Japan knows how to change gears: we think of it through cherry blossoms and also through a giant lizard named Godzilla. If we see a ninja: Japan. A clean public restroom: Japan. In short, Japan has exported quite a few images that have colonized the global imagination, but one in particular has reached an almost supernatural level of fame: The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Katsushika Hokusai (ca. 1830-1833) The Great Wave off Kanagawa [神奈川沖浪裏] [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] copies held in several museums

We’ve seen The Great Wave in every possible form, from mugs to tattoos, along with a whole series of parodies printed on every available surface. It’s such a famous work that, to really look at it, you first have to move a mountain of merchandise out of the way. And speaking of mountains… In The Great Wave, Hokusai hid Japan’s most immovable symbol inside a frame where everything moves, making it look like a detail. But Mount Fuji is more important than it seems: the work is part of a series called Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

We could describe these thirty-six views as a kind of tour of Japan with Fuji as the recurring guest star. Sometimes huge, sometimes tiny, sometimes crystal clear, sometimes almost hidden: Mount Fuji photobombing.

Forza Horizon is a racing game. And, really, that’s all you need to understand what kind of game we’re talking about. In the new entry in the series, the Horizon Festival arrives in Japan, and Mount Fuji immediately becomes a magnetic presence: while we race through the countryside in an off-road vehicle or through the alleys of Tokyo at night, just like in Hokusai’s works, Mount Fuji is our point of reference. It gives the eye a center.

Katsushika Hokusai (early 1831) Hut On Suwa Lake, Shinano [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] National Museum in Kraków

In Hut On Suwa Lake, for example, Fuji peeks out in the distance while life goes on. Someone is probably thinking about what to cook for dinner, a question that, throughout human history, has always carried more weight than most philosophical disputes.

This happens all the time in Thirty-six Views: Fuji watches, like a sacred element of the landscape, but it doesn’t make a fuss about it

Katsushika Hokusai (ca. 1832) Fuji Under Mannen Bridge On The Fuku River in Fukagawa, Edo [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] National Museum in Kraków

In Forza Horizon 6 as the seasons change, the same road can become a different work: autumn leaves, snow, spring, fields, sunset or dawn light, different sounds, a different atmosphere. It’s not unusual to lose a race because you were too busy looking at the scenery.

Katsushika Hokusai (first edition ca. 1831) Viewing Sunset over Ryōgoku Bridge from the Onmayagashi Riverside [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] National Museum in Kraków

The developers also seem to understand Mount Fuji’s function very well. They place it in the screens that support the game’s structure. Very different moments, all marked by the same presence.

As if Mount Fuji were the punctuation holding up a story.

Katsushika Hokusai (ca. 1831) Enoshima Island, Sagami [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] National Museum in Kraków

Forza Horizon, someone might point out, behaves toward geography like a child left alone in a room full of toys: it wants to touch everything.

Everything is very close. You can go from a snowy mountain road to the coast in an instant, the cars are extremely fast and indestructible, and we, being mature and responsible people, cross it all at ridiculous speed.

Hokusai, after all, was obsessed with movement too. In The Great Wave, there’s the sea. In View of Mount Fuji from Hongan-ji Temple, there is a kite.

Katsushika Hokusai (ca. 1831) View of Fuji from Hongan-ji Temple in Asakusa, Edo [Woodblock print] [Ukiyo-e] [Ink and color on paper] National Museum in Kraków

Where Hokusai puts a kite in the sky, the game can throw in a plane. But we can also fly with our car. Forza Horizon lets us take off thanks to ramps placed exactly where they need to be. And when we snap a photo of our battered car, capturing moments that are either poetic or wonderfully tacky, there it is again in the background: Mount Fuji. Our travel companion.

Playground Games (2026) Forza Horizon 6 [Video game] [Open-world racing] [26½ hours] (Xbox Series X) [Xbox Series S, Windows] Xbox Game Studios

My last two coins

Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. Isn’t that a beautiful title? As often happens with beautiful titles, it’s a bit of a liar. In the end, there were forty-six views: the first thirty-six were successful, and ten more were added. Edo-period DLC, basically. Except instead of new skins and side missions, you got a nice little pack of new woodblock prints. Every era has its own little indulgences.

Until the next episode, ciao!

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House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski begins with a sentence written on a blank page:

This is not for you.

Obviously, it’s a trap. It feels like one of those ads that say “Don’t read below,” or those little mental tricks like “Don’t think of an elephant.” And after that first trick, the book pulls off so many others in a row that the reader starts to wonder whether the problem is them. It’s a novel, an essay, an archive, a typographical labyrinth, a house haunted by incorrect measurements.

Telling the book in a linear way would already mean betraying it, so we’ll proceed carefully, like when you get up at night to go to the bathroom without turning on the light. Spoiler: your little toe is going to suffer.

The plot is a labyrinth: Johnny Truant moves into a house and finds the papers of an elderly blind man who was writing an essay about a documentary in which the Navidson family recounts the investigations the Navidsons themselves carried out on the house. Clear, right?

The house does in fact have a few anomalies: the inside is bigger than the outside, for example. But the strangest thing is perhaps the corridor that appears at a certain point, called the “Five and a Half Minute Hallway.”

If a corridor that long appeared in my house, leading to other empty rooms (and dark ones too, but you can’t have everything), I’d be happy. Finally, a study! That would be my first thought. Finally, a place to dump all my stuff. But if the corridor starts appearing wherever it likes, if it keeps getting bigger, then no, then we have a problem.

What’s astonishing about House of Leaves is the way the impossibility of what it tells becomes real on the page: as we read a story about a labyrinth, the book itself becomes a labyrinth.

There are notes upon notes, appendices, texts inside other texts, voices chasing one another, pages that are almost empty, pages suffocated by words, lines that force you to rotate the volume. The reader can’t just sit there turning pages in order, sprawled out in the usual position of someone reading a novel on the couch. The form becomes the point, and makes us lose our bearings.

The documentary, the essay, Johnny’s story, each version only adds another interpretation and another layer of fear. Every attempt to control the house ends up expanding it. It’s information overload, a very contemporary problem.

House of Leaves ultimately becomes a frightening place for the same reason children work so well in horror: a house is supposed to be the place where we don’t need to orient ourselves. We already know where the kitchen is, even half asleep. We know how many steps separate us from the bed. We know where the corridor ends. Except this time, the corridor doesn’t end.

Mark Z. Danielewski (2000) House of Leaves [Literature] [Novel] Pantheon

In Blue Prince, we inherit a mansion and spend every day trying to make sense of it. Inheriting a mansion sounds like a pretty good start, at least in real life. In video games, things get complicated.

To truly take possession of the estate, we have to find the mysterious Room 46. That would already be suspicious enough. Then we discover that the mansion officially has 45 rooms.

