Yuha's Nightmares: Episode One arrives November 10

Most games hide their scaffolding. Yuha's Nightmares hands it to you as a place: from any of its 20-plus dream levels you can slip into the Wireframe World, the invisible architecture of lines and vertices underneath the scene, and look through walls at how the level—and the dream—is built. That inversion now has a ship date. Yuha's Nightmares. Episode One: Catastrophe arrives November 10 on Steam, the first of an episodic run.

The game calls itself a nightmare simulator, and the material is first-person: it is built from the actual dreams of Yuliya Kozhemyako, the St. Petersburg artist who releases work as Supr Experience, with Yuha as the waking life's alter ego. "Don't just observe the dream," the Steam page instructs. "Play the dream." Catastrophe fixates on home—what happens when you suddenly have to leave one, what you bring with you, what can survive translation into a virtual world—and its glitches bring field of view shifts, sinking surfaces, vanishing staircases vanish, and, maybe, a way out.

Yuha's Nightmares has been an exhibition piece for half a decade—it showed in Uncanny Dream, the young-Russian-artists exhibition attached to Ars Electronica's 2021 festival, and Kozhemyako's CV runs through the IBORG collective, a co-curating credit on Games Not Games at Moscow's Electromuseum, the Garage Triennial, and an A MAZE award. Games that live in galleries tend to stay there. This one is walking out the door, one episode at a time. The fascination cuts both ways, too: read on for a wireframe church that looked like a videogame's debug mode made real. Kozhemyako builds the church and then hands you the debug mode.