For Slum Lord's cover, Mason Lindroth stayed in clay

A new Mason Lindroth image is an event in itself these days—the Hylics artist surfaces rarely, and a new image usually arrives from inside that same claymation universe. So it caught my attention that the cover posted to Instagram last week is for someone else's game entirely: Slum Lord, a tabletop tenant simulator by Tanner Simpson of Simpso Miniatures, free to download on itch.io.

Slum Lord itself deserves the attention it is getting. Simpson bills it as a "Tabletop Residential Slice-of-Life Emergent Narrative Simulator"—a solo-play system where you generate an apartment complex and, if the mood takes you, physically model it in miniature, while your tenants live autonomous lives governed by dice rolls and tables. In-game time passes at the speed of real time. The rules document is upfront about its own excess: there are deliberately more gauges than anyone could track, and, in Simpson's words, "The system does not intend to be fun; it exists as an experiential exercise." The downloads even include a folder of alternate covers, which is where Lindroth's contribution formally lives.

The pairing makes deep sense. Lindroth built a whole visual language out of clay, plasticine, and hand-digitized matter—we profiled the material world of Mason Lindroth back in 2015—and Slum Lord is a videogame sensibility passing back out of the screen into physical craft.