When we open a door, the game offers us three possible rooms, and we decide which one to place inside the mansion’s floor plan. A dining room? A corridor? A bedroom? A room with useful resources? A room that looks promising but will actually turn out to be a dead end? The real question is: will the unpredictable path we create lead us to Room 46?

Every choice changes the route, except the house is not a fixed text. Every day it reassembles itself while we try to reassemble the story of our ancestor. Just like in House of Leaves, the mansion here is both the setting and the narrative structure. On one side there is a building that contains more space than it should; on the other, a building that contains infinite floor plans.

The symmetries between the two works are many: both build an archive, both are packed with details that seem useless at first. On one side there is an impossible abyss, on the other an impossible system of rules. And we can study that system, exploit it, challenge it, but it will very likely end up winning.

Even in Blue Prince, where in each run we don’t so much explore the mansion as literally build it, and should therefore be in a position of power, the feeling is always that we are facing something larger than ourselves.

Explorers and architects taking notes, that’s what we are. Because there are so many things to understand, so many things to know. Every day the house resets. We, on the other hand, have one more piece of information and are always closer to the end of the corridor or to Room 46, both places that should not exist. And yet there they are.

Dogubomb (2025) Blue Prince [Video game] [Puzzle] [18 hours] (Xbox Series X) [PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series S, macOS, Nintendo Switch 2] Raw Fury

Information Desk:

House of Leaves is a complex book. And if a book has a reading guide on the publisher’s website, maybe that book has more floors than anyone could imagine.

Extra question: you didn’t think about the elephant, did you?

And since there’s a reading guide for the book, why not also have a guide for starting to explore Blue Prince?

My last two coins

Houses are one of our safest harbors. We take a little piece of the world, put walls around it, and say: this is mine, this makes sense, this won’t change. The pictures on the walls, the color of the furniture, the bathroom mat. We call it “stability.”

Then big things happen, good or bad, and the spell breaks. Suddenly a Room 46 appears, or an ever-longer corridor, and we no longer recognize anything. It seems to me that maybe what we love isn’t places themselves, but the habits they hold.

Until the next episode, ciao!

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Before we begin, let’s put on György Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello. The first movement is called Dialogo, which is already a tiny joke: there’s only one instrument, and yet the title promises a conversation. Who is it talking to? Itself? The listener? A second cello that missed its train? Actually, I think it’s talking to silence. So, to get straight to today’s topic without too much throat-clearing, it might be a dialogue with empty space.

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.

That is how Peter Brook begins The Empty Space. He strips theater of everything and proves that even without a red curtain, without chandeliers, without actors delivering speeches while clutching a skull, theater survives. All you need is a space, a body crossing it, and someone watching.

And he does this without turning it into three chairs and one sad spotlight pretending to be minimalism. Brook explains that theater does not need accumulation. It needs relation. Someone does something. Someone else watches. And in this way, space becomes a question: what is happening? Put like that, Brook’s idea of theater becomes clear: a question created between actor and spectator. And a question is much more interesting than a chandelier or a beautiful set.

Then Brook introduces the concept of Deadly Theatre. Deadly as in embalmed, polite, respectable, with folded hands and all the vitality of bureaucracy.

Deadliness always brings us back to repetition: the deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects, stock beginnings to scenes, stock ends […]. A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain.

Repetition, in itself, is not the problem. Music is based on repetition. Theater rehearses, rehearses again, makes mistakes, starts over, insists, sweats, takes a bow, and begins again. Life, if we’re being honest, is an endless cycle of laundry.

The problem begins when repetition stops being practice and becomes a conditioned reflex. When, instead of searching for something, the actor has become material for a Pavlov experiment. Raise your hand if you’ve never repeated a joke only because it once made someone laugh. For Brook, Deadly Theatre dies because it repeats without thinking: it is as if it already knows everything before anything has even happened. Which is very convenient, true, but also a very elegant form of death.

Truth in the theatre is always on the move.

First there is emptiness, then repetition, and finally presence. Emptiness is the space for action. Repetition risks killing it, but it can also sharpen it. Presence saves it, because it prevents the gesture from becoming just something already seen. In theater, as in all the tired afternoons we drag ourselves through, the problem is not doing something new, but being truly present while doing the same old things.

Peter Brook (2019) [1968] The Empty Space [Essay] Nick Hern Books Limited

At the beginning of The Witness, we wake up in a tunnel. We don’t know who we are, we don’t know where we are, we don’t know why we’re there. On the upside, in front of us there’s a yellow panel with a line to draw. An elegant way to let us know that nothing will be explained.

Once we leave the tunnel, we find ourselves on an island. Colorful, silent, arranged with almost suspicious precision. Even the trees seem to make sense.

Nobody runs up to us yelling for help. We don’t have a diary full of objectives or an inventory with three differently colored keys. There is silence. There is space. And we cross it.

The emptiness of The Witness is a wonder. A game without dialogue, missions, tutorials, constant rewards, or characters counting on us to save the world, even though we don’t even know how to open a door.

The island is full of panels. On each panel, you have to draw a line from a starting point to an endpoint, following a rule that is intuitive at first. Then less so. Then even less so. Then you spend minutes staring at a grid as if it contained the encrypted will of a distant rich relative.

Here comes repetition. Always the same action: drawing a line. Again. Again. Again. The risk of Deadly Theatre is right around the corner, dressed up as a puzzle game: old formulas, old tricks, old ways of beginning and ending a scene or in this case a grid. But The Witness never lets the gesture become mechanical. The moment the player thinks they know where to sit, the game comes up from behind and moves the chair.

The most interesting thing about The Witness is that it teaches without explaining. Every area of the island introduces a grammar: it may be based on symmetry or colors, on shadows or separations, on sounds, on shapes. And every time, without having to read a single line of text, we learn to speak the language of the panels.

Every grid we encounter refuses to be solved if we use only what we learned in the previous one. No conditioned reflexes. If a rule becomes automatic, it is no longer enough.

I don’t think I can put into words how close The Witness comes to my purest idea of a masterpiece. Of course, you need a patient, curious eye, one that does not make haste, or shooting enemies, its personal creed. The Witness is paradise for people who go to the beach and like doing crossword puzzles, not for those who rush off to smack a ball around at the water’s edge. For those blessed with this spirit, little by little the game opens up, and you start seeing lines everywhere. Even in tree branches or in the outline of a cloud. The entire island becomes a puzzle.

The Witness is not a hero, a chosen one, a savior with a sword twice his size. Truth is always on the move. The witness has seen, has played, and now knows.

Jonathan Blow (2016) The Witness [Video game] [Puzzle] [17 hours] (Xbox Series X) [Windows, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S, macOS, iOS] Thekla, Inc.

