KS Radar: A man and his horse look for a vet

A little pre-amble. When I started Killscreen over 15 years ago, Pitchfork was a huge influence on my thinking. I had been a critic there for a couple of years before joining The Wall Street Journal, but I was always impressed by how well the site captured its moment. Initially, Killscreen was more focused on high-minded takes on BIG games, but as the site moved to the web, volume became important.

Part of the problem, though, was that there simply wasn't enough good stuff to cover day in and day out, so we made do. But 15 years on, it's the exact opposite. Not only has the number of independent games blossomed, but all the other media, from film to animation to theatre to performance, are sprouting game makers as well. I've started flagging things, but there are just too many.

So what to do then? For this week's newsletter, I'm ditching the formal headers and will just give you a rundown of what I'm seeing, a counterpoint to the longer pieces elsewhere.

I think I'll try to keep these snappy, and you can click through. I might make this email-only and try to have more formal news pieces on the site.

A man and his horse look for a vet

Brute Horse is part punch-line, part parable.

Juuuust a bit wackier than what I'm used to, but Prague-based studio Place of Departure is adding new games to the mix after winning two awards at the Art Directors Club. The premise is almost too much to believe, but a barbarian carries his horse across a fantasy world in search of a vet. Tell Christopher Nolan to hold his beer. I suppose the more interesting story here is leading with a strong visual direction informed by a mix of Frazetta, Messhof, and Cartoon Network interstitials.

I had always suspected that small independent ad shops would make their way into games along the way, as ustwo games, makers of Monument Valley, did. It never really happened, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Watch the trailer here, and you can follow Place of Departure's work on Steam or on Instagram.

Talha and Jack want you to talk it out

Abide is light on details, but heavy with clay

Talha and Jack King-Spooner are pushing at the edges of what can be done with stop-motion animation in games. King-Spooner has been doing the messy work of magical realism since 2017 with Dujanah, about the occupation of a fictional country. ABIDE is a break toward psychological horror as you're placed in the waiting room of St. Boniface, a secluded retreat encouraging healing through group therapy. By day, you build out the character's interiority; at night, you venture out at your own risk.

The big draw, of course, is Talha and Jack's animations, another stop-motion game along the lines of Out of Words. They boast that these are "their most detailed and expressive models so far, with magnetised, swappable parts, robust armatures and experiments with new materials." But for me, it's bringing physical objects back into game-making practice, something I've been hoping for since Lumino City back in 2014.

I'm not exactly sure what's happening with xeocho's latest, but put my hands in front of my face, and it's a game I'll play.

This is from early May, but experimental music festival Berlin Atonal reactivated Brennan Wojtyla's LAN installation, first shown at Antwerp's TICK TACK gallery. Jakob Kudsk Steensen noted map-building in Unreal specifically as a key part of his engine-based practice, so revisiting those long nights with a 30-hour deathmatch is fitting.

Animator Eran Hilleli is experimenting with real-time bouncy boys.

No word on what this is yet.

The Prolific Alice Bucknell Thinks on a Planetary Scale

Artist, writer, and game designer Alice Bucknell is becoming quite prolific, announcing not one but three new projects over the past couple of weeks. As part of their residency at Swiss outpost La Becque, Bucknell is building Coyote Time, a climate grief text-adventure about the Mississippi River, and Lazarus Mode, about some of my favorite species that come back from the dead. Then Bucknell premiered Ground Truthing, a bit I saw them lecture on last year, that starts with the famous picnic blanket from Eameses' Powers of Ten and blasts off to planetary scale.

Inside Larry Achiampong's Media Ark

I met artist Larry Achiampong about 10 years ago at a dinner party, and when the moment came to play games, we had a fascinating conversation. Achiampong has integrated games so seamlessly into his practice, most recently with his Gaming Room at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The University of Dundee recently published an interview with Achiampong about his wide-ranging interests, with a walk inside what he calls "the ark," a personal media archive à la the Criterion Closet. Notable is how seamlessly he jumps from Elijah's Close the App, Make the Ting to Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound to Frantz Fanon's Concerning Violence. It's a great insight into an artist who's fully integrated into his cultural diet and an aspiration for someone hoping for a media archive that wide someday.