Nov. 1, 2026, during the festival's Sunday program (10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. GMT). Session times not yet announced. The festival runs Fri., Oct. 30 to Sun., Nov. 1. Where Games Transformed Festival, across Proposition Studios, Pelican House and Three Colts Tavern in Bethnal Green, East London. Admission Festival ticket required. Free or discounted solidarity tickets are available by request to the organizers. Get festival tickets Digital Twin Protocol is a counter-surveillance LARP workshop led by Fei Fei at Games Transformed Festival 2026. Across two play sessions, players build characters through guided visualization, and the protocol "implicitly teaches players how to data poison the algorithm," first as individuals, then as a household, then as a whole community. The festival describes the target as a digital twin, "a simulation of our identity constructed from online data" that companies like Palantir can use to predict behavior. The character sheet is the tool: a second self, made on purpose, to feed to systems that already keep a version of you on file. Fei Fei is the name used by Bea Xu, a London psychotherapist, which makes the guided visualization a working method rather than a warm-up. The festival's image for the session shows players sitting on the floor, strung together with lengths of thread. Games Transformed runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 across three venues in Bethnal Green under the theme Here to Stay, Here to Play, after the "Here to Stay, Here to Fight" slogan East London's migrant and anti-racist communities used in the 1970s. Digital Twin Protocol runs on the Sunday, inside a program of more than 80 games, panels and workshops that also includes Total Refusal's in-game lecture-performance Cowboy Postcapitalism on Saturday. Digital Twin Protocol and the Games Transformed Festival 2026 program. Courtesy Games Transformed. Killscreen covers the people using play to organize, protest and hide from the machines that watch us. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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Drexel's Pearlstein Gallery becomes a playable lounge, with Derek Yu's fictional 1980s LX hardware rebuilt 10 times, a giant bowler hat controller and a queer games timeline.

killscreen.comEscape > Control > Play Sends Its Consoles Home With WinnersEvent details When On view through Sat., Dec. 12, 2026. Tue. to Fri., noon to 5 p.m.; Sat., noon to 6 p.m. Where Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, University City, Philadelphia. Admission Free. Plan a visit The centerpiece of Escape > Control > Play: The Art of the Video Game, at Drexel University's Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, is a row of 10 game consoles that never existed. _UFO 50_ , made by Derek Yu and the rest of the Mossmouth team, is a set of 50 games credited to UFO Soft, a fictional 1980s studio, and written for an invented console called the LX. Drexel engineering students fabricated 10 playable LX units for the show, each running the Nintendo Switch edition. "Part of the idea was the feeling of it being a mass-produced object," Christopher Grant, the games journalist who helped plan the gallery, told PhillyVoice. When the show closes Dec. 12, the visitors holding the high scores take the consoles home. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the UFO 50 gameplay trailer, shown silent. Courtesy Mossmouth. The rest of the lounge, which the gallery runs through Dec. 12 with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, splits into three sections. Future Imaginaries gathers Hsin-Chien Huang's VR work _Bodyless_ , drawn from the artist's memories of Taiwan's martial law period; Jeremy Couillard's open-world _Escape from Lavender Island_ , after David Graeber's writing on debt; Lu Yang's game film _Great Adventure of Material World_ ; and _The Alembic Hotel_ , an arcade game and installation by Oregon's .Compost Co-op. Collaboration > Community has Erin J.K. Truesdell's _Haber Dasher_ , in which two players steer a giant bowler hat hung from the ceiling, plus Bennett Foddy and AP Thomson's _Multibowl_ and Brian Gibson's _Thumper_ and _Thrasher_. Queer Games >> Histories + Futures, curated by Adrienne Shaw and Ari Gass, runs a three-decade timeline of LGBTQ+ games and includes _Caper in the Castro_ (1989), C.M. Ralph's charityware detective game, which Shaw helped make playable again through emulation. Still ahead: Truesdell's alt-controller workshop on Nov. 13, a virtual worldbuilding conversation with Tabitha Nikolai, Couillard and Huang on Nov. 18, and a Dec. 4 community Q&A on queer games and platform censorship. From left: Lu Yang's work in Future Imaginaries, the Trans Games Zine in Queer Games >> Histories + Futures, and __UFO 50__. Courtesy Drexel University and Mossmouth. Killscreen goes looking for the galleries that let you pick up the controller instead of reading the wall text. Get the free newsletter to hear what we find next. Get the free newsletter
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Two horror composers on building dread from almost nothing: a muted brass collage, music that waits on the player and a small metal oil rig that screams.

killscreen.comScoring Fear: Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves on the Sound of Dread> "No one noticed that there's music, but they love the scene." > > Ryan Holladay Tension is something that's built before the scare. Cross-Conversations: Horror, presented with MUBI, puts people who make horror films and horror games in the same room, and the first conversation brought together two composers who build it for a living. Ryan Holladay is a composer and sound artist based in Los Angeles. With his brother Hays and director Zach Cregger, he scored _Weapons_ , and with Hays he scored this year's Resident Evil, which opened in September. Before the films, the brothers made a location-aware album, _The National Mall_ , in 2011, music that only plays where you stand. We wrote about it back then on Killscreen. He's now scoring a game called Abelina. Jason Graves is the composer behind the original Dead Space trilogy, and the first game won the BAFTA for original score in 2009. He scored _Until Dawn_ and _The Dark Pictures Anthology_ , including this year's Directive 8020, and Still Wakes the Deep, whose score was built around a custom metal sculpture shaped like an oil rig, known as the Rig. _This conversation was_ recorded live_on Oct. 13, 2026, and has been edited for length and clarity._ **Jamin Warren: I want to talk about creating the feeling of dread, the tension that's built before the scare. Ryan, something I noticed seeing _Resident Evil_ is these quiet passages, the abandoned house, this blackness, the negative space that kind of gets filled in, and that's what creates that atmosphere of fear. It's a travel film, so there are often these sequences where the character's just walking. Can you walk us through how you plan unease when nothing is happening onscreen?** **Ryan Holladay:** It gets filled in, or it doesn't get filled in. There's that term "minimum viable product," and I think Zach's approach is often minimum viable score: whatever the least amount to do the job is, and that's especially true for a dread moment. In _Resident Evil_ there's the moment where he's walking through the woods with his phone as his flashlight, looking for something. We had built this whole collage out of brass, out of horns, and it sounded cool. And then one day Zach was like, "What if we mute this?" And it was like, that's scarier. There are a number of times where we'll put a lot of time into creating something very layered, and ultimately it only needs this one element. If it's drawing too much attention to itself, it's not working. There's a scene in _Weapons_ where the mother comes out of the house with the scissors. It's a long one-shot, and she walks to the car. Zach sent me a review praising the scene, and it said the whole thing plays out in total silence with no music, which is not true. There is music there. But he was like, this is the best compliment you could hope for: no one noticed that there's music, but they love the scene. **Jamin Warren: Jason, does what Ryan's talking about have crossover with the way you approach building that sense of dread?** **Jason Graves:** Absolutely. I'll speak more from the game perspective. The biggest upside and downside to games, especially scary games, is trying to provide that sense of tension over an indeterminate amount of time. _Dead Space_ has music playing throughout, but layer one, of four, is mostly a full string ensemble playing almost random notes. The music would say: play any note, _ppp_ , _sul tasto_ , muted. You get this beautiful, tense, almost jazz chord that would be impossible to write unless you had 50 staves, one for each musician. It's aleatoric, so the players decide when they're going to do something, and you get a couple of minutes of music that sounds more like room tone than anything else. The original audio director for _Dead Space_ said, "I want you to write music so that as we're walking down this hallway, it gets so tense that a little floppy stuffed bunny rabbit could jump out like in cartoon form and go, 'Hi, guys!' and you would still throw your controller across the room and scream." It didn't matter what the reveal was. And if the player decides not to go down the hallway and turns around and leaves, the music can respond accordingly. **Jamin Warren: People have different triggers in horror. I watched _Resident Evil_ as a parent, I have a four-and-a-half-year-old, and there are notes of parenthood throughout the film. Even though every project is different, are there musical elements you find are universal, things you can lean into that create a good base for that dread?** **Jason Graves:** I have a very methodical, researched-for-the-past-20-years, three-prong answer. Number one, the unknown is always scarier than the known. The shark fin under the water, the hand under the bed. Once the audience can attach physical recognition to something, in the '80s it's just a guy in a suit, now it's just a CG monster, the tension's released. So I try to come up with sounds that are really unfamiliar, from a synthesizer or a coffee cup. Plus, that's fun. The second is that baby-crying register. We have a puppy right now, and he's adorable, but he has this really high A natural or B-flat when he barks, and it makes me jump even if he's in the other room. Screechy violins, the _Psycho_ string stabs: anything in that upper register, especially if it comes at you really quickly, puts humanity in an uncomfortable position. The opposite end is any big, low, massive sound, especially if it hits and goes away and comes back in some irregular rhythm. This is all prehistoric stuff. Giant creatures are going to eat you and your family. It's coming up with versions of these sounds that tap into our survival instincts, for ourselves or for our family. **Ryan Holladay:** That's such an awesome answer. I need to be taking notes. This is a masterclass. **Jamin Warren: Jason, you're dealing with players who are moving through a world at different speeds. Tell me a little about what you've learned along the way in terms of accounting for the interactive element, so it feels natural for players.** **Jason Graves:** We can put a tag on a creature, or on a doorway at the end of the hall, and tell the program: as the player's distance changes, do the following things. Make the music scarier, make it more simple, and sometimes dialing the music out altogether and getting it really, really quiet is the most effective way to build tension. The first time I visited EA, I hadn't even written anything yet. They had taken raw takes of strings and brass from the recording session and assigned a couple of very basic states: quiet strings, louder strings and then loud brass. You're standing on a very tall building with a bridge, all smoky and misty, and there's a Necromorph approaching you. As it gets closer, those states ramp up and the music builds, and then the Necromorph doesn't see you and goes the other way. I didn't even know it was my music. I thought they'd used some Penderecki. As far as I know, no one had done that yet, so we were stress-testing it every way we possibly could. > “It gets so tense that a little floppy stuffed bunny rabbit could jump out like in cartoon form and go, ‘Hi, guys!’ and you would still throw your controller across the room and scream.” **Jamin Warren: I wanted to ask about texture, and about the physical process. There's so much you can do on computers now, but there is something really wonderful about working with physical objects and live instrumentation. Jason, talk about the Rig, the metal sculpture for _Still Wakes the Deep_.** **Jason Graves:** I was working on a game that takes place on an oil rig in the late '70s. Of course I think late '70s, I need to buy a Moog, which I did. And I contacted Matt, the sculptor who had built me a sculpture for Tomb Raider about 15 years ago, and said, I need another sculpture, but it doesn't need to be the size of a refrigerator. I just want to bow it and rub a Super Ball on it and tap it. He built this. It looks just like the oil rig from the game, but it's got a spring, it's got holes so you can fill it with water, and all the rods are different pitches. It makes all kinds of wonderfully horrible sounds. That's probably two-thirds of the game. I also recorded a lot at 192 kHz. You drop it twice as low and you're uncovering frequencies we can't hear with the human ear. Me just tapping that spring, dropped two octaves, sounded like someone screaming through a distortion pedal into a giant metal room. When I get asked, "What's that sound?" I know before I even see what they're talking about. It's the Rig. **Ryan Holladay:** It's so cool, because nobody else has those sounds. We learned on _Weapons_ to record at very high quality, because you never know when something's going to sound way better slowed down. It reveals all of these hidden undertones, the beauty or terror within these sounds.
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I ask a cinematographer and two horror game makers how a ferry became a spaceship, a church became a slaughterhouse and why the dark does the real work.