Information Desk:

Sure, Jonathan Blow is the brilliant mind behind The Witness. But he is not the only person who contributed significantly to its success. The game’s gorgeous aesthetic is the result of a team effort, and on the site linked here you can discover, through the words of Luis Antonio, one of the people who worked on it, how the aesthetic fused perfectly with the game.

We said that the first movement of Ligeti’s Sonata for Solo Cello is titled Dialogo. And the second movement? Capriccio. And the title delivers exactly what it promises.

My last two coins

I like empty space. It feels full of possibilities. For example

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So many things I could have written in this space. I’ll leave it to you, so you can use it for something you’ve been meaning to think about for some time. This is the empty space for doing that.

See you next episode, ciao!

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I have a question for you: can you make a series of more than a thousand paintings all devoted to the square?

Apparently, yes, you can. Especially if color is what makes it work. Josef Albers began the Homage to the Square series in 1950 and kept going until 1976, the year he died. They are all paintings of squares inside other squares, in an experiment that feels a bit like The Hunger Games or the battle royale mode in online games: all the colors locked in one room, and let’s see what happens. It sounds unbelievably simple because there are no figures, wars, saints, dogs, or battles. But maybe that is exactly what makes the series so sophisticated and hypnotic: the power struggles between colors take over the whole painting.

Josef Albers (1950-1976) Homage to the Square [Painting] [Geometric abstraction] [Mostly: oil on Masonite] Works in several collections, including the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation

A yellow next to an ocher swells with pride, an orange brushed by red suddenly turns shy, a gray, if placed in the right spot, discovers it has a personality of its own. Albers spoke of “climates of color,” and in two words that phrase explains what happens in our eyes when we look at one of his Homage to the Square paintings.

But color does not have to stay inside a frame. James Turrell, for example, decided to use color outside a painting and use it to occupy as much space as possible.

James Turrell (2013) Aten Reign [Installation] [Light art] [Light and space] Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

For a few months, at the Guggenheim in New York, Turrell transformed the museum’s famous rotunda into an optical experience. Concentric ellipses of light generating wonder. Like a close encounter with an alien culture.

Walking into a work like this means accepting that, for a few minutes, the rules of space will behave differently. As happens in other works of his too, including Aftershock just below, space loses its walls, corners, ceilings. There is no longer any depth your eye can reliably measure. Color invades everything and knocks away the points of reference we are used to. Edges soften, distances seem to stretch or shrink, and we end up inside a kind of hallucination that takes us in completely.

James Turrell (2024) [2021] Aftershock [Installation] [Light art] [Light and space] Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen

There are video games that place a lot of importance on color. There is a Nintendo series called Splatoon, for example, where the whole point is spraying paint around. Then there is Chicory: A Colorful Tale, which we talked about in an older episode, where you have to bring color back to the world. But we need to get to the heart of the matter, so I do not want to talk about games that use color. I would rather talk about a game made entirely out of color. A game where you do not shoot, do not run, and do not save the world.

I Love Hue Too is a collection of mosaics, really an endless collection of mosaics, made of tiles that fade from one color into another.

Each level appears in perfect order, then everything gets mixed up. Thankfully, some tiles stay fixed, and with their help we have to rebuild the perfect transition from one tone to the next. That’s it.

A lilac leaning a little too far toward blue, two greens that clearly have beef with each other, how did that red end up among the yellows? I Love Hue Too turns color into a truth. Finding the right tile is a small but constant pleasure, and somehow it works every single time. And in pursuit of that small pleasure, little by little, we turn into restorers cleaning up one chromatic earthquake after another, devouring one level after another.

We are not aware of it, but we are full of chromatic grammar. Traffic lights, ripe fruit, the sky changing moods, someone’s face right after reading the latest gas bill. Colors have their own way of getting into our heads. In front of one of Josef Albers’s squares or inside one of James Turrell’s transformed environments, our body reacts physically, and the brain changes with it. I Love Hue Too builds a puzzle on a language we already know without realizing we know it.

When we first find ourselves staring at a shattered mosaic, the first thought is that it must be impossible to solve. Then our fingers pick up a tile and place it exactly where it belongs. Somewhere in our heads, every color already has its perfect place: the precise point between too much and not enough.

Zut Games (2020) I Love Hue Too [Video game] [Puzzle] [Infinite] (iOs) [Android] Zut Games Ltd.

Information Desk:

Aten Reign redrew the Guggenheim in New York. In this article you can see all kinds of colors, all kinds of perspectives, all kinds of worlds.

I Love Hue Too is the sequel to I Love Hue. Who could have guessed? The people at Zut Games do know their wordplay.

After Albers, Turrell, and I Love Hue Too, even a row of macarons starts to look like a small work of art. No link this time, just a suggestion for a new pastime the next time you go to a pastry shop:

My last two coins

Sometimes I get the feeling that nobody cares about nuance anymore. Whether the subject is feelings, corn, or self-defense, everything gets hacked apart with an axe. You are either on this side or that side. Either on one team or the other. It would be like saying you can only be sad or happy. What kind of world would that be? I am never simply sad, in the sense that I never fit neatly inside the borders of that word. I am melancholy, heartbroken, low, cracked, in a bad mood. And that is only to name a few. Same goes for happiness. Not to mention that sometimes I am one shade of sad and one shade of happy at the same time. I do not know how you feel about it, but if I’m crazy, go ahead and tell me. Though I do not think I am exactly crazy. I am more dazed, alienated, visionary, senseless, odd, delirious, off-kilter. You get the idea. See you next episode, ciao!

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This is the beginning of Rain, a game whose protagonist is in bed with a fever. Sure, thirty seconds later he gets up and starts wandering around in the rain, but then again, he doesn’t have to write a newsletter.

I wanted to mention Rain because at the heart of the game there’s a very poetic idea that only Japan Studio could have pulled off (a Sony studio that gave us some remarkable experiments, before being shamefully shut down): the character is invisible and only revealed by the rain.

It would be nice if someone revisited that idea with today’s technology. The same technology that gave us, for instance, Tylenol.

Acquire, Japan Studio (2013) Rain [Video game] [3½ hours] [PlayStation 3] Sony Computer Entertainment

My last two coins

Short episode, short sign-off. See you in the next one, ciao!

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This is a special episode of Artcade. Not just because Stefano didn’t write it, but because that fact directly shapes the way this episode is put together. If you’ve developed a pleasant habit of enjoying the elegant and cultured pairings of the Master of Artcade, you may be surprised by the slapdash spirit of this installment, built on a match-up that basically introduced and declared itself. To make up for my artistic and cultural blind spots, I’ll be resorting to insufferable little tricks that reek of stale first-person anecdotes.

So then, in order: The Smiths, meaning the Manchester band from the Eighties. I didn’t discover them in the Eighties, but much later, with curious timing. A lucky convergence of events that gives at least a little sense to what I’m about to write. Because even though The Queen Is Dead (1986) was sitting at home on CD, universally recognized as one of the essential records of its decade and probably the album most often suggested as the place to start if you want to get into the Smiths, I had never actually listened to it.

