When you misplay Palimpsest, the film starts to distort

Most games punish your mistakes by taking something from you. Palimpsest punishes them by taking something from everyone else in the room: one person plays, an audience watches the interactive film the game is driving, and every wrong move makes scenes vanish or lets the image and sound distort. The player becomes a projectionist who can damage the print.

The premise, per the announcement, is a "collective imaginal dimension" built from stories that have accumulated and overwritten one another. Four beings move through it, pursued by a network of sentient data centers intent on absorbing every story into a single model: Av'Ril, a cyborg carrying a lost world's last breath; Kura, a spider; Lantern, a sleepless spirit; and Zeetee, a former military drone. Each character is bound to a different gameplay style and a different storytelling tradition, oral, written, visual and digital. As an argument about generative AI flattening culture, it has the rare virtue of being made out of play rather than panel discussion.

Creators Guillaume Roux and Johan Delétang made Palimpsest with Dutch production house Studio Biarritz, with a sculptural installation by Noah Cohen and sound by Charlène Dannancier. It premieres in the IDFA DocLab Competition for Digital Storytelling, running Nov. 12 to 22 in Amsterdam, in the same 20th-anniversary DocLab program where Samuel Baidoo's Plum Road Tea Dream, a Killscreen regular, also screens. The documentary festival keeps turning into one of the best places in Europe to see games misbehave.