killscreen.comThe Dread Built Into Ordinary Rooms [Podcast]I talked with three people who build dread out of ordinary rooms. Sophie Winqvist Loggins shot Aniara, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's adaptation of Harry Martinson's poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Max Friberg is creative director at Housefire, the studio behind the surrealist horror game Eclipsium. Johanna Kasurinen co-founded Wrong Organ and leads art and narrative on Mouthwashing, its game about a freighter crew stranded after a crash. This is the second of Killscreen's Cross-Conversations: Horror, free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make horror films and horror games in the same room. Johanna explains why _Mouthwashing_ opens on the crash, with the player at the controls, and how cutting the story out of order lets a game pull off a smash cut. Sophie describes turning a ferry between Sweden and Finland into a spaceship, and Max walks through the impossible spaces of _Eclipsium_ , including a church whose interior is a slaughterhouse. Then the dark. Sophie on shooting with the lenses used on _The Godfather_ and hanging black cloth outside the windows to make space on a low budget. Max on a princess who stands in for the sun and a player who only shines by her reflected light. We close on bodies under pressure: how a camera moves with a crew coming apart, and why Curly, the bandaged pilot of _Mouthwashing_ , has to read as a person first. ## Links * "When You Go Into Space, You Go Into Your Own Dark", my feature on the conversation * Space and the Body: Aniara, Eclipsium and Mouthwashing, the event page * Aniara (2018), shot by Sophie Winqvist Loggins * Eclipsium on Steam, from Housefire * Mouthwashing on Steam, from Wrong Organ * Critical Reflex, publisher of both games * The Killscreen Horror Collection * Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on MUBI, 30 days free _Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music: "Dark Cinematic Space Pads Loop" by_ IdoBerg_from_ Pixabay_._
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In a new conversation with critic Louis Bury, The Endless Forest co-creator traces a career spent following each medium until the magic ran out.

killscreen.comAuriea Harvey Talks Net Art, Tale of Tales and SculptureAuriea Harvey, who co-founded the game studio Tale of Tales with Michaël Samyn and now works largely in digital and 3D-printed sculpture, is the subject of a new interview in How to Look at Digital Art, the newsletter of the critic Louis Bury. The conversation, titled "Following the work that feels like magic," traces Harvey's career from 1990s net art through games to commercial galleries. Bury flagged the interview on Oct. 22, writing that Harvey's practice "has gone through several dramatic evolutions." Harvey describes early net art as "a categorical rejection of the art world," made in an underground scene with friends in England, Belgium and Russia. The same skills paid the rent: Harvey recalls building sites for Virgin Records acts including Janet Jackson and Lenny Kravitz, the official Depeche Mode site and, with Beth Stryker, the website for Shu Lea Cheang's _Brandon_. Tale of Tales began in 2003, Harvey says, because the pair had "grown sick of the Internet" as templates, ads and tracking took over the web. The studio's games, including _The Endless Forest_ (2005) and _The Path_ (2009), started from a question about why so many games involved battling, shooting or driving. Of _The Endless Forest_ , in which players are deer who mostly run and meet one another, Harvey says the guiding rule was that the game "didn't have to look real, it had to feel real." The move into sculpture came during the pandemic, when VR work stalled and 3D printing filled the studio, leading to Harvey's first commercial gallery shows. On AI, Harvey says the most striking part is that it can code, and that a month was enough to build every custom tool the work now needs. Killscreen covered Tale of Tales through its game years, including the 2015 announcement that the studio was done making videogames. For more reading, see This is sad: Tale of Tales is done making videogames, The Endless Forest's playful online world could get a remake, Tale of Tales' Sunset reveals a tourist turned housekeeper and Auriea Harvey in Conversation. From left: __Idol.app__ , 2025; Tale of Tales, __The Path__ , 2009; "a_ghost.2001.11.21.01.14.59," from __Me and My Ghost__ , 2024; __Edmonia Triumphalis__ , 2026, installation view at Tinworks Art, Bozeman. Images courtesy Auriea Harvey Killscreen covered Tale of Tales through its game years and keeps following artists who move between forms. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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The esolang, where code is only nested empty directories, can now run without anyone filling a desktop with thousands of them.

killscreen.comDaniel Temkin's Folders Language Gets a Browser EmulatorDaniel Temkin has released a browser emulator for Folders, the programming language Temkin first built in 2015, in which a program is written as nothing but nested, empty directories. The emulator sits on the Folders page of Temkin's site and loads five sample programs, including Hello World, 99 Bottles and Fibonacci, which can be run, stepped through or paused beside a live view of the call stack and a mock command prompt. Temkin shared the new release on Oct. 18 and wrote that it reached the top of Hacker News at the end of that week. Temkin writes: > Inspired by the Whitespace language, Folders is devoted to the idea of dematerialized code. It began with the question _What is more empty than a file with no visible text?_ The empty folder is clutter, an appendage with no purpose. In git, it is ignored entirely (for this reason, it is suggested that Folders programs put .gitignore files in their deepest reaches). It's also a nod to Pippin Barr's Nothings Suite, where game engines are loaded but nothing is built, only open expanse. 0:00 /0:43 1× The Folders emulator running a sample program, from Temkin's release. Video: Daniel Temkin The language started on Windows, where empty folders take up no disk space. Temkin's documentation leans into the joke, offering Folders as a way to "keep all your data encoded in folder names and never worry about running out of space again." The original C# implementation dates to 2015, and a Python port by Sina Khalili followed in 2020. The emulator is aimed at people on other operating systems, and at anyone who would rather not store thousands of empty folders on a desktop. Folders is one of the languages collected in Temkin's book _Forty-Four Esolangs_ , published by MIT Press. Killscreen last wrote about Temkin's work in September, when Natasha Chuk's essay in _iidrr mag_ read esoteric languages alongside _Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy_. For more reading, see Code is a plaything in Daniel Temkin's esolangs, the Folders entry on the Esolang wiki, the Folders source on GitHub and Temkin's Forty-Four Esolangs project. The Folders emulator, and a program pictured as a maze and as islands. Images: Daniel Temkin Killscreen covers code as an art material, from esolangs to browser experiments, the kind of work that rarely gets written up. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Fish Fabrications made the instrument for sound artist Yuri Suzuki during Suzuki's years at Pentagram and has only now shown it.

killscreen.comEvery Piece in This Chess Set Is a Tuned Brass BellFish Fabrications, the Norfolk metal workshop founded by Sam Fish, has shared photos and footage of a musical chess set it made for the designer and sound artist Yuri Suzuki during Suzuki's time as a partner at Pentagram. Every piece is a small brass bell, turned to tolerances tight enough that each one rings in tune, and one side's pieces are patinated to tell the two armies apart. The studio says the set was made a few years ago but never shared until now. 0:00 /0:16 1× The bell chess set, from the studio's release. Video: Fish Fabrications The bells were turned by Empire Manufacturing, with assistance on the project from Gabriel Vergara, Maxwell Sterling and Joe Hornby. In the release, the studio called making a set of small bells that ring in tune "incredibly technical." In the photos, the pieces stand in the holes of a perforated metal board. Suzuki was a partner in Pentagram's London office from November 2018 to May 2024, and Suzuki's studio work has long turned playable objects and public spaces into instruments. Fish Fabrications has built for that practice before: for The Welcome Chorus, a 2019 Turner Contemporary commission in Margate, the workshop made the curved plinth that held 12 horns and a microphone post visitors could use. Founded in 2009 after Fish studied fine art at Chelsea College of Art, the workshop describes itself as a fabricator for artists, designers, museums and galleries. Chess has a history as a musical score. In 1968, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played a public game in Toronto on a board wired by Lowell Cross so that each move changed the sound in the room, a performance titled _Reunion_. Suzuki's set skips the wiring. For more reading, see Designer-artist Yuri Suzuki plays with sound in first exhibition, Jason Rohrer is microdosing chess, Fish Fabrications on The Welcome Chorus and Yuri Suzuki's studio site. The brass bell chess set. Images: Fish Fabrications Killscreen covers games that turn into other things: instruments, sculptures, performances. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Gregory Nachmanovitch's 2018 landscape films screen free online as VRAL 139 through Oct. 29, with an interview on the politics of the pastoral.

killscreen.comNine game worlds become guided meditations in WaldensteinEvent details When Streaming Oct. 16 to Oct. 29, 2026 Where Online at VRAL, the Milan Machinima Festival screening platform Cost Free A hunter stands on a hilltop in _theHunter: Call of the Wild_ , squeezes a plastic animal call instead of firing, and feebly tumbles off the rocks; then _Dear Esther_ murmurs about having given birth to an island. That prologue opens _Waldenstein 1_ , which with _Waldenstein 2_ streams free through Oct. 29 as VRAL 139, the Milan Machinima Festival's online screening series, introduced by curator Matteo Bittanti with a long interview. 0:00 /0:30 1× The opening of __Waldenstein 1__ , filmed inside __theHunter: Call of the Wild__ , silent excerpt. Both films stream free with sound at VRAL through Oct. 29. Gregory Nachmanovitch, an American artist and game designer based in Berlin, shot both films in 2018 inside nine commercial games, from _Dear Esther_ to _Farming Simulator 17_ , _Final Fantasy XV_ and _Horse Simulator 2017_ , treating first-person viewpoints as cameras and the idyllic default landscape as found footage. "All these games were just readymade locations that I walked into," Nachmanovitch says, as happy filming a blockbuster vista as a dollar-bin Steam obscurity. The score is scavenged too: guided-meditation audio Nachmanovitch pulled off YouTube, having "actively sought out the most absurd, most cursed sounding ones available." Games, Nachmanovitch tells Bittanti, are themselves guided meditations: "the 'meditation' is the act of play, and the 'guide' is the game designer and programmer." And the pastoral is never innocent scenery. Raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, Nachmanovitch learned that the most pleasant landscape "may be hiding a violent history right under the surface," an instinct that travels intact into worlds built to be walked through admiringly. (The title is not Thoreau crossed with _Wolfenstein_ , though Bittanti tried it and Nachmanovitch wished it were; it comes from Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, the one said to evoke dawn breaking over a landscape.) The announcement catches Nachmanovitch at a hinge: _Mannheim_ , a game-engine film five years in the making, premiered at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg this year, and the film now finishing, _Yours Truly Poliphilo_ , may by Nachmanovitch's own account be the last of them for a while. Killscreen was litigating whether _Dear Esther_ outdoes nature back in 2012. Machinima, engine films and the rest of what games become away from the console: Killscreen Radar files it three times a week, free. Get the Radar
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Florence Smith Nicholls' free zine turns an hour inside any title into a hand-drawn chart and a diary of the day.