Like so much of the music I love, the Smiths came to me as a gift from someone else. Few experiences depend on being shared as much as music does, which can be revealed, suggested, introduced by friends or relatives. And every time it works, every time you end up loving that music, it becomes a gift of literally immeasurable value. The Smiths were given to me by Roberto, one of the friends I used to write about video games with in the early 2000s for Nintendo la Rivista Ufficiale (basically Italy’s equivalent of Nintendo Power). Roberto was, and still is, passionate about video games, but above all about music, and with him we talked more often about the latter than the former. So one day we’re talking about Morrissey’s lyrics, the voice and anti-charismatic leader of the band, or Johnny Marr’s flashes of brilliance on guitar. Then he brings me a few Smiths records and a special issue of the storied Italian monthly Il Mucchio Selvaggio, retracing the story of a band that had already been dust for fifteen years by then.

From that moment on, guided by Roberto and Il Mucchio Selvaggio, I liked The Smiths. Morrissey’s warbling voice, romantic and breezy even when dealing with terrible deaths and the terrible habits of the British people, is matched only by the natural ease with which Marr keeps pulling little tricks with his guitar. It’s instantly recognizable, and for good reason: these days he regularly shows up as a guest of honor on other people’s records, most recently the intriguing The Mountain by Gorillaz.

The Smiths manage to keep a pop lightness they really shouldn’t be able to have, considering what’s being said and the hilariously decadent, depressed tone the songs often drag around with them.

There’s that same pop lightness in killer7, the game Goichi Suda directed for Grasshopper Manufacture and Capcom in 2005. Even now, in the weeks following the release of his Romeo is a Dead Man, Suda is still mainly identified as “the guy behind killer7.” Everything he made afterward carried the same experimental charge, and the same confusion, as the hypnotic 2005 adventure, without ever quite matching its effectiveness. In the editing of certain scenes, which recalls a certain kind of Japanese action cinema, or in the aesthetic and character design of the figures in motion, extreme and/or Tarantino-esque, killer7 seems more amused with itself than it has any right to be, given the themes it deals with.

killer7 is an extremely violent game, both in the gameplay scenes where you unload firearms into wandering kamikaze-minded souls known as Heaven Smile, and in the dialogue the seven protagonists exchange with an incomprehensible and therefore unforgettable supporting cast. With the same punk fury as a twenty-year-old who wants to tear the world apart, Suda writes lines about a world in flames, drunk on sex and violent death, without ever fully bringing it into focus or maybe half-glimpsing some order that might give meaning to the whole thing. And perhaps that’s exactly why, twenty years later, it still has an allure that’s hard to describe or justify. You get the feeling there’s something more inside and behind killer7, but it’s also entirely possible there’s absolutely nothing under the dress.

We said there were seven protagonists in killer7, but that leaves out one crucial detail: they’re all emanations of a single man, Harman Smith, an elderly professional assassin now confined to a wheelchair. Those seven are his personae, in the Latin theatrical sense of the word, meaning masks. Harman Smith becomes Garcian Smith, Dan Smith, Kaede Smith, Kevin Smith, Coyote Smith, Con Smith, and Mask de Smith. By now you’ve probably already figured out where this is going: they’re the Smiths. Not the ones from Frankly, Mr. Shankly, but Smiths all the same. At least this much is not accidental: Suda loves Seventies and Eighties punk and post-punk music, and this is his tribute.

When I played killer7 in 2005, none of this was immediately clear to me, partly because Suda’s obsession with references was only just starting to take shape and find its voice in that game. It would keep happening in the years that followed, starting with No More Heroes in 2007, which borrows its title from the best-known song by the Stranglers. But I caved in front of the titles of the letters delivered to the protagonists by carrier pigeons that show up from time to time in little corners of the levels, while you’re barreling down fixed paths, shooting, blowing things up, and understanding absolutely nothing.

Each of the eight letters bears the title of a Smiths song. First comes Still Ill, then Rusholme Ruffians, then Well I Wonder, Meat Is Murder, Back to the Old House, Half a Person, Rubber Ring, and Cemetry Gates. Back then I didn’t catch that even the pigeons’ names followed a pattern, borrowing from the so-called Bond girls, the irresistible women of the James Bond movies. When I quickly connected the dots and realized that inside one of the most anticipated games of 2005 there was this flood of passion for a great band, The Smiths, I couldn’t help developing a more intimate relationship with the work of Suda and his team. Because video games are great and interesting, but music is in a league of its own, and finding inside the former not licensed songs but the names and surnames of those songs as part of the narrative fabric... well, that was a jolt. In killer7, Suda threads The Smiths’ words into the game, showing us that there’s a passion there that goes far beyond the convenient trick of dropping a famous track into a trailer or an ending sequence.

That’s why killer7 and the Smiths are forever intertwined, and why it’s worth putting up with its slippery monologues, its rambling, the imprecision of the gameplay systems, and the lack of a clear direction in how the experience is shaped.

Gōichi Suda (2005) killer7 [キラー7] [Video game] [On-rails shooter] [Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2] Capcom

My last two coins

Today the video game industry has grown so large that it absorbs artistic influences of every kind. A huge monster that devours everything and spits it back out into other fields, as with the Super Mario movies or the TV adaptation of The Last of Us. Maybe that’s why I tend to forget that even twenty years ago, when you could still imagine counting the polygons on screen, video games were already entangled with all sorts of artistic forms. I really do think it’s time to explore the past as well. Is a new column on the way? Maybe. And after that outrageous tease, what is there left to add? Nothing, I’d say, other than a thank you to Mattia. Until the next episode, ciao!

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The Plucky Squire is a game set inside a book, and that alone makes it perfect Artcade material. But Jot, the protagonist, isn’t content to stay there neatly between one page and the next: every now and then he jumps out of the volume and runs off the pages as if he were the digital opposite of Snake Plissken in Escape from New York.

In the middle of this adventure appears Artia, the creative capital of the land of Mojo, a peaceful retreat for many artists of centuries past and the worst nightmare of every surveyor alive. One look at almost any house is enough to figure out that the people living there must be impossible. But that’s exactly its charm. Today we’ll meet some of its most famous residents.

The first painter we’re stopping to chat with is one of the most beloved in the world, and maybe it’s no accident that his biography also resembles a tragic legend. Vincent van Gogh is the patron saint of tormented talent, proof that humanity can’t really love an artist without adding at least a splash of suffering.

And yet, when you look at his sunflowers, the torment gives way to a kind of restless energy, as if they were about to catch fire or start talking.

