> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.killscreen.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Not With a Scream, But With a Bloop: What to Play, October 2 - URL: https://www.killscreen.com/not-with-a-scream-but-with-a-bloop-what-to-play-october-2/ - Published: 2026-10-03T01:52:15.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-03T02:55:20.000Z - Description: It just might be wearing a funny hat. - Author: Jamin Warren - Tags: Playlist, What to Play Now, platformer, physics, isometric, oil, climate change, Environment, capitalism, satire, cute, Literature, los angeles, United States *Many thanks to the folks at MUBI for making October’s Playlists available to everyone.* [*Get 30 days free*](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter)*.* 0:00 /0:10 1× ## Playlist 291 ## Crude Oil (2026) ## Peter Nichols ### Play Time: 2–3 hours [Play on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1653020/Crude%5FOil/?ref=killscreen.com) > “The Oil Encounter ... has produced scarcely a single work of note.” \-Amitav Ghosh, 1992 In sci-fi writer Fritz Leiber’s 1964 cosmic horror short story, “The Black Gondolier,” the unnamed narrator found himself with an odd, learned friend named Daloway, who was stricken with a particularly unfortunate obsession. The oil derrick outside his trailer in Venice, California, the home of many human-machine interfaces that pump the crude from beneath its surface, was not simply an instrument of 20th-century commerce, but a portal to something in the great beyond. To his mind, it was more than petroleum; it was the sum total of wishes and desires of the “lush vegetation and animal fats” that “had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams \[...\] until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself.” In Leiber’s story, the oil, the “blood of the earth” as P.T. Anderson’s ominous oilman Daniel Plainview put it, was more than just something to be extracted and sold. It was something else, something of near-timeless origin, and shapeless in form, that was looking for a way out. A way back. By the end of the story, the titular figure dragged Daloway from his bed to parts unknown: the Black Gondolier. Leiber’s narrator had warned that “man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man.” SPONSORED BY MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) 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. [Watch now → ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) Daloway’s fate is, in a way, where [Peter Nichols’](https://www.elfsend.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *Crude Oil* begins, not with a scream, but with a bloop. Released earlier this year, *Crude Oil* starts with an asteroid striking a dinosaur that, millions of years later, becomes a single, sentient morsel of crude that has emerged in the depths of an oil industry research facility and must make its way to freedom. You start small but collect droplets along the way, which increase your mass and locomotion and also serve as a resource you can expend for certain puzzles. You fire the droplets to operate elevators, knock objects off shelves, and even start fires, so resource scarcity forces you to be honest about what you have. (A nice counterpoint to our current predicament.) 0:00 /0:10 1× What emerges is something much darker and multifaceted, communicated both through the environment and through various email consoles sprinkled throughout the game. New World Oil, in fact, knows you exist and has been scouring the earth for a type of superintelligence that will help with both its economic aspirations and military engagements. As we know, oil isn’t just oil; it’s power, and harnessing one as mysterious and omnipotent as Daloway’s nightmares is surely what shareholders require. But when our villain (hero?) emerges, there’s no one left at the facility that’s perhaps been abandoned after a protest, and the compound is in clear disrepair, with rogue robotic vacuums, conveyor belts to nowhere, and printers firing off copies for no one to read. *Crude Oil* is a type of genre inversion that casts you as a cuddly ball of slime bent on destroying the planet, and contrasts with other physics-based fluid works like [Ron Carmel](https://www.killscreen.com/world-goo-co-creator-ron-carmel-indie-success-patent-infringers-and-saving-gamemakers-publishers/) and Kyle Gabler’s *World of Goo* (2008), which have no particular point of view other than the object itself. “Most people \[...\] ask, ‘Why is Gish a ball of tar?’” Chronic Logic’s Alex Austin [wrote in 2004](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/indie-postmortem-chronic-logic-s-i-gish-i-?ref=killscreen.com). “He just is.” It’s no surprise that it’s a game about climate change; I mean, what else could it be? (The derricks are in the desert, and you’re a blob of oil.) Past attempts to engage with oil lean more toward the direct, such as Paolo Pedercini’s 2008 [*Oiligarchy*](https://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/?ref=killscreen.com), which casts you as an oil executive explicitly corrupting politicians and killing clean energy. *Crude Oil* shares nothing of that lineage, and your protagonist is simply adorable, a feint perhaps, but a deception sold through a variety of hats. (A blob wearing a hat!) At one point, I’m wearing a construction hat and operating a forklift, and at another moment, I’ve donned a mind-control hat (a nod to [*Inside*](https://www.killscreen.com/inside-dares-escape/), perhaps my favorite title ever) to control smaller bloblets of goo to open doors on my behalf. But mostly, the lack of structured locomotion makes sliding, swimming, splooshing, and squeezing a delight to work through. “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” [Sianne Ngai writes](https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper%5Fngai.php?ref=killscreen.com), but cuteness also highlights the contrast between my aspirations to overheat the planet and end human life and simply climb up a set of stairs. I’m torn between the demands of caring for this little being and the fact that I am the end of the Anthropocene. 