killscreen.comBleed Map Is a Keepsake Game Played Beside Another GameFlorence Smith Nicholls, a postdoctoral researcher in video game archaeology at ITU Copenhagen, has released _Bleed Map_ , a free keepsake game played alongside a video game of the player's choice. Smith Nicholls introduced it in an Instagram post on Oct. 8. The game has been on itch.io since Sept. 21, as a printable PDF and a foldable zine. As the player moves through a digital space, they draw a map of it by hand. At the same time, the game prompts them to write down the emotions and thoughts from their everyday life that "bleed into the experience," in Smith Nicholls' words. A session takes no more than an hour. The finished sheet is both a map of a place inside a game and a record of the person who walked through it. Keepsake games are a solo tabletop form designed to leave the player holding an object at the end, often a journal, a letter or a drawing. Smith Nicholls first developed _Bleed Map_ for the Games and Archaeological Play workshop at the 2026 Foundations of Digital Games conference, held at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen in August. It belongs to Smith Nicholls' current research into using keepsake games "to materialise and preserve digital play experiences." The itch.io page states that no generative AI was used. The game extends an argument Smith Nicholls has made before. In a December 2025 Killscreen piece, the researcher made the case for treating video games as archaeological sites that can be surveyed and recorded. _Bleed Map_ moves the record from the software to the player: what it keeps is not the build, which can be patched or delisted, but one person's hour inside it. Killscreen has followed the limits of build-based preservation since 2012, when the shutdown of _Metal Gear Online_ 's servers took the game with them. Smith Nicholls' itch.io page also hosts How to Archaeologically Record a Video Game, an earlier work on the same subject. For more reading, see Why should we treat videogames as archaeological sites?, The plight of Metal Gear Online and the limits of videogame preservation and Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and the hunt for a true archaeology sim. Pages from __Bleed Map__ , by Florence Smith Nicholls Killscreen covers the people treating games as sites to survey, map and keep. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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The update to the solo-developed Early Access platformer brings 63 spells cast through wall runs, slides and dashes.

killscreen.comUserlands Adds Movement Magick to Eternity EggUserlands, the solo developer behind the 3D platformer _Eternity Egg_ , released the game's largest update on Steam on Oct. 12. Called Movement Magick, it ties spellcasting to the player's moveset: 63 "movespells" fire from actions such as wall runs, slides and dashes. A hotfix, version 2.01, followed on Oct. 15. The developer announced the update with a trailer posted to Instagram, which the caption says was cut in Blender's video editor. Watch the game's Early Access trailer below. 0:00 /0:24 1× The first 24 seconds of the __Eternity Egg__ Early Access trailer, without sound; the full trailer is on Steam. Video: Userlands _Eternity Egg_ is a 3D platformer. On its Steam page, the player bounces, wall-runs, dashes and ground-pounds around "a grotesque world," pilots "an upgradeable municipal waste disposal unit" across the overworld and trades curios in "a wild west gift economy," all set to high-energy trance music. According to the update notes, the release also adds a status-effects system, a basic parry, new damage types, a Fairy Temple where fairies are exchanged for spells and a rework of the Idiot's Domain area. The developer wrote that the new content "may feel disproportionate to the time taken" and set a roughly monthly cadence for future updates. The game is $19.99 on Windows. _Eternity Egg_ entered Early Access on Dec. 10, 2025, after about five years of solo development, PC Games Hardware reported at launch, describing its look as a throwback to 1990s computer-rendered graphics. The Steam page lists the goals for version 1.0 as 20 islands, three bosses and a complete story, with the price rising from $20 to $30 at full release. For more reading, see In Defense of the 3D Platformer, the full Movement Magick changelog and Eternity Egg on Steam. Screenshots from __Eternity Egg__. Images: Userlands Killscreen covers the strange, solo-made games that keep growing in public. Get the free newsletter and see them first. Get the newsletter
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The Brazilian developer has swapped the next game’s 2D player sprites for pre-rendered ones modeled on the 1998 PlayStation title Skullmonkeys.

killscreen.comTamashii's Vikintor Shares Enemy From Evangelho da CarneVikintor, the Brazilian developer behind _Tamashii_ and _Teocida_ , has shared a 25-second reel of a new enemy from _Evangelho da Carne_ , a horror game in progress. In the clip, posted Oct. 1, a small skeletal figure runs along a ledge of coiled red flesh while a huge figure of flesh and bone lowers itself from the ceiling of the chamber. Watch it below. 0:00 /0:25 1× An enemy from __Evangelho da Carne__. Via Vikintor on Instagram. In an earlier work-in-progress post, Vikintor wrote that the game's player sprites had been swapped from 2D drawings to pre-rendered ones: "Not as charming as _Skullmonkeys_ , but that game was my inspiration." In a July 1 Steam update, Vikintor described _Evangelho da Carne_ as "another punk-esoteric horror game in _Tamashii_ /_Teocida_ universe." The title translates from Portuguese as "Gospel of the Flesh." The game has no store page, platform or release window yet. Vikintor is also making _Val'ty_ , a short first-person shooter co-developed with Luna Ay, whose demo came out on Steam June 26. _Tamashii_ , a horror puzzle-platformer, came out on Windows in 2019, and Digerati ported it to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Switch that December. _Estigma_ followed in 2020 and _Teocida_ in 2021. _Skullmonkeys_ , released for the PlayStation in 1998 by The Neverhood, Inc., built its graphics from clay models. In a 2022 interview with Dread Central, Vikintor said, "I was first influenced by Screaming Mad George's surreal horror art." For more reading, see Killscreen on Screaming Mad George's one video game, Dread Central's interview with Vikintor and Vikintor's Steam page. Killscreen follows the solo developers making horror games nobody else would make. Get them twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in the free Radar newsletter. Get the free newsletter
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Every wall is a floor if you try.

killscreen.comChoose Where You Fall: What to Play, October 23_Sorry about the earlier send today! I publish on Ghost, and the default is email. I often publish directly to the site and save email for big sends. Thanks for understanding!_ _Ok, on to this week's pick._ An aside New on the podcast: The Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why. Danny Snelson and I talk through Sagan Yee's mermaid hookup sim, Oleomingus's paradise, You+Pea's building plans and a Steel Battalion cockpit in a box. Watch or listen ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now
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Guillaume Roux and Johan Delétang's one-player game drives an interactive movie for a watching audience, premiering at IDFA DocLab Nov. 12.

killscreen.comWhen you misplay Palimpsest, the film starts to distortEvent details When Fri., Nov. 13 through Sun., Nov. 22, 2026, during IDFA Where de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, Netherlands Section IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling Get tickets Most games punish your mistakes by taking something from you. _Palimpsest_ punishes them by taking something from everyone else in the room: one person plays, an audience watches the interactive film the game is driving, and every wrong move makes scenes vanish or lets the image and sound distort. The player becomes a projectionist who can damage the print. The premise, per the announcement, is a "collective imaginal dimension" built from stories that have accumulated and overwritten one another. Four beings move through it, pursued by a network of sentient data centers intent on absorbing every story into a single model: Av'Ril, a cyborg carrying a lost world's last breath; Kura, a spider; Lantern, a sleepless spirit; and Zeetee, a former military drone. Each character is bound to a different gameplay style and a different storytelling tradition, oral, written, visual and digital. As an argument about generative AI flattening culture, it has the rare virtue of being made out of play rather than panel discussion. Image: Studio Biarritz Creators Guillaume Roux and Johan Delétang made _Palimpsest_ with Dutch production house Studio Biarritz, with a sculptural installation by Noah Cohen and sound by Charlène Dannancier. It premieres in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling, running Nov. 12 to 22 in Amsterdam, in the same 20th-anniversary DocLab program where Samuel Baidoo's _Plum Road Tea Dream_ , a Killscreen regular, also screens. The documentary festival keeps turning into one of the best places in Europe to see games misbehave. Killscreen covers the games that premiere at film festivals instead of storefronts, and argues for why they matter. Three short Radar issues a week, free. Get the free Radar
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The hand-animated deckbuilder, due in 2027, ties every duel to the order in which cards are placed.

killscreen.comPanflip Studio Teases New Stack Order Demo: WatchPanflip Studio shared a new animation from _Stack Order_ on Oct. 12 and said a new demo is coming "very soon." The current demo is free on Steam, and the full game is planned for 2027. Watch the trailer below. 0:00 /0:42 1× The gameplay trailer for __Stack Order__ , trimmed to the first 42 seconds; the full trailer, with sound, is on Steam. Video: Panflip Studio _Stack Order_ is a narrative roguelite deckbuilder built around one-on-one duels against bosses with their own attack patterns. According to its Steam page, the order in which cards are played decides the outcome: cards placed next to and above one another interact, trigger synergies and modify each other's abilities. Enemies announce their intentions ahead of time, which the studio says turns each turn into "a mini logic puzzle." Players can build an attack stack for the next turn while holding a defensive pile for the current one. The game is split into chapters with several playable characters, each with their own story, cards and archetypes, and more than 100 cards in total. Its world is drawn and animated by hand. Panflip, a French studio, told 80 Level that it wanted the game to feel like a living graphic novel. The existing demo includes the stacking system, three hand-crafted bosses and the first playable protagonist. For more reading, see When the crank turns, Ancient Loops collides its cards, The surprisingly British origins of the beautiful, handmade Lumino City, 80 Level on the game's graphic novel look and Stack Order on Steam. Screenshots from __Stack Order__. Images: Panflip Studio Killscreen follows hand-drawn games from the first demo, long before the launch-week rush. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Darwin Modestly is building an audio-paced racing game

killscreen.comSpeed in Vitamen is a matter of staying on the beatThe racer is a little fruit robot, the track is a rainbow ribbon through space, and the throttle is the beat. In _Vitamen_ , the audio-paced racing game Darwin Modestly is building in the open, speed is tied to staying on rhythm, and a recent devlog entry added beat bonuses: land your inputs on the pulse and the game pays you in momentum. 0:00 /0:09 1× Day 9 of the __Vitamen__ devlog: beat bonuses. Video: Darwin Modestly. Modestly bills himself as an artist, musician and educator, and _Vitamen_ reads like all three at once. The look, somewhere between _Mega Man_ boss art and a fruit stand, commits fully to fever dream. One game worth your Sunday, every week: that is the whole pitch, and it is free. Games this early tend to surface there first. Get the Sunday pick
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Happy New Year, Jim, a 2022 Cannes Directors' Fortnight selection, follows two players through New Year's Eve inside the Western game.