Vincent van Gogh (1888) Three Sunflowers in a Vase [Drei Sonnenblumen in einer Vase] [Painting] [Oil on canvas] [73 cm x 58 cm] Private collection, USA

You probably recognized him from the house alone, even without the mustache. There’s something unique about certain clocks that melt like cheese left out in the sun, the creation of one of the great saboteurs of the twentieth century.

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Balthasar van der Ast (1622) Still Life with Basket of Fruit [Painting] [Still life] [Oil on panel] [49.5 x 81.3 cm] North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, US

I’ve always been struck by the difference between the English name for this genre of painting, still life, and the Italian one: natura morta which, translated literally, would be “dead nature.” In Italian, all the attention goes to the cut stem, the fruit that may still look colorful and beautiful but has already been severed from the plant. It’s dead. That’s that. Still life, on the other hand, puts the emphasis on immobility. Life is frozen inside the painting and separated from the movement that defines every living being. Even the tiniest movement will do, like a sloth’s, or mine at 7 in the morning. In a way, once life is made still, it becomes immortal.

Giovanna Garzoni (c. 1650) Melon on a Plate with Grapes and a Snail [Painting] [Still life] [Tempera on parchment] [35.5 cm x 49.5 cm] Palatine Gallery, Florence, Italy

Giovanna Garzoni’s Melon on a Plate with Grapes and a Snail is a perfect example of what I mentioned in the introduction. Everything looks delicious. Or rather, it would look delicious, if it weren’t for the fly. The snail at least has the decency to head toward the leaves. The fly does not. It has to steal the scene and remind us what we’re really looking at: not a scene of opulence, not a celebration, not a triumph of life, but a feast that is about to spoil, where everything is already sliding toward rot.

All those seventeenth-century painters who filled their canvases with objects, fruit, and extravagant flowers did it to remind us that everything decays. The sneaky bastards. Just look at that melon. Speaking of symbols. Painters lure us in with bright colors, and only after we’ve stepped closer do we realize that time has already landed on all that wonder with its tiny little legs.

Time Flies puts us in charge of those tiny little legs. Maybe controlling a fly is not your greatest aspiration, but give me a second. The flies in Time Flies have a task list that looks like one of those things-to-do-before-you-die lists. Here’s one example. There are others in the game too.

The fun lies in figuring out how to fulfill some of those wishes, some of them pretty ambitious for a creature that is usually remembered mainly for where it lands.

Okay, but what does this enterprising fly have to do with the flies in still lifes? Those had a very different existential posture. I’ll get there right after the break.

In Time Flies, time is everything, and a playthrough never lasts more than two minutes. A fly’s life is short, and the seconds you have left are displayed clearly in the top-left corner.

As if dodging too-hot light bulbs, too-fast fans, and droplets falling from badly closed faucets weren’t enough, time itself keeps you from seeing all the wonders hidden in the game world.

This is where the game pulls off its meanest trick. The fly in a painting, an omen of decay, reminds us that even a marvelous fruit at the peak of its beauty already has its fate sealed. It reminds us that death is universal. Fair enough. Kings die, peasants die, melons die, flies die, and sooner or later even the person who says “video games are stupid” dies, as does the one who says “video games are intelligent.”

Time Flies keeps that old memento mori intact, from the Latin: “remember that you must die,” but it adds one detail that makes the whole thing much harder to contemplate from a safe distance: not everyone gets the same amount of time.

At the beginning of every run, the player has to choose a country of origin, and depending on that choice they get more or fewer seconds. Same fly, same to-do list, different deal.

That is how a game that seemed merely clever turns ruthless. A perfect example of the kind of little game Artcade loves. A memento mori can remind us that we all vanish. True, but also convenient. Universal truths are elegant partly because they can hide the chaos underneath. Time Flies refuses to do that. It keeps death universal, but makes time unequal. The fly suddenly belongs somewhere. It belongs to a country, to a statistic, to a set of conditions it did not choose. Choosing one country rather than another can mean not having enough time to learn something new. Or to take in a beautiful view.

Michael Frei, Raphaël Munoz (2025) Time Flies [Video game] [Adventure] [2 hours] (Nintendo Switch 2) [PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Mac] Panic

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Life expectancy changes depending on where you are, but what if I told you it can change from one train stop to the next too? Here’s an infographic for the Manchester area.

The most famous memento mori in Italian cinema appears in a movie starring Massimo Troisi, who outside Italy is remembered mostly for Il Postino, while here his comic talent is what people celebrate above all. In Nothing Left to Do But Cry, in the clip below, a friar yells at him, “Remember that you must die!” and he replies, “Yes, yes, I’ll write that down, absolutely.”

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People like writing “life is short” because it sounds wise and looks good on mugs, posters, and underneath Instagram photos of sunsets. They write “life is short” because “life is short and also profoundly shaped by geography, class, infrastructure, and neglect” is much less elegant. It is also more expensive to print on a canvas tote bag.

That is probably one reason I love writing Artcade: it lets me talk about a melon with a fly on it and a video game where you buzz into furniture; and it lets me show the best things art and video games can do. Like taking ideas we think we’ve already understood and forcing us to lean in. Sometimes close enough to hear the buzzing.

Until the next episode, ciao!

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Odilon Redon (1890) Closed Eyes [Les Yeux clos] [Painting] [Symbolism] [Oil on canvas] [44 × 36 cm] Musée d’Orsay, Parigi

If painting is usually thought of as the art of looking, that is only because nobody bothered to ask Odilon Redon. For him, the most interesting things begin when sight steps aside.

Closed Eyes feels like the manifesto of that idea: a face suspended between sleep and disappearance, held in a calm too deep to be entirely real. I’d say it has the look of someone who wouldn’t give you the time of day. But this is Artcade, so let’s put it more politely: it carries a kind of serene estrangement, distant enough to seem untouchable and still close enough to be felt. Honestly, the previous version gets there faster.

Odilon Redon (1882) The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity [L’Œil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini] [Drawing] [Symbolism] [Lithograph] [25.9 x 19.6 cm] The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Before becoming the painter of radiant color, Redon was known for his charcoal drawings and dark lithographs, filled with floating heads, giant eyes, impossible creatures, and thoughts that seemed to have grown arms and legs. He poured that overactive imagination straight into the work. By the time he had to come up with a title, he may have had very little energy left, but that does not change the fact that The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Toward Infinity is an unsettling marvel.

Odilon Redon (c. 1914) The Cyclops [Le cyclope] [Painting] [Symbolism] [Oil on cardboard mounted on panel] [65,8 × 52,7 cm] Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo

And yet Redon is not only darkness and hallucination. Take The Cyclops, for example. Nobody would deny that the creature in the painting is a monster, and yet the terror is almost imperceptible, leaving room for something strangely tender, the kind of being that could almost wander into a Nintendo game. Redon’s creatures do not merely threaten: they look, they float, they wait. They live in an emotional world that throws the viewer off balance, a world far stranger and more disarming than it is cruel. At least that’s how it seems. Just to be safe, maybe choose a different picnic spot.

