Podcast

The Buttons Are Under Your Skin [Podcast]

I ask Murlo how a decade of reading dance floors led him to build a Luddite point-and-click game alone, with a sequencer hidden under the player's skin.

I ask Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator Chris Pell, what changes when the crowd is gone and the work is a game someone plays alone in a room.

Something Beautiful is the music-driven point-and-click he is building by himself in Unreal Engine, set on a broken industrial estate much like the one beside Shepshed, the East Midlands market town where he grew up drawing in his bedroom and copying Boris Vallejo to learn anatomy. He tells me how the story grew out of two albums on his own label, Coil Records, Dolos (2019) and Puckle (2023), and why the themed queue for Oblivion at Alton Towers, with its jungle track on a loop, taught him as much about world building as any record did.

We talk about hardcore, both kinds, after his NTS show put Swing Kids and Mudhoney next to club music. He explains why the minigames were always his favorite part of bigger games, from the Pokémon slot machines to Gwent in The Witcher, and how learning MetaSounds from YouTube tutorials let him use pieces of his own music to drive the play. He walks me through the sequencer built into the player's arm, where the skin presses in when you push a button, and the Flesh Disks, record players modeled on MiniDiscs and made of flesh.

He also tells me what he learned from watching strangers play a slice of the game on the Media Wall at Factory International's Aviva Studios, where one visitor tried to open a box by reading the dates behind the pages and left him with a full page of notes. We get to Loom, the point-and-click he keeps coming back to, and to William Blake, Goya and the Luddites. We close on what it is like to make a game alone in a flat after a decade of meeting everyone you know in clubs.