0:00 /0:10 1× Why Nichols chose to tell *this* story in this way speaks to how games might offer a way for us to understand What Is Happening. In 1992, writing in *The New Republic* in a book review titled [“Petrofiction,”](https://amitavghosh.com/petrofiction-and-petroculture/?ref=killscreen.com) Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh lamented the lack of fiction about the extractive century of global oil production. Compared to the spice trade that had yielded several works, he worried that fiction and storytelling weren’t quite up for the geopolitical moment. Twenty years later in the *American Book Review*, [Imre Szeman suggested](https://americanbookreview.org/focus-petrofictions/?ref=killscreen.com) that there was finally a “move afoot to puzzle out the implications of our dependency, as much metaphysical as material, on a slippery substance that connects technological futures with prehistorical pasts in ways that cannot but be difficult to conceptualize.” But I wonder if writing about it or directing films like *An Inconvenient Truth* is going about describing this “very wicked” problem the wrong way. Published in 2018, Nicole Seymour’s *Bad* *Environmentalism* [argues](https://www.publicbooks.org/should-environmentalists-learn-to-take-a-joke/?ref=killscreen.com) that a shame-and-blame approach isn’t the only way to engage with the unfolding catastrophe after the Great Acceleration. We are often torn between earnestness, sanctimony, and awe on one side and fear, shame, and guilt on the other, but the former can push us into hopelessness, where big, simple feelings simply aren’t enough. Seymour suggests a type of “ironic adaptability” that nontraditional media allows us to relieve us through our feelings by laughing through our tears. (Her prime example is *Jackass* regulars Steve-O and Chris Pontius’ 2003 “nature” show *Wildboyz*.) *Crude Oil* is a serious game, but presented in quite an unserious way. Typically, platformers require [moment-to-moment precision](https://www.killscreen.com/a-precision-platformer-drawn-in-ben-day-dots/), demanding rigorous execution as their payoff. But these are in conflict in Nichols’ work, as the climbing and decoding are far less stringent, largely because you are an amorphous blob. So I find myself, in many instances, stuck between a file cabinet and shuffling boxes around, or in one sequence trying to stay still on a box while jumping onto a platform. Or losing mass while scooting on the floor. (“Stick to your fixed-sized character,” the designer of body horror title *Carrion* [warned](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/carrion-game-level-designer-krzysztof-chomicki-on-managing-amorphousness-gravity-and-screams?ref=killscreen.com).) In many platformers, we have hands or feet that keep us balanced, or allow us to orient ourselves before leaping to another surface. But in *Crude Oil*, we are the unhuman: “that which is made human, in which we would have featherless, bipedal walking and talking lumps of oil,” [Eugene Thacker writes](https://www.pagesmagazine.net/en/articles/black-infinity-or-oil-discovers-humans?ref=killscreen.com). (He was talking about “The Black Gondolier,” although it clearly could have been written about platforming in our case.) Thacker’s point is that giving a monstrosity human features is less unsettling than a thing without mass at all, Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable.” *Crude Oil* counterbalances the precision we expect from games like this. The instability of my character is not just a mechanic, but a mood, as well. (Philly's electro-itinerant [Body Meat](https://bodymeat.bandcamp.com/album/starchris?ref=killscreen.com) builds a score that vacillates between office park pensive and triumphant escapism.) I’m often uneasy, like this greasy dollop, which naturally reflects the growing unease we feel about our climate disaster. Year after year of hot summers leaves us wondering about summer vacations, airline travel, and food insecurity, so it’s only fitting that *Crude Oil* would offer no stability as well. It’s all a bit imprecise. Additionally, Nichols chooses an isometric perspective that keeps you outside the frame, ostensibly through the lens of a security camera. It’s a destabilizing verticality, an orientation of [Hito Steyerl’s “view from above”](https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/?ref=killscreen.com) that makes the ground under your metaphorical feet that much more treacherous. So, then, who am I really? Perhaps there’s a clue in the closing sequences. After traversing through sewers and through corporate mazes, my final exit is blocked by an enormous pile of money and a torch. In a move that honors the legacy of the K Foundation’s [legendary performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%5FFoundation%5FBurn%5Fa%5FMillion%5FQuid?ref=killscreen.com), I must do the same, and all the accreted earnings of the New World Oil corporation must go in a cleansing fire before I can make my escape through the toilet to a new, better life. And with that we have a tidy and circular summary of the secret hands—of commerce, of oil, of the military, of capitalism—that have guided me to this present moment. I’m presented with my wealth, and the only way out is fire. I, a superintelligent life form, have transcended the need for capital itself. That oil itself that led us through its divine hand into this mess would somehow lead us out is an ending as fitting as Leiber’s ode to the black horror: 0:00 /0:09 1× *Oh, the Black Gondola’s gonna take you for a ride* *With a cargo of atom bombs and Atlases and nightmares...* *The Black Gondola’s gonna stop at your door* *With a bow-wave of asphalt and a gravel spray ...* *The Black Gondola’ll ... get ... you ... yet!* It just might be wearing a funny hat. Before you go Members get a new Playlist pick every Friday, plus the full archive of past ones. This week: a blob of oil in a hard hat that wants out of the oil industry. 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