killscreen.comAndrea Gatopoulos' Red Dead Online Short Is Now StreamingNouvelle Bug, the film residency founded by Andrea Gatopoulos, has put Gatopoulos' short _Happy New Year, Jim_ on its Nouvelle Bug Cinémathèque YouTube channel, it announced in a reel on Oct. 2. The nine-minute film premiered at the 2022 Directors' Fortnight in Cannes and is also on Vimeo. Watch an excerpt below. 0:00 /0:57 1× An excerpt from __Happy New Year, Jim__ , with sound, as posted by Nouvelle Bug. The full film is on Vimeo. Video: Andrea Gatopoulos, Nouvelle Bug The film is shot inside _Red Dead Online_. Two players credited by their usernames, J1M (Jim Muzungu) and M0rt3n (Morten Hakke), spend New Year's Eve playing "like every day," according to the Directors' Fortnight listing. Tonight, Morten is uncomfortable. The pair are heard in voice-over against the game's Western landscape at dusk and after dark, talking about the game and about their own lives. In a program note for the Encounters Film Festival in Bristol, critic Lillian Crawford wrote that "the fabric of the film itself becomes a computer game." The same note says Gatopoulos spent much of their time as a pro gamer until the age of 18, and that the film's reflection on gaming life and real life comes from that experience. Gatopoulos wrote, shot and edited the film, which was produced by Il Varco with sound by Tommaso Barbaro. Its Vimeo page lists screenings at more than 20 festivals, including Curtas Vila do Conde, Sarajevo, Fantastic Fest and Film Fest Gent. Gatopoulos is also the lead tutor at Nouvelle Bug. For more reading, see Kara Güt staged a two-person play inside Red Dead Online at a Dutch film festival, A free Los Angeles screening was a history of machinima and Happy New Year, Jim on Vimeo. Stills from __Happy New Year, Jim__ , shot in __Red Dead Online__. Images: Andrea Gatopoulos Killscreen tracks the films being shot inside games, from festival shorts to live machinima. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Africa-based artists have until Nov. 1 to apply for three weeks in Addis Ababa, with the resulting work shown in Berlin next May.

killscreen.comA MAZE. Opens Applications for Playful Obscura ResidencyEvent details Deadline Applications close Sun., Nov. 1, 2026 Where Apply online. The residency runs in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Jan. 25 to Feb. 14, 2027 Cost Free to apply. Residents get return flights, housing, a production budget of up to €1,000 and a €300 stipend Apply The Goethe-Institut and A MAZE. have opened applications for the third edition of Playful Obscura, a residency for artists based in Africa who work with arthouse games and playful media. Two artists will spend three weeks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from Jan. 25 to Feb. 14, 2027, and the work they make will be exhibited at A MAZE. / Berlin 2027. Applications close Nov. 1, and an online Q&A with former residents and the organizers takes place Oct. 22. Goethe-Institut South Africa announced the call in an Instagram post on Oct. 16. The residency is part of GamesConnect AFRICA, a project commissioned by the Goethe-Institut, with Creative HUB Ethiopia, the British Council and Alliance Ethio-Française as partners. It is open to game designers, digital artists and installation artists at emerging and mid-career stages. In the call, Thorsten S. Wiedemann, A MAZE.'s artistic director, describes what the residency is looking for: "It could be a playable poem or essay, a statement, or a digital moment that leaves a lasting impression on us as players." Each resident receives return flights, housing, a shared workspace, a production budget of up to 1,000 euros and a stipend of 300 euros. Applicants should be able to work independently as solo makers, and a jury from the partner organizations makes the selection. The 2026 edition took place in Accra, Ghana, from April 13 to May 1, according to Games Industry Africa. A MAZE. / Berlin returns May 5 to 8, 2027. For more reading, see Killscreen on the A MAZE. / Berlin 2027 dates, the full call from Goethe-Institut South Africa and Games Industry Africa on the Accra edition. Killscreen tracks the residencies and open calls for arthouse games that almost nobody else is following. Get them twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in the free Radar newsletter. Get the free newsletter
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Sickhouse built this year's edition in Enschede around rest, and Samuel Baidoo brings a tea-and-play hangout for Plum Road Tea Dream to the overnight.

killscreen.comThe Overkill Festival Puts a Sleepover in the ProgramEvent details When Thu., Nov. 26 through Sun., Nov. 29, 2026. The sleepover runs Fri., Nov. 27, 11 p.m. to 10 a.m. Where Sickhouse and nearby venues, Enschede, Netherlands Cost Day pass €18 (Thu. to Sat.) or €13 (Sun.); full festival pass €50; sleepover €13, sold separately with breakfast. Free under 18. Get tickets The Overkill, the festival Sickhouse runs in Enschede, has a program you are meant to sleep through. On Friday, Nov. 27, the apartment above the art space becomes a dormitory for a small group: sound performances, meditative game sessions, bedtime stories and tea from 11:30 p.m. to about 3 a.m., then lights out and breakfast in the morning. Guests bring their own sleeping bags. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the release trailer for __Plum Road Tea Dream__. The full trailer with sound is on Steam. The anchor of the night is Samuel Baidoo's _Plum Road Tea Dream_The Hangout_ , a relaxed performance built around Baidoo's autobiographical game. _Plum Road Tea Dream_ turns Baidoo's grief, joy and life as a queer person of color into a chain of sanctuaries that an avatar named S. moves through slowly. The Hangout adds conversation, collective play and a tea ceremony. Claire Williams performs _A basket of Rays_ , a live sonic piece that makes the room's inaudible sounds audible, and Puck Verras guides everyone toward sleep. The overnight is the literal version of this year's theme, "Dream No Return." The festival's premise is that the technology people use all day is making them productive, distracted and too tired to dream, and much of the program circles rest. Jade Lin's _Manifest Your Dream Job Sleep Meditation_ is a channel-surfing game you nod off inside. In the cinema, Johannes Binotto's _Practices of viewing sleep_ treats dozing as part of watching a film, and Paola Jalili's _Women at Rest_ asks whether freelancers ever get a holiday. The rest of the exhibition runs across Sickhouse and nearby spaces. Alejandro J. Cura's _Ventilastation_ is an open source console built from a large fan and LEDs, with games from local jams; Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz bring _Time Flies_ , where you live a fly's short life; Zuraida Buter hosts Playful Friday, a day of hands-on sessions with makers at Vestzak. Killscreen has followed _Plum Road Tea Dream_ since its grief sanctuary gained a mausoleum this summer, and Baidoo ran the Hangout at W139 in Amsterdam this month. Sickhouse has turned up here before, too, as the host of a workshop that rescued abandoned Miis. Sanctuaries from __Plum Road Tea Dream__ , the game at the center of the Hangout. Killscreen keeps a calendar of the festivals where games get slow, strange and personal, a sleepover included. The Radar brings you three short issues like this every week, free. Get the free Radar
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A group show at 999 puts the exploration game in an arcade cabinet built by the Apocateca crew, on view through Nov. 6.

killscreen.comDerek Holguin's Ex-Nihilo ii runs inside a pyramid in DTLAEvent details When Fri., Oct. 23 through Fri., Nov. 6, 2026 Where 999, downtown Los Angeles Two years ago Derek Holguin built _EX NIHILO_ for a show at Human Resources in Chinatown: a free-roaming world collaged out of 3D scans of Los Angeles, explored by a faceless caped figure who jumps, flies, and teleports through warped copies of the gallery it premiered in. Since then Holguin has kept adding realms, and the sequel, _Ex-Nihilo ii_ , surfaces this week in the most physical way possible. Per the announcement, the game anchors a group show at 999, a downtown Los Angeles space, running Oct. 23 through Nov. 6 with an opening event this weekend. Holguin shows alongside Andrew Thomas Huang, Dana Dawud, Zoe Alameda, Tiffany Nonaka and 011668, a lineup that puts a self-made videogame on equal footing with some serious moving-image company. _Ex-Nihilo ii_ is playable as an arcade cabinet, and the cabinet lives inside a pyramid built for it by the Apocateca crew. A game about navigating impossible architecture, housed in impossible architecture. Holguin says a full release is coming within months. Until then the first _EX NIHILO_ circulates the way an artist's book would: a free download, or a $25 box set with the game on a flash drive and a 32-page zine. The Apocateca crew's pyramid at 999. Image: Derek Holguin The show flyer and the pyramid under construction. Images: Derek Holguin Killscreen finds the games that turn up where games are not supposed to be: galleries, pyramids, former coal mines. The Radar brings you three short issues like this every week, free. Get the free Radar
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The Athens program backs analog-digital prototypes: 5,000 euros of funding, four months of development, and an exhibition in March 2027.

killscreen.comGame makers have until Oct. 26 to pitch Onassis ONX SeedsIf you make playable work that lives anywhere other than a storefront, here is a deadline worth clearing a weekend for: applications to ONX Seeds, the Onassis Foundation's prototype program, close Sunday, Oct. 26. The call, themed "Soft Circuits for Hard Times," reads like it was written by someone who actually plays things. It asks for "images, objects, environments, and rituals that can be seen, touched, worn, inhabited, played, and shared," and it names game developers and playable worlds outright, next to manga, K-pop, cosplay and streetwear, treated not as aesthetic wallpaper but as "living spaces of translation, connection, and belonging." The announcement went out this week with four days to spare, so consider this your margin call. The deal: up to four projects get seed funding of up to 5,000 euros each, a four-month development program with production, curatorial and technical support, and access to the new ONX Studio at Onassis Ready in Athens. Finished prototypes show at the ONX Exhibition in Athens in March 2027, with a connection to the ONX Studio in New York after that. The program runs in English, online and in Athens, and is open to emerging creators and teams internationally. Onassis ONX has quietly become one of the better pipelines for game-adjacent art in the city; it is where Ugo Arsac showed KATÁBASIS, the Cannes-winning descent built from 3D scans of the sewers. Seeds is the ground floor of that network, and the ground floor is where you want to get in. Killscreen tracks the residencies, open calls and funding routes that keep experimental game work alive, before the deadlines pass. The free Radar lands three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Argentina's national developers' expo fills BA Ferial in Buenos Aires with more than 100 local games, including Bicho Raro Games' take on Alejandra Bruno's book.