Odilon Redon (between 1895 and 1900) The Sleep of Caliban [Sommeil de Caliban] [Painting] [Symbolism] [Oil on wood] [48,2 × 38,5 cm] Musée d’Orsay, Parigi

Ever wonder how painting moved beyond Impressionism after its overwhelming success? Odilon Redon is one answer. I also wonder how cinema plans to move beyond Marvel, but that is a separate problem.

Redon painted landscapes the Impressionists were never going to see. Scenes where floating heads visit us in the narrow space between dream and waking life. Freud was still developing his theories, but other artists and thinkers were already walking down nearby roads by other means. Redon was someone who took the unconscious seriously.

Odilon Redon (between 1905 and 1908) Ophelia Among the Flowers [Ofelia entre las flores] [Painting] [Symbolism] [Pastel on paper] [64 × 91 cm] The National Gallery, Londra

The premise of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is well known: once a year, the Paintress awakens and paints a number on her monolith. Each time, it drops by one. The game opens on the day the number goes from 34 to 33, and everyone aged 34 turns to smoke and disappears. That is why an expedition sets out each year, because once you only have one year left to live, the only thing left to do is leave and hope you can stop the Paintress and break the cycle of death. In other words, light stuff.

But Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not just an interesting premise. It would take a whole series of episodes to unpack all of its artistic references, so this may well become the first entry in a future One Bit Of series devoted to the game. Who knows. For today, though, we are pairing it with Redon’s paintings.

Let’s go back to Closed Eyes, where an immense figure stands before us in total indifference. Part Paintress, part fantastical creature, like the one you can see in the screenshot above.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is certainly tragic, certainly grand, certainly full of spectacle. But beneath all that, it feels like a vision. It moves like something half-remembered, or too vividly dreamed, or painted by someone trying to give form to an inner world before waking up and losing it. Redon knew that territory well. You can see it both in his more radiant paintings and in his darker lithographs, where black and white becomes the medium he sinks deepest into. Those are the same roots feeding some of Expedition 33’s key scenes.

With Redon, we step into fantastical environments, unsettling and yet strangely enveloping. Creatures that feel threatening, yet inspire a strange kind of affection. Floating faces. Mental landscapes. A world made of vivid colors that feel real, perhaps because all of us know the territory of dreams from experience.

In the four images that follow, Redon turns into a video game.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does not reproduce a single canvas or one of Redon’s exact techniques, but Lumière, the city from which the game’s protagonists depart, feels painted with the same brush. Neither Sandfall, the developers, nor Redon are interested in objective description. They are drawn instead to emotions and ideas. The spaces of Expedition 33 feel like externalized mental states: grief rendered as architecture, acceptance as flowers, resilience as combat. The whole adventure is a terrible, beautiful journey, and you may want to approach it with a notebook in hand. You never know when those notes might come in handy outside the game.

Sandfall Interactive (2025) Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 [Video game] [Role-playing game] [29 hours] [Xbox Series X] [PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox Series S] Kepler Interactive

Information Desk:

A soi-même (To Oneself) is Odilon Redon’s diary, published in 1922, and you can read it online if you know French.

“Year by year, she erases us.” If you are still not convinced you should play Expedition 33, the official website opens with exactly that line. Efficient, cruel, memorable. Marketing departments dream of copy like this and usually wake up with “Two for the price of one.”

And if what fascinates you most is Redon’s black-and-white period, full of strange creatures, eyes, and floating heads, MoMA has a beautiful online collection you can browse from the comfort of your couch.

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Many things refuse to be seen with open eyes. Maybe that line alone would be enough, with no need to add anything else. Anyone who has ever looked at the world with their eyes closed already knows. Anyone who hasn’t may simply have no way of learning it. Everyone has their own skin to live in. Until the next episode, ciao!

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In 1970 Robert Smithson decided that the Great Salt Lake needed a spiral. He traveled to Utah and built one out of rock and earth, about 450 meters long, curling into the pinkish water like some prehistoric fossil. The work is called Spiral Jetty, and it doesn’t hang on a wall like a painting; you can’t wait for it to show up in an exhibition somewhere near where you live. You actually have to travel to see it and contemplate the piece within the landscape itself. Land art often works this way: it reorganizes matter already present in the environment, shifts it around, makes the landscape aware of its own shape. In doing so, it changes the way we read a space.

Robert Smithson (1970) Spiral Jetty [Land Art] [Earthwork] [Basalt rocks, soil, salt crystals] Great Salt Lake, Utah

Walter De Maria does something different, while still staying close to the principles of land art. New York Earth Room is a loft filled with soil. Put that way, it sounds like a construction company’s mistake, but the white walls, the controlled lighting, and the interior that smells faintly of damp earth bring matter back to the center of the experience, as if the room had returned to a primordial state. The idea is to make us feel like temporary guests on a planet much older than we are. I’m not entirely convinced it succeeds—unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to visit it yet—but I do love the intercom you have to ring just to be let in.

Walter De Maria (1977) New York Earth Room [Permanent installation] [Indoor earthwork] [250 cubic yards of soil] Dia Art Foundation, New York

So far we’ve seen artists use materials to change a landscape—or even a house. Michael Heizer takes things a step further and chooses subtraction instead. In 1969 he dug two enormous trenches in the Nevada desert and titled the work Double Negative. No sculpture, just the void left behind after 240,000 tons of rock were removed to create a space that didn’t exist before. Traditional monuments accumulate; Heizer removes, carving his decision into the earth. The sculpture is the space left behind.

Michael Heizer (1969) Double Negative [Land Art] [Earthwork] [Excavated rock in the desert] Mormon Mesa, Nevada

If you’ve been reading Artcade for a while, you know this is the moment when a video game enters the picture. But which video game could possibly connect with land art? Wouldn’t it require a landscape, soil, some kind of physical contact with the land? There is a game much closer to all of this than you might think. I’m talking about:

A Game About Digging a Hole has an extremely simple narrative premise. A small truck pulls up and posts a flyer on a notice board.

Curious, we go check it out and discover we’re about to make the deal of a lifetime.

A house for sale for ten thousand dollars. And that’s not all: there’s treasure buried in the backyard. Naturally, we buy it.

Not a bad little house. And in the yard there’s an X drawn on the grass. Armed with a strange motorized shovel (included with the house), we start digging.

A Game About Digging a Hole delivers exactly what its title promises: a patch of land to dig. No epic quest and no princess to rescue like in your typical Super Mario game. Here you simply press a button and make a bit of earth disappear. It hardly matters if, especially with the more advanced models, our electric shovel ends up looking more like a vacuum cleaner than the tool it’s supposed to represent.

