Killscreen

A performance of Waluigi’s Purgatory by dmstfctn, with a 3D theatre projected above a stage

ai

Game engines meet stagecraft in dmstfctn’s Rhizome talk

Also, a purgatory for cheating AIs built as a theatre, where the audience runs the lights by phone.

The cover of Daniel Temkin’s book Forty-Four Esolangs.

Daniel Temkin

Code is a plaything in Daniel Temkin’s esolangs

Natasha Chuk’s new essay reads esoteric programming languages through Oulipo, Aarseth’s ergodics, and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

A large festival crowd poses on and around a stage beneath an A MAZE. sign

A MAZE

A MAZE. / Berlin 2027: May 5–8, with 200 early-bird tickets

The arthouse-games festival whose lineup predicts a year of coverage sets its 16th edition; award submissions may open as early as December.

The holographic silver cover of The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games, with art by Plastiboo

Fake Games

John Walsh bound 21 fake games into one huge hardcover

Hollow Press's 176-page anthology, written by the YouTuber known as Super Eyepatch Wolf, reviews titles that exist only as art, Vermis to Bird World.

Grand Theft Auto V screenshot: suited men aim pistols at a figure in eighteenth-century aristocratic dress

books

A philosopher files Grand Theft Auto next to de Sade

Daisy Dixon’s Depraved treats games as full participants in the history of dangerous art, not late examples.

A painting of a young man playing Dark Souls at a desktop computer while a woman in a green dress stands behind the player, scolding

News

The boss fight is offscreen in Leonardo Devito's Dark Souls

The Florence-born painter puts the monitor, the keyboard and an unimpressed onlooker on canvas

A player using in-game 3D modeling tools to build a disguise in FAKE ME

News

In FAKE ME, your disguise starts as a blank block

Eren Can Metin and Emre Gökçe put the verbs of 3D modeling into a multiplayer hide-and-seek round.

Featured

Brutalist blocks hang over a Manhattan skyline as a flock scatters, from EDGLRD's CONTROL Resonant campaign

Behind Control Resonant's ads: Harmony Korine's EDGLRD

The collective that made Aggro Dr1ft is selling Remedy's paranormal Manhattan.

Playable poems now come with peer review

Playable poems now come with peer review

Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson's open-access magazine of short-form videogames, borrows the literary journal apparatus:

Banner artwork for the RESILIENT GLITCHES / HYPERNOMA media art festival in Graz

HYPERNOMA launched a three-year platform for unruly play

Graz's RESILIENT GLITCHES festival closed ten days at Schaumbad

Cameron Granger builds a dance floor you can only cross once

Cameron Granger builds a dance floor you can only cross once

Granger spent a decade making art before he made a game. His first is a warehouse party with 10 minutes left, and you are the Angel of History.

Killscreen

Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren

Latest

A doll protagonist facing a painted, hazy landscape in Prison of Husks

A painted afterlife anchors Prison of Husks

Glass Head Dolls' doll wakes in the Lithos Plateau hunting a lost love

Two hand-drawn flightless birds standing on a bright island in Reason and Rhyme

Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is co-op for exactly two

Tim FitzRandolph's Flipnote-styled island puzzler lands October 15,

A pixel-art scene from GRANDMA, shown in the Kickstarter campaign video

Zhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridge

Backers can have someone they love redrawn as a pixel character in the Game Boy eulogy.

Come and See: What to Play, September 25

Come and See: What to Play, September 25

Six cinder blocks, seven cats, two body bags.

A comic-book styled platforming scene from Rebounder, printed in halftone dots

A precision platformer drawn in Ben Day dots

Aggro Crab's first signing is ThirtyThree's Rebounder

Aria explores a decaying pixel-art megastructure in METAMORPHOSIS

With Top Hat signing on, METAMORPHOSIS goes full time

luxan's pixel-art horror game sends a nun named Aria across a dead world toward absolution

Brutalist blocks hang over a Manhattan skyline as a flock scatters, from EDGLRD's CONTROL Resonant campaign

Behind Control Resonant's ads: Harmony Korine's EDGLRD

The collective that made Aggro Dr1ft is selling Remedy's paranormal Manhattan.

Hand-painted 3D landscape from Camoflux: Levels and Bosses (Igapo)

When you attack the boss in Camoflux, the landscape wins

Leo Castañeda built the Whitney Biennial’s game installation with grandmother Maria Thereza Negreiros, 96—and its browser spin-off is free to play.

Playable poems now come with peer review

Playable poems now come with peer review

Game Poems, Jordan Magnuson's open-access magazine of short-form videogames, borrows the literary journal apparatus:

Dice Have No Eyes turns push-your-luck into a fever dream

Dice Have No Eyes turns push-your-luck into a fever dream

Arco artist Franek Nowotniak and coder Max Cahill made a gambling roguelike where managing your own greed is the entire design.

Banner artwork for the RESILIENT GLITCHES / HYPERNOMA media art festival in Graz

HYPERNOMA launched a three-year platform for unruly play

Graz's RESILIENT GLITCHES festival closed ten days at Schaumbad

A cartoonish first-person view from a bus driver's seat, passengers seated as the bus barrels down a road

Double Fine's first post-Xbox game is a slapstick bus sim

Action Labs is the newly independent studio's label for weird little experiments, and its debut arrives October 14.

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