A Metal Oil Rig Is Screaming: Oct. 28, 2026
Two horror composers on building dread from a muted brass collage, a chess set where every piece is a tuned bell and a 2011 interview with the historian who kept Assassin's Creed II honest. Plus a hand-drawn deckbuilder where card order decides the duel. All in this week's Experimental Games Weekly.
We're almost done with spooky season! I know nearly half of you are coming from abroad, so Halloween doesn't mean much (and I'd happily trade for a proper Carnival), but I went as Tony Soprano this year. One bathrobe, slippers, and rolled up Newark Star-Ledger, and I was good to go.
Feedback alert! So Friday's Playlist is a mix of new games and older work, let me know if you prefer one or the other? The thinking is that if you haven't played it, It's New to You, but also why be so beholden to the present moment when the backlog awaits.
Thank you to the 100 of you who joined this week, especially Dhruv, who started a paid membership. Welcome in.
This Week's Feature
Scoring Fear: Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves on the Sound of Dread
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.
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.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Be fulfilled by Jane Schoenbrun's TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA. By flesh and fluids, and pure filmic pleasure.
Starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, this MUBI Release is bloody genre-bending bliss from the visionary director behind I Saw the TV Glow. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI.
Get 30 days free to stream great cinema like this and so much more.
Spandrel
Caves of Qud Gets a 1,500-Copy Physical Edition
Lost in Cult is putting Caves of Qud on a Switch 2 cartridge, capped at 1,500 copies, with a fold-out map of the overworld and an essay booklet on the game's history. Jason Grinblat and Brian Bucklew started building it in 2007, and every creature still runs on the same systems you do, down to body parts and faction loyalties.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Further down, a 2011 print interview with the historian Ubisoft hired to keep Assassin's Creed II honest. Helping Hand members read every magazine back issue and get the live Cross-Conversations talks, like the one above, at $55 a year through Dec. 31.
Two New Game Books Are Due From Hollow Press This Month
Hollow Press, the Italian publisher behind Plastiboo's Vermis books, has two new titles due at the end of October. Brad Hock's Big Sally: Lake Emulator is a lore game book of photo collage and sculpted clay, and Andrea Laperni's What Lies Here Is Not a Gift is billed as a cartography investigation game.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Rimowa's New Campaign Film Stars Hideo Kojima
Luggage maker Rimowa put Hideo Kojima in a one-minute campaign film directed by Otman Qrita, talking about performers and motion capture with a case in hand. It follows Prada's Satellites II with Kojima and Nicolas Winding Refn this summer, and ties back to OD - Knock, which still has no release date.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Radar is the short one — three news items, every Tuesday and Thursday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that.
Renaissance Man
Assassin's Creed II's resident historian on why accuracy is overrated.
By David Wolinsky, from the Kill Screen print archive, Issue 02, 2011.
Italian historian Marcello Simonetta came to Yale in 1995 to earn a PhD and wound up solving one of Italy’s oldest and bloodiest mysteries, the Florentine Pazzi family’s conspiracy to overthrow the de' Medici, after poring over literally millions of documents in a university microfilm collection with a trusty family-heirloom decoder.
That research caught the eye of the Assassin’s Creed II team as it was deciding when and where to set the historical fantasy game. Simonetta eventually landed a job with Ubisoft as a historian-consultant to assure ACII’s historical accuracy. But, as he says, getting all the facts right doesn’t necessarily make a better game.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Intersection
Every Piece in This Chess Set Is a Tuned Brass Bell
Fish Fabrications, the Norfolk metal workshop, has finally shown the chess set it made for sound artist Yuri Suzuki during his years at Pentagram. Every piece is a small brass bell turned to ring in tune. In 1968, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp played chess on a board wired to change the sound in the room; Suzuki's set skips the wiring.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
One to Watch
Panflip Studio Teases New Stack Order Demo
Stack Order is a hand-drawn roguelite deckbuilder where the order and placement of your cards decides every duel: cards set beside and above one another trigger and change each other. Panflip, a French studio, wants it to feel like a living graphic novel. A demo is free on Steam now, a new one is coming soon and the full game is planned for 2027.
| Read it on Killscreen → |
Run-ons
- A Spider Named Karl Guards Fallgrade's Rotating City: a black-and-white brutalist horror demo where walls become floors as you run
- Speed in Vitamen Is a Matter of Staying on the Beat: Darwin Modestly's racer ties the throttle to the rhythm
- A Horse Holds a Book Tour in Someone to Steal Horses With: Dylan Pailes-Friedman's Los Santos machinima, shot partly on Super 16mm, now free to stream
- Andrea Gatopoulos' Red Dead Online Short Is Now Streaming: Happy New Year, Jim, a 2022 Cannes Directors' Fortnight selection, spends New Year's Eve inside the Western game
- Daniel Temkin's Folders Language Gets a Browser Emulator: the esolang written entirely in nested empty directories, now without the desktop clutter
- Bleed Map Is a Keepsake Game Played Beside Another Game: Florence Smith Nicholls' free zine turns an hour of play into a hand-drawn chart
- Auriea Harvey Talks Net Art, Tale of Tales and Sculpture: The Endless Forest co-creator in conversation with critic Louis Bury
The extended cut
This week's episode is up: I talk with Sophie Winqvist Loggins, who shot Aniara, and the makers of Mouthwashing and Eclipsium about how a ferry became a spaceship and why the dark does the real work. Listen to The Dread Built Into Ordinary Rooms.