Repeat it enough times and the act of digging becomes a mantra—a form of concentration and, later in the game, something close to stubborn meditation. As in the land art piece Double Negative, we intervene in the landscape by removing material, and progress is measured by the depth we reach. The hole grows, and the world above slowly drifts away.

Like all pleasant, hypnotic, and slightly pointless activities (none come to mind right now), it’s easy to get carried away. You keep digging longer than necessary, just to see what this mystery might be hiding, if it’s really a mystery at all.

Is there actually treasure? How deep can I dig? Those questions reminded me I was playing a game. The answers satisfied me, up to a point, not because they were disappointing; on the contrary, for a game that lasts about two hours everything feels very well put together. But the truth is something else. The truth is that I just wanted to keep digging.

Cyberwave (2025) A Game About Digging a Hole [Video Game] [Simulation] [2 hours] (Xbox Series X) [Windows, Xbox Series S, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch] rokaplay Bou·tique, Drillhounds

Information Desk:

If you’re curious how far land art can go, take a look at The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria. It’s a rectangular field measuring one mile on one side and one kilometer on the other, with 400 steel poles arranged across it. Or perhaps you’d rather visit it in person.

What if the real enemy in A Game About Digging a Hole were the real estate agent? Contains spoilers.

And if you’re curious to see how Spiral Jetty was built, there’s a clip on YouTube from the film Robert Smithson himself made about the project.

My last two coins

We’re used to thinking about ambition in vertical terms: towers, rankings, numbers that keep climbing higher. Yet many of the most radical gestures we can make point downward. Archaeologists dig to understand the past, psychologists dig to explore our inner lives, drills dig to extract resources, and algorithms dig to uncover our desires. Rising upward often means leaving a place behind, escaping from where we are. Digging, on the other hand, means going deeper, staying present, leaving a mark. In other words, digging means changing the world and leaving your trace behind. Maybe that’s why a simple digital hole can become so meaningful. I’m going back to digging. See you in the next episode, ciao!

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Today was also supposed to be the paywalled episode, but I’ve been wondering whether a paywall still makes sense at all (if you have thoughts, tell me), and given the occasion I decided to skip it. If you’d like to support the project, you know how. Enjoy the read!

We’re at the beginning of Fallout 3, and today, as you can tell from the decorations popping out inside this sad little bunker, we’re celebrating.

It’s my birthday and everyone seems genuinely happy… what did they get me?

A Pip-Boy 3000? This is basically an Apple Watch that went to the gym and decided to live on your forearm. They give it to everyone who turns ten. I was expecting something better.

Wow! I knew there was more! I wonder what it is. I’m pretty sure I’ll find out in the next screenshot.

A rifle! There is no better gift in a video game. And what can I shoot? Pirates? Monsters? Aliens? Oh. A giant cockroach. Okay. Thanks anyway.

Bethesda Game Studios (2008) Fallout 3 [Fallout 3] [Video game] [Action RPG] [22 hours] (Microsoft Windows) [PlayStation 3, Xbox 360/One/Series X|S] Bethesda Softworks

Since we’re on Artcade, I can’t get away with it that easily. A comparison has to happen. If Fallout 3 starts with a birthday, it’s interesting to see how the same setting is used in episode 1 of season 1 to introduce a world-changing turning point for humanity. Control room, give us the highlights.

Jonathan Nolan (2024) The End (Fallout S1E1) [Audiovisual work] [Drama, science fiction] [74 min] Amazon MGM Studios

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What do you want me to tell you today? You’re expecting a full-blown treatise on dystopia and aging, right? Well, nope. Dance, sing, or, if you’re short on time, even just a smile will do. Until the next episode, ciao!

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In every World Tour episode there’s a ritual I never skip: commenting on the map. And wouldn’t you know it, today’s country sits in the bottom-right corner, not because it’s truly the farthest point on Earth, but because the most common way we draw the world decided that spot is a corner, not the center.

The thing is, there are countless maps, all different. I’d love to see one where New Zealand and the South Pacific finally get the spotlight, with the central position they deserve, since they’re the protagonists today. For now we’ll have to settle for seeing New Zealand dangling off the edge of the planet… even though, minor detail, the planet doesn’t actually have an edge.

Seedlings takes place in New Zealand and shows the country from a very specific perspective: that of a seed. Today I’m making an exception to the no-spoilers rule, because it’s a short game and, for this trip, we kind of have to walk the whole route.

We start in a native New Zealand forest, explored by our seed protagonist (radioactive thanks to a meteorite, for the curious) using its noble ability to roll. In the photo right below you can admire it in all its majestically tiny glory, perched on a log and staring into the distance. And the scenery has a shameless beauty for a simple reason: every environment (they’re very proud of this, as they mention it pretty much everywhere) was built from real photos and videos.

You can almost see the humidity coating all that greenery, helped along by soft light and the kind of forest ambience that only works if you keep your voice down. So from now on, I’m writing in a whisper.

Usually in video games we’re used to playing grim-eyed heroes (in the last World Tour episode we were a biker who didn’t look anyone in the eye, not even zombie hordes). This time we’re a rolling seed with very limited mobility. But instead of rotting in the moss, we discover the seed can possess little creatures made of bark (I think they’re made of bark, at least), each with its own ability to jump, move, or launch.

“Launch” meaning each creature can shoot us in different directions and to different heights, letting us overcome the natural obstacles in our way.

After all, if you’re seed-sized, every log, leaf, or stone becomes a piece of architecture. A fallen trunk turns into a highway, a cluster of mushrooms is a skyline, and a puddle becomes an endless sea. The puzzles lean into this shift in scale, and they make one survival rule painfully clear: when you’re tiny, everything is a threat.

The creatures couldn’t care less about whoever insists on calling themselves “the protagonist.” Big nasty birds, insects, butterflies… no, butterflies don’t hurt anyone. But aside from the butterflies, we’re closer to snack than hero. And when we finally learn how to move through the forest’s dangers, everything changes.

The setting shifts subtly: from the dense, soft depths of the forest to brighter clearings with streams and rocky stretches. It’s still New Zealand, still photorealistic, but the forest opens up, making room for a different landscape and a different mood.

What looks like a simple new area hides a terrible danger: a human. Because of course, if sentient seeds show up on Earth, humans can’t just stand there and watch. We have to understand it. Immediately. That’s how we’re built. And then the real obstacle arrives: the human, also known as The Boot.

A heavy presence. Then: capture. Then the lab. The game never turns into full-on lab horror, with Resident Evil-style experiments. We learn humans are curious, but they still don’t understand a thing about us. We get locked inside a plastic container (the kind you’d stash leftovers in) and paraded at a conference. We’re basically a circus act.

