Experimental Game Culture This Week: Oct. 14, 2026

October at Killscreen has turned out to be mostly about fear: the Horror Collection, the Scoring Fear talk, and now an issue that opens on a fish who has to swim home to die. I promise it's sweeter than it sounds.

One other thing I've been working on is a new Events page. During the course of my research each day, I've been coming across so many IRL things that didn't quite merit a mention in Radar, but would be tremendously useful if you lived there. For example, this weekend I was able to catch Alice Bucknell's Ground Truthing at art/space here in LA that was only up for a couple days, and Isabelle Frances McGuire's work that I'd seen at the Whitney Biennial is featuring a new Salem Witch game project only playable at the gallery. And, like, this is my job.

The other piece is that social media has moved away from follower-driven, chronological information. The task of knowing what's going on right now is at once easier and harder, since there's no guarantee that what's posted is what's shown. Moreover, I'm hoping to bring more of my interests in contemporary art and performance in line with smaller DIY independent game happenings.

Thank you to the 100 of you who joined this week, and especially to Jim, Paolo and 丁文, who signed up as paid members. Support means so much to me.

This Week's Feature

Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District

Sagan Yee's hookup sim asks what if mermaids lived like Pacific salmon: go home, spawn with everyone you grew up with, then die alongside the whole town.

Thomas Wolfe's posthumous novel told readers You Can't Go Home Again, and generations of writers have mostly taken him at his word. Sagan Yee's answer is stranger and more biological: you can go home, you have to, and it will be the last thing you do. Last Call for the Redding District, the game Yee built for his MFA in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. The player returns for spawning season to a suburban hometown modeled on Yee's own Saskatoon, catches up with everyone they grew up with, decides who to spawn with, and then, along with everyone else, dies.

Yee came to games sideways. Trained in classical animation, they spent nearly a decade at Toronto's Hand Eye Society, the videogame arts nonprofit they led as executive director from 2016 to 2020, before turning to their own practice. They also write speculative fiction, and Redding District began as a short story.

I spoke with Yee in September, shortly after his move to Eugene, Ore., about salmon, dating sims, the virgins who keep his fictional society running, and the workshop that changed how he builds worlds. The game is still in progress, and Yee hopes to finish it within the next year.

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Spandrel

Sticky notes storyboarded Blood Dungeon's animated intro

Messhof credits Baltimore artist Dann Beeson with the intro for Blood Dungeon, and a making-of reel posted the day the game came out shows where it started: a pad of tiny sticky-note panels, shuffled and crossed out until the sequence held. Beeson says he wanted "a bad aesthetic," with flat, hand-drawn characters swung through a 3D camera, and getting something to look that wrong took real work.

A TV station is forming around downloadable art

NIGHT EYE TV, an upcoming platform for experimental art, is introducing itself through the NIGHT EYE TV GUIDE BOOK and a run of featured contributors: alpha_rats, Vinny Roca and others. The site will run short-form programming that advertises each artist's larger work.

Jess Uhre Rahbek Releases This Is Why You Love LEGO

Jess Uhre Rahbek, an assistant professor at Design School Kolding's LAB for Play Design, spent three years embedded with the design team at LEGO House in Billund. This Is Why You Love LEGO, out yesterday from MIT Press, follows one young builder's space pirate ship to name the ways people work with bricks, from following the manual to what Rahbek calls "drifting and shifting."

Kitty Horrorshow

The former practicing witch builds haunted, hostile worlds that treat you as a trespasser.

By Chris Priestman, from the Kill Screen print archive, Issue 09, 2016.

Kitty Horrorshow was once a practicing witch. She still studies the occult arts from her home in Savannah, Georgia, but her main craft is now videogames. The switch came in 2012 with Pontefract, a Twine-made “storygame” about confronting darkness inside an evil castle. With interactive fiction, Horrorshow had found a way to reify the many worlds she imagined. But she craved to make 3D games. And when she discovered the means to, Horrorshow says it was as if the powers of a “half-crazed architecture-goddess” had been granted to her.

Intersection

You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans

Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson, the London studio You+Pea, measure 12 game worlds, from Doom and Disco Elysium to Elden Ring and The Sims 4, in plans, sections and exploded diagrams. John Romero, who designed Doom's levels, writes the foreword. The Thames & Hudson hardback drops Oct. 22 in the U.K. and Nov. 17 in the U.S.

One to Watch

obleak games Facilitates A Creature-Feeding Passion In Full Bloom

In In Full Bloom, you feed a small, helpless creature whatever is nearby until neighborhoods, then continents, count as a meal. obleak games, the Zurich studio of Lisa Bach and Charisse Ann de Leon, calls it a Tamagotchi-inspired Katamari-like about responsibility and mindless consumption. It's out Nov. 4, and a free demo is on Steam now.

Run-ons

• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Releases The Eyes Under the Sky: a free browser horror game set in public toilets, part of a comics series of the same name
• Theo Triantafyllidis Shows Feral Metaverse at Frieze London: a climbable soft spider that logs strangers into one shared multiplayer body
• A showcase from the Mouthwashing label is set for Oct. 20: Critical Reflex lines up 22 unreleased games, with TALLBOYS' Militsioner demo out now
• Miles Buckle invents a Paul McCartney idle game from 1998: a fake anniversary reel for a CD-ROM that never shipped
• Total Refusal Bring Let's Play I Am Old and Tired to Berlin: live gaming theater staged inside Red Dead Redemption 2
• Matt Romein Plays a Text Adventure Live in MILKMAN ZERO: a solo show at Mitu580 in Brooklyn, Dec. 3 to 13
• Playfool's The Server Puts a Data Center Vacuum in the V&A: museum visitors become the cleaning staff, and entry is free

Event

Greatest Hits from Planet Blip: the release party

Hologram Opera and Killscreen celebrate the vinyl release of the Blippo+ soundtrack on Friday, Nov. 13, from 7 to 10 p.m. at Revenge Of in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. Expect pop-up performances from Lord Wright, Chloe Coover and Brent Weinbach, and party music all night from Rob and Jona of YACHT. It's free and all ages.

The extended cut

This week's episode is up: Danny Snelson and I follow Murlo's solo game, a Game Boy cartridge milled in metal for a grandmother, and a MacArthur that names a game, to ask who gets to be the genius. Listen to "Brass, Flesh and a Genius Grant." Helping Hand members have the full Murlo interview in the members' podcast feed.