Murlo's Luddite rhythm games wrapped a run at Aviva Studios

For most of this spring, Manchester's Aviva Studios put an unreleased videogame on the Media Wall of its ground-floor Social space. Something Beautiful, the debut game from producer and illustrator Murlo, showed there April 10 through June 28 as five playable rhythm minigames—handled not with a gamepad but with a bespoke controller Murlo designed, embellished with 3D-printed sculptures of the game's own world. Murlo shared photos of the setup in late July: "It's finished for now."

The full game, wishlistable on Steam, is a music-driven point-and-click adventure set on a single industrial estate where the internet has been cut dead and rumors circulate about a cult and its leader, Puckle. Factory International frames the project as Luddite revival—the nineteenth-century textile workers who broke automated machinery—carried into present-day politics and runaway capitalism. The framing comes more from Murlo, an electronic musician with two albums and a run of EPs whose records have always arrived wrapped in the artist's own illustration; here, the music, the drawings, the sculptures on the controller, and the game are one continuous act of world-building.

The direction of travel is the interesting part. The institution didn't license a finished game; it exhibited one mid-making, hardware included. Killscreen has been tracking how arts institutions learn to hold games—most recently when four decades of consoles moved into the museum—but a venue presenting playable fragments of a work in progress, on a controller built by the artist, is a warmer kind of custody. It treats the game less like an artifact to preserve than a practice to host.

A release date is still "to be announced." The soundtrack, at least, is already home turf.