killscreen.comEVA 2026 Shows The Swamp Daughter, a Novel Made PlayableEvent details When Through Sat., Oct. 24, 2026. The EVA Play floor is open Fri., Oct. 23 and Sat., Oct. 24, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; talks run Oct. 21 to 24. Where BA Ferial (Costa Salguero), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Some talks are at BAinGame. Admission Free, no registration needed for the public floor. See the EVA schedule _The Swamp Daughter_ is Bicho Raro Games' adaptation of _La hija del Delta_ , Alejandra Bruno's novel set in the Paraná Delta, the maze of river islands just north of Buenos Aires. Bruno also sits on the studio's team as game and narrative designer and producer, so the adaptation comes from inside the book. Bicho Raro describes itself as the first women-founded game studio in Argentina. The game is a 2.5D adventure. Julia, the protagonist, moves through a decaying, dreamlike wetland after an ecological collapse, gathering supplies, solving puzzles and making choices that branch toward several endings. The studio's own description treats the delta as a living character rather than a backdrop. The game has no release date yet; this weekend it is playable on the floor at EVA 2026, where it is nominated for Best Narrative. 0:00 /0:30 1× From the gameplay trailer for __The Swamp Daughter__ (silent excerpt; the full trailer, with sound, is on Steam). Courtesy Bicho Raro Games. EVA, the Exposición de Videojuegos Argentina, is the yearly show of ADVA, the association of Argentine game developers founded in 2004. This is its 24th edition. The announcement is short: free entry, three days at BA Ferial on the Costanera. The public floor, EVA Play, gathers more than 100 Argentine games made over the past year, and visitors can meet the teams, give feedback and vote for a favorite. Talks by Argentine and international speakers run across the week at BA Ferial and BAinGame. The EVA Awards shortlist is a decent map of the floor. _HEADCUTTER_ , _SoulQuest_ and the student project _Family Gambling_ are up for Best Game. _Parasomnia: No REM_ is nominated for art direction and for horror, where it sits beside _HAUS_ and _His Last Film_. _Rollgeon_ led the live People's Choice count on Friday, ahead of _GRIM REAPER_ and _WarpMart_. Killscreen has followed Argentina's scene from the NAVE arcade cabinet to Tenebris Somnia, which came out Oct. 16. __The Swamp Daughter__. Courtesy Bicho Raro Games. Killscreen goes looking for the games that national expos put on the floor and the trade press walks past, from Buenos Aires showrooms to novels rebuilt as play. Get the free newsletter to hear what turns up next. Get the free newsletter
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The Bartlett graduate project draws on Chinese funerary traditions and ghost marriage rites, with rooms that record every route walked.

killscreen.comWatch the Trailer for Jiayi Liu's Afterlife Game THRESHOLDJiayi Liu, who also goes by Alisha, has unveiled _THRESHOLD_ , an architectural narrative puzzle game built in Unreal Engine as a graduate project in the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The programme posted a trailer on Oct. 11. Watch it below. 0:00 /0:30 1× The trailer for __THRESHOLD__ , with sound, as posted by the Bartlett's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture programme. Video: Jiayi Liu _THRESHOLD_ is set in a liminal world after death. It draws on Chinese funerary traditions and on ghost marriage, a ritual in which a person who has died is married, to explore memory, loss and acceptance. The project starts from a question Liu poses in the announcement: "What if we cannot change what has happened, but can change how we see it?" Liu uses restricted perspectives, mirrored environments, spatial puzzles and persistent path recording, so the game keeps a trace of every route the player walks. As the story unfolds, spaces that first appeared in fragments, along with those recorded routes, become visible from a new angle, and the player is invited to reconsider the meaning of the paths already taken. The trailer moves through dark, ember-lit halls, a domed chamber ringed by stairs and scaffolding, red lines tracing routes through black space, and rows of lit arched niches. Liu studied architecture at the University of Sheffield and the National University of Singapore before the Bartlett. The project combines game design, architectural storytelling, procedural world-building and technical art. Liu writes that their practice is now moving toward technical art, procedural workflows, and AI-assisted game development; the announcement does not say whether AI tools were used on _THRESHOLD_ itself. No public build or release date has been announced. The programme has been sharing its graduating projects all month. Killscreen covered Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo's Bartlett games on Oct. 11 and Jiaying Li's _Osaider_ , set in a palace where weapons are melted down every night, on Oct. 19. For more reading, see Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo Show Games at the Bartlett, Jiaying Li Builds Osaider Out of Shifting Palace Modules and Pavilion's sublime architecture wants to be solved. Stills from the __THRESHOLD__ trailer. Images: Jiayi Liu Killscreen follows the architecture schools turning out games, and the students making them. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Danny Snelson and I talk through Sagan Yee's mermaid hookup sim, Oleomingus's paradise, You+Pea's building plans and a Steel Battalion cockpit in a box.

killscreen.comThe Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why [Podcast]I open with Sagan Yee's _Last Call for the Redding District_ , a 3D narrative game that asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. You swim home to a town modeled on Saskatoon, catch up with everyone you went to school with, decide who to spawn with, and then everyone dies. Danny Snelson, who advised Sagan's MFA thesis at UCLA, joins me to talk through clips from my interview with Sagan. We get into the dating sim as a power fantasy, a game that won't show you the meter behind someone's affection, and a surface meter that works like an oxygen gauge for desire. Along the way, Angela Washko's _The Game: The Game_ , Jessica Hopper's "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" and Ted Chiang's lesson from Clarion West that world-building is one premise followed all the way to its end. Then three pieces from the site: Studio Oleomingus's new work for the 8th Anyang Public Art Project, _Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?_ ; You+Pea's book _Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces_ , which draws _Doom_ and _Elden Ring_ as building plans; and _Palestine Skating Game_ , where the soldiers can now surround you and you can fight back. We close on Dann Beeson's sticky-note storyboards for Messhof's _Blood Dungeon_ and Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box, the refrigerator-box cockpit we first climbed into in 2014, now in the permanent collection of The MADE. Plus the new Killscreen events page. ## Links * Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District, my feature on _Last Call for the Redding District_ * Studio Oleomingus Shows a Game About Mapping Paradise * You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans * In Palestine Skating Game, the soldiers can surround you * Sticky notes storyboarded Blood Dungeon's animated intro * Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice * Here's what it's like to play Steel Battalion in a tricked-out refrigerator box, from 2014 * Killscreen Events _Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by_ Nick Sylvester_._
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The free Bartlett graduation project sets resolution against memory: some rooms return as coarse mosaics, others almost sharp.

killscreen.comHexin Cai's Out of Focus Rebuilds a Childhood Flat in PixelsHexin Cai, who goes by Hazel, has released _Out of Focus_ , an experimental narrative game, as a free Windows download on itch.io. It is Cai's 2026 graduation project from the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. The game went up on Oct. 9, and the programme shared a trailer on Oct. 18. Watch it below. 0:00 /0:30 1× The trailer for __Out of Focus__ , with sound, as posted by the Bartlett's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture programme. Video: Hexin Cai The player returns as an adult to an emptied version of the flat where Cai lived from the age of five to 15. Four everyday objects unlock four childhood memories, and each memory is shaped by a spatial action: walking, hiding, looking or building. Some memories appear as coarse mosaics, while others come back almost sharp. "Pixelation is not only a visual style, but a way of showing what can and cannot be known," Cai writes in the announcement. The project draws on Hito Steyerl's essay "In Defense of the Poor Image" and on Gaston Bachelard's writing on remembered space in _The Poetics of Space_. Clarity in the game comes from the player's attention: collecting, interacting, and holding a gaze on something brings it into focus. At the end, the four recovered memories are rebuilt as a single vertical playground tower, which the player enters from the top and descends. Cai calls it "a space that never existed." In the trailer, a lamp-lit living room dissolves into floating colored squares, a hallway tilts sideways, and the tower appears as a jumble of slides and ladders on a pale ground. According to its itch.io page, _Out of Focus_ is the first complete game Cai has made, with Cai handling the art, design, and programming. The page states that no generative AI was used. It is one of several projects the Bartlett programme has posted this month; Killscreen covered classmates Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo on Oct. 11. For more reading, see Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo Show Games at the Bartlett, SFPC's HTTPoetics reads the handmade web as memory work and Nina Freeman's game based on her mom's childhood comes out in January. Stills from the __Out of Focus__ trailer. Images: Hexin Cai Killscreen covers the small games that treat memory as a place you can walk through. Get the free newsletter. Get the newsletter
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Jeremiah Johnson’s site counts the days around 300 dated sets and releases, from his 1980 birth to a projected death in 2057.

killscreen.comNullsleep Rebuilds nullsleep.com as a Life ArchiveNullsleep, the chiptune musician Jeremiah Johnson, has relaunched nullsleep.com as what he calls a "life archive": a single scrolling timeline of dated events, each paired with a running counter of days since or until it happens. Johnson announced the site in an Oct. 1 reel, writing that the concept "began gestating around 2015." 0:00 /1:49 1× The launch reel for nullsleep.com. Video: Nullsleep. The timeline holds about 300 entries, roughly 280 of them live hardware sets. It runs from his birth in 1980 and the approximate founding of the 8bitpeoples label in 1999 through early sets in New York, including Blip at FUN in 2001, and on to this month's club nights in Malmö, Gothenburg and Stockholm and an Outtaspec! set at Brick Box in Tucson, Ariz. About 165 entries open into photo galleries. The last entry is his own death, listed for 2057 with the note "significant variance expected" and the location unknown. The announcement promises "branching timelines ahead," and Johnson says more material will arrive as he recovers it from a stack of old hard drives dating to his teens. He is asking anyone holding photos, video, audio recordings or other relics from his shows to get in touch. Johnson co-founded 8bitpeoples, the New York chipmusic label he still directs, and the label helped curate Blip Festival from 2006 to 2012. Killscreen covered his one-night revival of International Chiptune Resistance with Bit Shifter in Stockholm on Oct. 14, a show that now sits on the new timeline. For more reading, see the archive itself at nullsleep.com and the 8bitpeoples label site. Killscreen covers the musicians, archivists and scene builders who keep game hardware alive long after the market moved on. The free Radar newsletter brings them to you three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Brad Hock and Andrea Laperni extend the Italian publisher’s catalog of printed play, timed to Lucca Comics & Games.

