GAMES THIS WEEK
This week: Ambrose Trataris loses the nightclub to sobriety and injury and rebuilds it inside VRChat, ChillCash’s cursed ghost boat turns out to be a no-combat sailing mystery, and in Inkblood, an Inquisitor holds a magnifying glass to a villager’s window
Centro de Cultura Digital
The Centro de Cultura Digital is the point of entry, so the largest videogame market in Latin America enters a regional policy body through a culture center.
museum
Branden Collins and four collaborators modeled an actual home as an explorable level, then hid a second world called AKUPARA inside it.
oregon trail
Living, learning, and dying on the steps of The Oregon Trail
animation
Alain Mongeau, nine years before founding MUTEK, and Eric Mattson built an eight-minute case that computer graphics inherited the job of the illuminated manuscript.
choreography
Sobriety and injury cost Ambrose Trataris the nightclub, so they rebuilt it inside VRChat, then staged it as a dance work where one body puppets another.
Game Art
Vincent Moulinet and the Distraction.fun collective give an AI reinforcement lessons in queer cruising grounds, thorny controller included.
![A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/pixel-chix-the-apartment_buckle_single-room-animation_1.jpg){kind=tracking}
We go in on a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why Mario 64's water still felt like water.
The Baby Steps game designer reflects on jadedness, embodiment, and building a failson from two decades of human movement
Plus stop-motion goodness from Jack King-Spooner and a bevy of updates from Alice Bucknell
Two decades of self-published comics taught Decadence Comics to take a deep breath. Their first game, Rhizomatic Compound, is built to slow you down.
Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren
Hey Bird!'s occult detective game, coming from Critical Reflex in 2026, lets an Inquisitor watch the past replay through villagers' windows.
Marshmallow Laser Feast built the work with filmmaker Tom Mustill and bioacousticians in Barcelona, then let the animals’ own recordings deform the picture in real time.
An arcade cabinet that writes a stranger’s life, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour clock, and a pigeon romance rebuilt after its map switched off.
Turns out the whole universe is bent steel
Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman opens Sept. 25 in Nashville with game-engine worlds by Ian Cheng and Jakob Kudsk Steensen, plus an MIT Press catalogue.
A clip promised a cursed artifact that follows you forever, but Flux Empyrean had different ideas
Every visitor at the Grand LA wears a wristband and a scent collar, and leaves holding a paper token of the data they generated, to keep or to destroy.
The Future Entertainment Company built a 60-square-kilometer sealed zone on real-world topography, the way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. leaned on Chernobyl.
![The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_installation-view_07.jpg)
An arcade cabinet in Tokyo writes a stranger's life from census data, and the artist who built it explains why you are allowed to go back exactly once.
Tyler Yin and Kayla Drzewicki revisit the class's hand-built sites: a CD-ROM homage, a hammam of grief, pop-up loops of a toxic relationship.
Allen Riley and Andy Wallace wired a bullet hell into the guts of an image feedback loop, then demoed it on a CRT for the games-research crowd.
A games-native animator, associate director of UCLA's Game Lab, cleared one of cinema's oldest showcases with two haunted minutes about a swan.