GAMES THIS WEEK
A cabinet in Tokyo writes a stranger's whole life out of Japan's census. Plus a pigeon romance killed by a shut-down map service and rebuilt on open maps, a 2011 Kill Screen piece on toddlers who play before they can score, and Queen's Domain, a murky first-person heir to King's Field.
BREAKOUT BABY
BREAKOUT BABY, from developer STH and publisher Assemble Entertainment, hands you an infant and a maze
Noby Noby Boy
Toddlers step out into the world of consoles
Wristwork
The London studio's lockdown-era collectathon returns at true city scale — hundreds of thousands of birds, and one of them is your soulmate.
Gaming Club
Cameron Granger built a warehouse party for the last night on earth and cast you as the Angel of History. Tomorrow at 11am PT, he joins us for thirty minutes to talk about it.
Rising
A cabinet in Tokyo runs a language model that writes a stranger's life from census data, and its maker is still deciding what to call the work he does.
Zeitgeist Studio
Zeitgeist Studio's WINGS-winning debut makes performed happiness a survival mechanic, ahead of a Q1 2027 release through HYPER REAL.
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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
OHSH Projects argued that videogame aesthetics already remade contemporary art, and staged the show itself like a game.
Xiner Lan's UCLA MFA thesis installation stages pseudo-sports on a twin-joystick arcade cabinet, a ritual for building 'the great body.'
The simulation-based solo show opens August 28 at MANA Contemporary in Chicago, with a panel alongside longtime collaborator Yvette Granata.
The Fool's Journey converts characters from Museum of Symmetry and the Apocablyss universe into 22 archetypes, debuting at MUTEK Forum August 26.
The anonymous account cdmx.exe models the capital's characters in PS2-era polygons, and the audience keeps asking where to download them.
Another chorus of can-I-play-this for a dreamlike point-and-click that does not exist yet
Sophia Bulgakova's mixed-reality ritual, drawn from Ukrainian pagan practice, took the Berlin festival's prize for collective presence.
Eric Alfaro photographed household clutter into a Minecraft that runs on dream logic
THE END IS NEAR, made for Victor Barragán's label by Alex Sinh Nguyen, ships as $270 jewelry.
The dev jokes that teeth would wear down chewing on this game—Dark Souls's first-person ancestor finally gets an heir, and the demo is out.
Just a little twist of the truth.
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.