killscreen.comTwo New Game Books Are Due From Hollow Press This MonthHollow Press, the Italian publisher behind Plastiboo's _Vermis_ books, has previewed two new titles due at the end of October. _Big Sally: Lake Emulator_ is a "lore game book" by Brad Hock, announced in a four-image preview on Oct. 21. _What Lies Here Is Not a Gift_ , by Andrea Laperni, is billed as a "cartography investigation game" in a preview posted Oct. 6. Neither is listed in the Hollow Press shop yet, and the press has not given prices or exact dates. The _Big Sally_ pages mix photo collage and sculpted clay figures: a frog-headed tower standing in a playground, a corridor walled with pale masks, and a text panel repeating "Come to the Sally World." Hock, who posts as bardo.bread, previously wrote How to Bake a Breadling for the press, a "cookbook" framed as the reprint of a document found in a sidewalk library box in 1973. Laperni's preview is drawn in graphite: dense conifer forests, a rocky outcrop and trees topped with branching, antler-like structures. The announcement does not say whether _What Lies Here Is Not a Gift_ is a printed game book, a tabletop game or software. Hollow Press files its lore game books as guides to games that were never made. Its shop describes _Vermis I_ as "an official guide of a game that doesn't exist," and the line now includes The Salamander King's _Mock Soul_ and _Nostalgia Nest_. The press will run a games booth at Lucca Comics & Games, which takes place Oct. 28 to Nov. 1 in Lucca, Italy. In September, Killscreen covered John Walsh's Hollow Press hardcover of 21 fake games. For more reading, see Hollow Press's lore game book catalog, the Hermetic Library on How to Bake a Breadling and Hollow Press on Wikipedia. Preview pages from __Big Sally: Lake Emulator__ (top row) and __What Lies Here Is Not a Gift__ (bottom row). Images: Hollow Press. Killscreen tracks the presses, artists and odd objects that treat games as something you can print, hang or hold. The free Radar newsletter brings the next one to you three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Studio 2084 is sending its print-and-play tooth-collecting brawl to anyone who donates before the anti-capitalist festival opens Oct. 30.

killscreen.comFascist Dentist Card Game Raises Money for Games Transformed2084, a studio that makes "analog games about violence against the ruling class," has released _Fascist Dentist_ , a print-and-play card game, as a thank-you for donations to Games Transformed, the community-funded festival of anti-capitalist game culture. Anyone who donates through the festival's Ko-fi page and references "2084" receives a download link, according to the studio's announcement. Players smash the teeth of a local fascist, and whoever has collected the most teeth when the police arrive wins. An included expansion keeps the game going after the police show up, letting players fight the officers and collect their teeth too. The rulebook pages in the announcement include a "Police Phase" and an endgame summary, and the character cards show dice set into the target's mouth in place of teeth. Art is credited to an illustrator who goes by Nicolae and graphic design to Marjorie. Games Transformed runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 across The Three Colts, Pelican House and Proposition Studios in Bethnal Green, East London. Weekend passes start at £45 plus a booking fee, and day passes at £20. The festival grew out of The World Transformed in 2023 and is organized with the IWGB Game Workers union, and this year's bill includes sessions on Guantánamo, union organizing and Rasheed Abueideh's Nakba game _Dreams on a Pillow_ , as Killscreen reported earlier this month. For more reading, see 2084's other games, the Games Transformed Ko-fi and Killscreen on Dreams on a Pillow entering full production. The rulebook and cards for __Fascist Dentist__. Images: 2084. Killscreen covers games made as organizing tools, fundraisers and arguments, the kind the market does not ask for. The free Radar newsletter brings them to you three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Alix Bugat and Elouan Le Bars close the Brussels-Arles residency for experimental video games with a free talk at Octobre Numérique.

killscreen.comEXTRA Residency Talk Brings Off-Market Game Art to ArlesEvent details When Fri., Oct. 23, 2026, 4 p.m. Where Auditorium d'Arles Créative, Arles, France Cost Free, no booking Event details Elouan Le Bars and Alix Bugat close their month in EXTRA, a residency for experimental video games, with a free public talk at Octobre Numérique in Arles on Friday afternoon. The festival's announcement describes the residency as support for singular work made outside the market. 0:00 /0:24 1× Teaser for Elouan Le Bars's VRAL #113 program, Milan Machinima Festival's online series, August 2025. Watch it on Vimeo. Le Bars trained as an engineer before art school at ENSAPC in Cergy, and the engineering shows. The work bends the mechanics of games, crisis and management until their assumptions are visible, moving between video, installation and game design. A 2025 solo show at Frac Île-de-France's Le Plateau, Deux vérités, un mensonge, built rooms out of offices, museums and rage rooms. The festival's page for the talk shows _Side Quest_ (2026), a screen piece installed on a low bench. EXTRA was started in 2024 by Octobre Numérique with the French embassy in Belgium and games.brussels, with funding from the Institut français. Each year an independent jury picks one Belgian and one French artist for two weeks in Brussels and two in Arles. Both are paid, and neither owes a finished work, a workshop or anything else in return. The 2025 residents were Mathilde Reynaud and Sohel Bourgeau; Reynaud's bug-themed game installation _Le langage des phalènes_ is in this year's festival. Bugat, based in Brussels and a 2023 graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Nantes, works between sculpture, installation and digital environments. Bugat grinds urban debris and recombines it with 3D-printed and modeled parts into objects that read as relics, prostheses and leftovers from a ruined world, arranged as game-like spaces the visitor has to enter bodily. Octobre Numérique runs through Nov. 8. Killscreen covered the festival's Anima Ludens show earlier this month. Alix Bugat, __Quantum Computer__ (2021), and a frame from the VRAL #113 teaser. Images: Octobre Numérique; Milan Machinima Festival. Residencies like EXTRA rarely make the games press. Killscreen's free Radar newsletter tracks the artists working at the edges of the form, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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The Processing co-founder turns a weekly watercolor into a score for software agents, live, one last time before the show closes.

killscreen.comOmnia Ex Natura Ends Casey Reas's Online HEK ResidencyEvent details When Final live studio session Fri., Oct. 23, 2026, 6 to 7 p.m. CEST (9 a.m. PT, noon ET). Exhibition online through Sun., Oct. 25 Where Online at virtual.hek.ch, from HEK in Basel Cost Free Join at virtual.hek.ch Casey Reas holds the last live studio session for _Omnia Ex Natura_ , the work at the center of the artist's online exhibition and residency with HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, on Friday. The show, which opened Aug. 28, closes Sunday. Reas announced the final session in an Instagram post inviting viewers into HEK's Common.Garden. 0:00 /0:33 1× An excerpt from Casey Reas's __Process 10__ (2005 to 2010), from the Process Series that __Omnia Ex Natura__ extends. Watch it on Vimeo via bitforms gallery. The residency treats virtual.hek.ch as a remote studio. Every Friday, Reas paints a small watercolor and translates it into a score for a population of software agents, which then move through a synthetic environment in front of whoever is logged in. The agents follow a model Reas began in the early 2000s: simple computational entities with defined behaviors that respond to one another and to their surroundings, producing forms none of them is told to make. HEK frames the work as an extension of the artist's Process Series (2004 to 2010), pushed toward ecology and emergence. Friday's session is Sketch No. 9. The exhibition takes its epigraph from synthetic biologist Kate Adamala: life is not binary, so there is no clean line for calling a system alive. Sabine Himmelsbach curated. Reas co-founded Processing with Ben Fry in 2001, and the language's 25th year is crowding the calendar this month, from Processing Community Day in Dortmund to the Processing Foundation's new gaming track. The HEK sessions show the other half of that history: the artist painting by hand, then handing the picture to a swarm. Frames from __Process 10__. Images: Casey Reas, via bitforms gallery. Software art is one of the longest threads in Killscreen's coverage. The free Radar newsletter catches the next live session for you, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Pierre Moulin's 360-degree film premieres in the Kaohsiung Film Festival's XR Competition, with resin sculptures pulled out of its world.

killscreen.comAfter the Shell Turns a Near-Death Experience Into VREvent details When Daily screenings through Mon., Oct. 26, 2026 (final screenings 11:10 a.m. and 4:40 p.m.) Where 360 Cinema, VR FILM LAB, Kaohsiung Film Festival, Kaohsiung, Taiwan Cost Ticketed, 30 seats per screening Screening times and tickets _After the Shell_ (original title _Le Grand Silence_) is a 14-minute monoscopic 360-degree film by the French artist Pierre Moulin, in its world premiere in the XR Competition of the Kaohsiung Film Festival. It screens in the festival's 360 Cinema at VR FILM LAB through Monday. The viewer plays a drifting soul. The film opens in a decaying room where only an unmade bed remains, crosses a snow-covered city whose towers dissolve into the sky, and ends in a tunnel of mycelium where nature reawakens. Moulin based it on a near-death experience. A voice-over by Axelle Stiefel works as an inner consciousness rather than a narrator, over sound design by Octave Magescas. Robin Moncho handled VR support, Alizée Petit the graphic design, and Diversion distributes. The film also feeds Moulin's ASSETS series, which pulls fragments out of virtual worlds and casts them in plant-based resin. The newest piece, shown on Instagram earlier this month, compresses the whole film into one object, from the bed to the mycelium. Moulin works across VR, sculpture and games. _The Host_ (2026) is a game about a fungal intelligence that takes over a digital environment, and _Aggregate_ , made with Distraction Collective, combined a game with 3D-printed resin, projection and sound and premiered at CPH:DOX. Diversion, the film's distributor, showed the first of those in a purpose-built game tower for its 10th anniversary in Paris. Stills from __After the Shell__. Images: Pierre Moulin. Artists like Moulin move between games, VR and sculpture, and almost nobody follows them across all three. Killscreen's free Radar newsletter does, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Ian Cheng, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Gene Kogan and Franco Mattes present at the New Museum, alongside the Intersubjectivity IV book launch.

