A cult that scores your smile heads to gamescom

The recruiting pitch of NAME OF THE WILL is the part that stays with me: pain is salvation, grief is a design flaw, and the compound will fix you. You play Neighbor 3279, newly arrived at HOPE, a 34-floor facility whose masked members wear mandatory painted smiles. The mechanic that carries it — laid out on the game's Steam page — is a seven-strike Conduct System that logs every hesitation, every failed quiz, every interrogation answer, and calculates your fate from the tally.

Days are performance: attend Education courses, cooperate during interrogations, and — the design choice I can't shake — select which fellow member undergoes the day's Reformation ritual. Nights are for hacking restricted systems and dodging the Benevolent Father through the backstage floors. Zeitgeist Studio, a woman-led team of four Hong Kongers scattered across the world, calls the register “daylight horror”: nothing gothic, everything well-lit and cheerfully wrong. Creative director Mandy Wong locates the fear in “the pressure to conform, even when everything in you resists.” The look is 60-plus hand-drawn scenes with the density of an imagined Hong Kong; the score, by Golden Melody Award-winning composer hirsk, is built from the city's soundscape.

The news: after taking the WINGS Award at A MAZE. / Berlin in May — the prize that funds and amplifies gender-diverse teams — the game now has a publisher in HYPER REAL, Sankei Digital's Tokyo label, and a Q1 2027 Steam date. A new demo plays at gamescom's Indie Arena Booth in Cologne, August 26 through 30, filed under a curated grouping called “Democracy at Play,” which feels like the right shelf. A free demo is on Steam now.

Killscreen has been on this beat a long time: games that deputize you into the system you're trying to escape run from Papers, Please to The Westport Independent. What NAME OF THE WILL adds is the smile.