To play Joy's Hands, you have to visit a Chinatown gallery

A bowl, a knife, some snails, and a writhing ferret: that is everything Joy has to work with in Joy's Hands, and the only way to pick any of it up is to go to Chinatown. The 20-minute game runs on a wall-mounted flatscreen inside Isabelle Frances McGuire's Joy is a Puppet at Bel Ami in Los Angeles through Nov. 28. McGuire calls the gallery "the only place you can play" it.

It is also a debut. Joy's Hands is the first game from Recurseware, the studio McGuire formed with Will Lee. Lee designed it and McGuire made the sound and music, per the artist's announcement. Joy is locked in a shed in a fictionalized colonial Salem and has to puzzle through spells to summon the devil, who answers with a game of cat's cradle. Bel Ami's post frames the exhibition as an invitation "into the making of a full-length video game."

The room is what a studio would call a vertical slice, with the concept art cast in bronze: Joy in a cloth bonnet, three gaping bullfrogs each titled Sister, a display of supposedly hexed baskets. McGuire has spent years dragging game assets into sculpture. The 2023 show LOOP put Call of Duty night-vision goggles on an Elvis bust and named another after an Assassin's Creed NPC. Here the pipe runs the other way: the game is the source, and the objects are what it shed.

Ten years ago we argued that The Witch was great because it took the Puritan nightmare at face value and refused to be an empowerment story. McGuire, whose installation was in this year's Whitney Biennial (the one that left a game online), hands you the same bargain with a controller: Joy is the accused, and by Frieze's account the fun is in leaning into the charge. Most studios announce a first game with a trailer. Recurseware built a room around 20 minutes of it and left the rest unfinished in public.