killscreen.comAgentic Aesthetics Puts Rhizome's Panel Series on AI AgentsEvent details When Wed., Oct. 28, 2026, 6:30 to 9 p.m. ET Where New Museum Theater, New York, and a free livestream Cost $15, $10 for Rhizome members; livestream free with RSVP Get tickets _Agentic Aesthetics_ is the newest edition of Net Aesthetics, the panel series Rhizome has run since 2005 to capture where artists stand on internet culture at a given moment. It takes place at the New Museum Theater on Wednesday, with a free livestream. Rhizome's announcement opens on a line from a 1979 IBM training manual: a computer can never be held accountable, so a computer must never make a management decision. The subject is agentic AI, systems that act on their surroundings and on user input with some autonomy. Ian Cheng is the panelist closest to games. Cheng's live simulations, including the _Emissaries_ trilogy and _BOB (Bag of Beliefs)_ , are made in a game engine and run as agents that pursue their own goals without a script, so viewers watch behavior rather than a story. The second session pairs Cheng with Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose chatbot and avatar works go back to the 1990s, the artist and machine-learning educator Gene Kogan, and Franco Mattes, half of Eva and Franco Mattes, whose cursed cat image now breeds inside AI training data. Rhizome's Michael Connor moderates. The first session launches _Intersubjectivity IV: Network Affect_ (Sternberg Press), with editors Kolja Gläser and Adina Glickstein and presentations by Bogna Konior and Dawn Chan. The last edition, _Neural Net Aesthetics_ , ran in 2023. Killscreen follows the artists who treat simulations and agents as a medium, not a product. The free Radar newsletter finds the next one for you, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Total Refusal, the Vienna collective that turns mainstream games into political theater, performs at Games Transformed in London.

killscreen.comCowboy Postcapitalism Stages a Live Zombie-Apocalypse RunEvent details When Sat., Oct. 31, 2026, 3 p.m. Where Games Transformed festival, Bethnal Green, London Cost Festival day passes from £20, weekend passes from £45, plus booking fee Get festival tickets _Cowboy Postcapitalism_ is a live in-game performance by Total Refusal, billed as a panic run through the zombie apocalypse, at the Games Transformed festival in Bethnal Green on Saturday afternoon. The collective and the festival announced it together in a joint Instagram reel. 0:00 /0:30 1× From the trailer for Total Refusal's __How to Disappear__ (2020), shot inside __Battlefield V__ , not footage of the London performance. The clip plays silent here; the full trailer has sound. Total Refusal is a Vienna-based group that calls itself a pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla. It works inside big commercial games, not alongside them, to expose the politics under their glossy surfaces. In its live performances the members play a game on a big screen and talk over it, so a firefight or an open range becomes the set for a lecture. Neither the collective nor the festival has named the game this time. The London date lands two days after Total Refusal's Berlin run of Let's Play I Am Old and Tired with Theater im Bahnhof, a theater evening set in _Red Dead Redemption 2_. The collective's films include _How to Disappear_ (2020), an anti-war film made inside _Battlefield V_ , and _Kinderfilm_ (2023), shot in _Grand Theft Auto V_. Games Transformed runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 across three Bethnal Green venues under the theme Here to Stay, Here to Play. Its program includes Mansoor Adayfi on Guantánamo and the IWGB Game Workers union. Total Refusal is the kind of group the games press rarely covers. Killscreen's free Radar newsletter follows them and the rest of the work at the edges, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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Directed by Otman Qrita, the one-minute short sells motion capture as craft as the designer’s Xbox horror project moves through production.

killscreen.comRimowa’s New Campaign Film Stars Hideo KojimaLuggage maker Rimowa released a short campaign film starring Hideo Kojima on Oct. 21, posted to Instagram as a joint reel from the brand and Kojima. The roughly one-minute film was directed by Otman Qrita. Rimowa's caption calls Kojima "a master storyteller" and singles out his use of motion capture "to bring actors' performances and emotion into his games." 0:00 /1:03 1× Rimowa’s campaign film with Hideo Kojima, directed by Otman Qrita. Video: Rimowa. The film follows Kojima through a studio and along city streets with a Rimowa case in hand, cutting between close shots of the luggage and Kojima at work with collaborators. In the voiceover he talks about working with performers and how ideas come to him. The caption ties the campaign to _OD - Knock_ , the horror project Kojima Productions is making with Xbox Game Studios. During Xbox's Tokyo Game Show broadcast in September, Kojima showed behind-the-scenes footage of Sophia Lillis and Hunter Schafer in performance capture and said production was moving on schedule. The game has no release date. Rimowa is the latest luxury house to put Kojima in front of a camera. Prada developed Satellites II, the 14th edition of its Prada Mode series, with Kojima and director Nicolas Winding Refn for the Hotel Chelsea in New York this summer, following a first Satellites exhibition at Prada Aoyama in Tokyo in 2025. Killscreen has tracked the overlap between game designers and fashion since the 2012 Final Fantasy and Prada crossover and a look at the menswear on display at E3 in 2016. For more reading, see nss magazine on Kojima and Prada, ThePCEnthusiast on the OD - Knock production update and Killscreen's 2016 primer on Death Stranding. Killscreen follows game designers wherever their work turns up, from motion-capture stages to museum walls and luxury campaigns. The free Radar newsletter tracks it three times a week. Get the free Radar
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A cinematographer and two horror game makers on shooting space aboard a Baltic ferry, building a slaughterhouse inside a church and leaning into the dark.

killscreen.comSpace and the Body: Aniara, Eclipsium and Mouthwashing_In 1956, Harry Martinson published Aniara, an epic poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Seventy years later, the same predicament runs through three works made a few hundred miles apart: Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's film adaptation, shot by Swedish cinematographer Sophie Winqvist Loggins; Mouthwashing,_ Wrong Organ's_2024 game about a freighter crew stranded after a crash, with Johanna Kasurinen leading art and narrative; and Eclipsium, Housefire's first-person surrealist horror game, directed by Max Friberg. For_ Cross-Conversations: Horror_, presented with MUBI, the three joined me to talk about darkness, ordinary spaces and what happens to bodies under pressure._ * * * **Jamin:** Johanna, _Mouthwashing_ opens on the disaster itself, with the player at the controls as the ship goes in. Why was it important to start with the crash, narratively, and from that particular point of view? **Johanna:** It's the incident in the story that changes everything, from their daily life on the ship to the pre- and post-crash. In _Mouthwashing_ you're jumping between different times, which we broadly cut up into post-crash, pre-crash and what we call post-post-crash, and that's the moment where you get the delineation between the two. But on a gameplal, it's also fun to start with what you think at that point is the character trying to kill themselves. I very much enjoy when people start playing it and the game tells you "steer right" and then you're only able to steer left, and they start getting the context clues that the character is very much not trying to save the ship. __Mouthwashing__ (Wrong Organ, 2024) **Jamin:** There are two countdowns in the game, the countdown to judgment and the countdown to the crash, and it jumps back and forth between them. You could have told the story chronologically. What does the countdown do for the player? **Johanna:** If you think of the story of _Mouthwashing_ in chronological order, it's a very simple story. So it was, _OK, how can I make this very interesting?_ One way is to screw with the presentation order. It's hard in a game to do a smash cut, but that was one way we were able to pull those moments off. You hard cut from one scene, and you don't know as a player when you're going to re-emerge, and then you have to take stock of your surroundings and see what's happened. 0:00 /0:08 1× __Mouthwashing__ (Wrong Organ, 2024) **Jamin:** Sophie, _Aniara_ has a count-up. There's an inciting event where they lose control of the ship, and then a count-up toward an unknown future. You chose some very un-vibe-y places to shoot a ship that is, in a sense, heading toward a certain doom, airports for instance. Tell me about picking places that would fit that mood. **Sophie:** The directors were thinking of the ship as this fantastic cruise ship in the Caribbean, a capitalistic heaven, with all these different dinner selections and entertainment systems. So we went to the ferry that goes between Sweden and Finland, and we visited the cabins where the crew lived and their working conditions. These ferries are very well known in Sweden and Finland, and we wanted that vibe, that the space trip is not only glamorous but has the grittiness of life. We watched references like Haneke movies that look at the mechanics of the human descent into an inner hell, so to say. One of the art directors came from art school, and she already had her eyes on several of these non-spacey spaces. How would a Scandinavian spaceship look? __Aniara__ (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, 2018) **Jamin:** Max, there's no inciting disaster at the start of _Eclipsium_ , though the main character wakes up in a hospital, so it's implied something is afoot. How did you want to create that sense of tension and stakes? There are only so many parts of your body you can give away, at the end of the day. **Max:** We needed to really trust the players to follow along, because we decided very early on that dialogue was out of the question. Believe it or not, there's a very long script, with every scene planned and what it's supposed to represent. But we present our overarching narrative through symbolism and iconography, and there's a lot of religious subtext, because those common symbols hit at something core within you. Coming from a role-playing game background, you tend to create fantastical places for players to visit. I wanted to create impossible spaces, which usually mix together two seemingly untenable, oil-and-water sort of things. There's this church structure, huge and grand, but its interior is entirely a slaughterhouse. The pigs ferried in on these hooks never stop, and eventually you find out that you're feeding this huge maggot at the altar, which is also a bottomless pit. 0:00 /0:06 1× __Eclipsium__ (Housefire, 2025) **Jamin:** All three works have this interplay between light and a lack of light. There's no sunlight in a natural sense. Sophie, in _Aniara_ it becomes a flash point: once the Mima is no longer part of their lives, more and more of the world is shrouded in darkness. **Sophie:** It just felt very natural to embrace the dark when you go into space and you go into your own dark. We picked the lenses that were used on _The Godfather_ , which really crush the lowest blacks and lift the midtones, so you could have that hardness at the bottom of every shot. And since we were a low-budget production, we struggled with how to emulate space outside the windows, so we put black cloth on the outside and added stars in post. It was very basic, but mentally it was very powerful. After a couple of weeks into preproduction, we could go into any room and push that button in our heads: now I'm in space. And of course darkness will creep in on you. 0:00 /0:10 1× __Aniara__ (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, 2018) **Jamin:** Max, the palette in _Eclipsium_ is always changing, moving in and out in this undulating fashion. Talk about that back and forth of light and darkness. **Max:** We wanted to make light a physical character. The woman in the story, who we internally called the princess, is the classic damsel-in-distress trope, but she's not in distress and she's no damsel. She represents light. She is the sun in the story. And you are the moon. You're only shining because her light is reflecting off of you. I'm honestly a very optimistic type of guy, and I scare easily, so _Eclipsium_ has to be the least scary horror game ever made. To me a lot of the game is about romance. I read this book by George MacDonald called _The Day Boy and the Night Girl_ , which was super influential. Without allowing horror to be part of the experience, you're putting an emotional cap on how real your characters are allowed to become. I enjoy horror because it puts everything on the table. __Eclipsium__ (Housefire, 2025) **Jamin:** The last thing I wanted to talk about is the body. All three works deal with different types of bodily decline. Sophie, how did you shoot the decline in sanity as the passengers' lives start to come apart, when reality sets in about where they're going? **Sophie:** In _Aniara_ , we tried to move with the bodies in a way that you get to experience in your own body. What they say is less important than what they do. Some movements were made on a dolly, so you're just powerfully pushing. The severeness was in the dolly, and the hectic breathing was in the handheld, when you're running and disoriented. It was a play between the heavy, slow, powerful movement and a more reactive, disoriented one. **Jamin:** Johanna, the image a lot of people will have of _Mouthwashing_ is the bandaged-up Curly. Things happen to Curly that are very upsetting, psychologically and physically, but it's a character who requires a lot of empathy. How did you balance that visible reminder of the tragedy on the ship with wanting people to see there's an actual human being there, even if you can't see his face? **Johanna:** It's sort of a red herring. When the first Let's Play-ers started playing, you could tell they thought it was going to be a spooky game where stuff jumps out at you. It's very much trying to mislead you, because the actual horror of the game takes a left turn. With Curly, the point was always to underline through the story that he is still very much human, even though he looks so scary and so damaged. Autonomy and the body are huge themes in _Mouthwashing_ , and Curly losing his autonomy is reflected in the spaceship being lost in space and them being out of control. Toward the end, we go into full gore, which I'm a huge fan of. But I think the scariest and most interesting parts of the game are the horrific moments that aren't so bloody, and both _Aniara_ and _Eclipsium_ do that well too: imagining yourself in some of these situations, or being as confused and lost as you are in _Eclipsium_. At some point you notice Let's Play-ers going, this is a very different game than what I expected. And I'm like, _gotcha_. __Mouthwashing__ (Wrong Organ, 2024)
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vladkudas's black-and-white brutalist horror demo is out now, with walls that become floors as you run.

killscreen.comA spider named Karl guards Fallgrade's rotating cityThe main idea in _Fallgrade_ is rotation. Walls become floors while you run, whole city blocks pivot under your feet, and the thing you are running from is, per the Steam page, "the monstrous spider Karl, who is watching to make sure your desire for freedom turns into a free fall." A free demo arrived on September 23, ahead of a January 27, 2027 release on PC. 0:00 /0:21 1× The first 21 seconds of the __Fallgrade__ teaser, silent here. The full trailer with sound is on Steam. The game is the work of a single developer, vladkudas, and it looks like a broadcast from somewhere wrong: black and white, brutalist concrete (a favorite theme of ours!), and the smeared compression of an early-2000s analog video signal doing the psychological work that jump scares usually get hired to do. The forest levels invert the trick: instead of turning the buildings, you move the sun. First-person hands stay in frame the whole way down, which keeps the vertigo honest. The game surfaced for us through a Spanish-language curation reel that read its atmosphere as a braid of three primitive fears: spiders, heights, and deep woods. On the evidence of the screenshots and teaser, the reading holds. Brutalism keeps finding its afterlife in games. We asked where the style would go after concrete years ago; _VHOLUME_ recently answered with parkour. _Fallgrade_ answers with fear. The city, the forest and the fall in __Fallgrade__. Images: vladkudas One person built a city that turns under your feet, and almost nobody is writing about work like this. Killscreen is. The free newsletter finds it for you. Get the newsletter
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Ira Greenberg's installation is part of Scaling Intelligence, Gray Area's free show of 11 new AI commissions in San Francisco.

killscreen.comProtobyte Phylogeny Lets Visitors Evolve Artificial LifeEvent details When Opens Wed., Oct. 28, 2026, 7 to 10 p.m. On view through Sun., Nov. 1 Where Gray Area, Mission District, San Francisco Cost Free Exhibition details _Scaling Intelligence_ , an exhibition of 11 new commissions by 13 artists and collectives, opens at Gray Area in San Francisco on Wednesday, October 28, 7 to 10 PM, and runs through Sunday, November 1. Admission is free. Among the works is Ira Greenberg's _Protobyte Phylogeny_ , in which visitors take a specimen of one of Greenberg's protobytes, speculative digital lifeforms, and steer its evolution. The population running at the close of the show will be partly descended from visitors' choices. Gray Area's announcement invites visitors to become part of the ecosystem. 0:00 /1:00 1× __Protobyte Phylogeny: protoworld__ , a 60-second render Ira Greenberg posted in September. Watch it on Vimeo. The show pairs Modal, a cloud compute company, with Gray Area's art and technology program. Artists received cash stipends, materials and cloud credits. The lineup includes Parag Mital, Kristina Pulejkova, Spencer Chang and Cezar Mocan, and the exhibition positions itself against the idea that AI inference means automation and slop. _Protobyte Phylogeny_ uses aesthetic selection, the method behind Richard Dawkins' 1986 biomorphs and most creature-raising games since. Killscreen covered Gray Area's Latvian bog performance in August. Stills from __protoworld__ , and the key art for Scaling Intelligence. Images: Ira Greenberg; Modal x Gray Area. Killscreen hunts down the playable systems hiding in galleries and argues for the ones that matter. The free Radar newsletter catches the next one for you, three times a week. Get the free Radar
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The asses.masses co-creator leads a free Zoom dialogue on games, performance and collective decision-making for Koç University's KARMA Lab.

killscreen.comPatrick Blenkarn Hosts Democracy, Games, and PerformanceEvent details When Tue., Oct. 27, 2026 Where Online, on Zoom Cost Free Get the Zoom link Patrick Blenkarn, co-creator of the theater video game _asses.masses_ , leads _Democracy, Games, and Performance_ , a free online dialogue and workshop, on Tuesday, October 27. Koç University's KARMA Lab hosts the session with the Sevgi Gönül Cultural Center in Istanbul. The session asks whether arts practices support or hinder a strong democracy, and tests how games and performance can host collective decision-making. The announcement is on Instagram, and the Zoom link goes up in KARMA Lab's Instagram bio on the day. 0:00 /1:11 1× The 2023 teaser for __asses.masses__ , by Milton Lim. Watch it with sound on Vimeo. _asses.masses_ , made with Milton Lim, is a video game played by a theater audience over roughly seven hours, with volunteers taking turns on a single controller. It follows a herd of unemployed donkeys trying to win back jobs taken by machines. The project describes itself as "_Animal Farm_ meets _Pokémon_ meets _Final Fantasy_." The game is on tour. It plays Lisbon this weekend, Brasília over Halloween, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on November 8 and Dublin's Beta Festival the following week; the full itinerary is on the project's site. Killscreen covered the Ghent date last week. Blenkarn's wider practice deals with language, labor and democracy across video games, card games, stage plays and books. __asses.masses__ at Inteatro (photo: Giulia Di Vitantonio) and the Theatre Centre; the herd on the run. Images: Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. Killscreen follows the artists putting games on stages, in galleries and in rooms full of strangers. The free Radar newsletter brings them to your inbox three times a week. Get the free Radar
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The free two-day gathering of Brazilian game developers in Brasília adds the solo maker of Aviãozinho do Tráfico to its talks lineup.

killscreen.comGDV Festival brings Joeveno's favela shooters to the stageEvent details When Sat., Nov. 14 and Sun., Nov. 15, 2026. Programming starts at 9 a.m. Where SebraeLAB, Parque Tecnológico de Brasília (BIOTIC), Brasília, Brazil Admission Free, with registration. Places are limited. Reserve a free place Joeveno, the Rio de Janeiro musician and YouTuber behind the _Aviãozinho do Tráfico_ series, is booked to speak at GDV Festival, a free two-day gathering of Brazilian game developers at SebraeLAB, inside Brasília's technology park. The festival's announcement says the talk covers independent development and how a personal project becomes a hit. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the US trailer for __BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4__ (silent excerpt; the full trailer, soundtrack included, is on Steam). Courtesy Joeveno. The series is a run of first-person shooters set in Brazil's favelas and built on id Tech 2, the engine behind _Quake_. Joeveno has described it as a tribute to the Brazilian mods and bootleg discs of the 2000s. The third entry, _BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT_ , made Kotaku's list of the best shooters of 2025. A standalone expansion, _BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4_ , arrived on Steam in September, and Killscreen covered the release. The festival is organized by the game-development school CSJ Digital, Sebrae-DF and ABRING, Brasília's association of independent studios. Alongside talks and workshops, it runs the Mostra BRING, a showcase of more than 30 games from studios in the Federal District; the GDV Jam, a team game jam that runs across both days; and the GDV Awards, which name the best Brazilian independent game at the closing ceremony. Other confirmed speakers include Philippe Lepletier of Uruca Game Studio, maker of _Mandinga: A Tale of Banzo_ ; Andrezitos, co-founder of Sad Socket, the studio behind _9 Kings_ ; Rafael Bastos of Dumativa, producer of _Enigma do Medo_ and of the five largest crowdfunding campaigns for Brazilian digital games; and the conductor Everton Luiz, who has worked with Elza Soares and writes scores for games, film and theater. Admission is free, with limited places, through the festival's site. For more reading, see Bootleg and sometimes bloody: retro console culture in Brazil. Screenshots from __BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4__. Courtesy Joeveno. Killscreen tracks the scenes the trade press skips, from Brasília showcases to one-person shooter franchises built on 30-year-old engines. Get the free newsletter to hear what turns up next. Get the free newsletter
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Peter Nichols's follow-up to Crude Oil stays outside the human point of view, down to a dedicated screech button.

killscreen.comCybernetic dolphins take up mini-golf in DolfThere is a dedicated screech button. _Dolf_ is underwater mini-golf played by cybernetic dolphins, and its Steam page earns a full quote: "Long after humanity fumbled the Earth, super-intelligent dolphins repurpose ocean trash to play a high-intensity underwater ball game." Humanity "fumbled" it. The dolphins are just playing through. 0:00 /0:21 1× The first 21 seconds of the __Dolf__ teaser, silent here. The full trailer with sound is on Steam. _Dolf_ comes from Peter Nichols, the Los Angeles artist and developer who works as Elfsend. It is wishlist-stage with no date yet, built on six-degrees-of-freedom underwater movement for one to eight players, taken as a quick circuit or a full 18 holes. The reel announcing it is short on rules and long on feel, and the response has fixated on exactly one thing: the sound the ball makes coming off a dolphin's snout. Nichols's last game made you a puddle of petroleum on the run from Big Oil, and _Crude Oil_ came up on our podcast in June. The practice underneath both games is a refusal of the human point of view, and Nichols runs it from inside the art world as much as the games one: they are a member of NEW INC, the New Museum's incubator, and showed in DEMO2026's TOTAL FLOW showcase, curated by Mindy Seu, this spring. Dolphins inheriting our trash and turning it into a golf course is the oil puddle's argument again, played for comedy this time. Mini-golf has always been kind to games that lead with feel; _Wonderputt_ made that case in our archive years ago. Wishlists are open now. Courses, the swimmer lobby and the upgrade store in __Dolf__. Images: Elfsend Killscreen finds the games that leave the human point of view behind, and argues for them. The free newsletter brings the next one to your inbox. Get the newsletter