The jump from the New Zealand forest to a world of sterile surfaces, labels, and masks is a great plot twist. We’ve spent over an hour learning the sounds and spaces of nature, and now everything feels alien. Even though, technically, we’re the aliens.

Maybe that’s why the cavalry doesn’t arrive on horseback. It arrives as another meteorite. The impact shakes everything, pops the lid on our container, and gives us our escape. That’s the finale kicking in.

We lift off above Hamilton, seeing the city from up high (after some truly unnecessary research, I’m pretty sure we’re looking at Korikori Park). And then we spot more meteorites streaking across the sky. Is it an invasion? Here it feels more like new friends showing up.

Bardsley Creative (2023) Seedlings [Video game] [2D puzzle-platformer] [2 hours] (Windows) [macOS] Bardsley Creative.

My last two coins

There’s a kind of arrogance that’s uniquely human. We walk through forests and tell ourselves we love nature, but we struggle to grasp proportions. The forest is immense and surrounds us, while its inhabitants are sometimes tiny, almost invisible. Holding such different scales in our heads at the same time isn’t easy. You can see it when we step on an ant, or clear-cut an acre of woodland, then obsessively manicure our garden with surgical care. We’re a strange species of animal.

Seedlings makes you realize how loud we are, how heavy we are, how convinced we are that everything exists to be understood, owned, improved, or at least explained.

Maybe that’s what travel should do, when it truly works: shrink us a little. Not physically (though airlines would be thrilled), but mentally. Make us less certain. Less central. Less convinced we’re the protagonists of every ecosystem we step into. Sooner or later, we’ll get there. Until the next episode, ciao!

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And here we are: the Stanley Parable museum. What we’re visiting today in ExhiBit is a museum that’s typical and unique at the same time. Let me explain: like any respectable institution, the vibe is sterile, with white light and didactic labels. But the collection isn’t about Ancient Greece, whales, or hypnotic paintings. The collection is about The Stanley Parable.

The museum includes scale reproductions of the game’s environments: architectural models of tiny offices, tiny corridors, tiny decisions that felt enormous when we made them. In a normal museum, miniatures make us feel powerful, like benevolent gods flying over a city. Here, the opposite happens. They remind us that the game has always been watching us from above, observing us as we ran in circles and called it “exploring.”

There’s also something strangely intimate about seeing the game turned into a model. It almost feels like going back to your childhood bedroom and discovering someone has inventoried it. Closeness and estrangement blend together.

Then come the prototypes and the ideas that never made it, sacred relics of what could have been. In the photo above we see a section that got shelved: a moment when the game was supposed to turn into a battle against mysterious aliens, a parody of shooters. But the tone didn’t fit the rest of the project. A missed opportunity, or a sensible choice? The museum becomes the place where we’ll ask ourselves that question forever.

The office setting is (rightly) celebrated. Paintings of generic landscapes, computer screens showing solitaire or command prompts. Office art is a genre of its own. It tries incredibly hard to say nothing, but with an inspirational tone, like any LinkedIn post.

Even the pause menu is part of the collection. In most games the pause menu is where you go to breathe, check your inventory, step out of the fiction for a second. Hung on the wall like a realist painting, we discover that one of the game’s endings was hidden right here. This escape route was also under control, but nobody noticed, so it got removed. Only the memory remains. Framing a pause menu and a vanished ending is a true museum move.

As we keep walking, we reach the video section, where we can watch the game’s trailers. In a nearby room we see, from a new perspective, the relationship between authors and audience: the emails players sent to the Narrator. Provocative questions, nonsense, demands for explanations and absolute truth.

Museums are usually places where the past is stabilized. The Stanley Parable stabilizes the game’s entire life path: from design, to communication, all the way to the very moment we’re inside it. I think Davey Wreden and William Pugh (the creators) are watching us and laughing.

And then there’s an entire section dedicated to one of the game’s protagonists: the Bucket.

The Bucket in The Stanley Parable is many things. From an emotionally neutral container, it slowly becomes a companion, a symbol, a moral problem, and more, but I won’t say anything else. If you know, you know. Otherwise: play it. In the museum, the whole wing dedicated to it deserves special attention.

Here the Bucket is depicted as the Vitruvian Man, creating what might be the biggest downgrade in art history.

In another image the Bucket is photographed alongside countless other buckets, but the label says there are 25. Why lie? Better question: what if the label is right?

In The Stanley Parable museum there are many other depictions of the Bucket, but to wrap up our visit I want to leave you with the one that feels, historically, the most important: the Bucket in cave painting.

Davey Wreden, William Pugh (2022) [2013] The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe [Video game] [Interactive storytelling] [2 Hours] (Xbox Series X) [Windows, macOS, Linux, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One/Series S] Galactic Cafe

My last two coins

Museums are good at preserving things: objects, history, meanings. I think it would be nice to live in a museum cloakroom, a place where you can feel preserved for eternity. Even though, in reality, the permanent museum of ourselves already exists: archived photos, saved chats, memories that resurface as a notification at set times. Look how you used to be. Do you like it? Today this version of you is back on display.

Who knows whether all these reflections of ourselves mean anything. We keep rewriting our personal narrative, polishing it, turning it into a meme, framing it, filtering it, until we convince ourselves that version was always the original. In its museum, The Stanley Parable takes its own essence and puts it under glass. At least it does it while making fun of itself. Today’s visit is dedicated to the noble art of telling your story by laughing first, so nobody else can beat you to it. Until the next episode, ciao!

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Psychedelia has a particular quirk: it looks simple until someone tries to remake it. At first glance it seems like all you need are bright colors, and yet, try it yourself, it never works. Because you have to be shameless, and Peter Max was. He knew how to make all those color decisions so that, instead of painting a senseless mess, his works come out complete, like worlds we probably wouldn’t want to live in, but for a vacation… absolutely.

Take, for example, one of his many reworks of the Mona Lisa:

I dare you to take a masterpiece, throw colors like these on it, and not get buried under insults. Peter Max can pull that off too. Maybe because he’s seen a lot. Born in Berlin into a Jewish family, forced into exile in Shanghai, then living in Israel, passing through Paris, and finally landing in the United States, in Brooklyn. And you can feel all that moving around in his paintings, where pop culture coexists with a fascination for calligraphy and colors from Buddhist tradition, and with his being an artist even outside the gallery circuit. Everything in his works seems to move, even when it’s pinned down on canvas.

And I’m saying “outside the gallery circuit” for a reason: Peter Max, with a name that sounds like a Marvel superhero, started out as a graphic designer and had strong ties to advertising. Thanks to his wide-open mindset, his work gets “contaminated” by the kind of visual language we usually associate with posters, playbills, and mass media. And instead of fighting it off, he leans into it. He turns it up. The sort of thing someone might dismiss as “commercial,” said with that little pinch of snobbery.

But that’s exactly why his images land with the clean, blinding authority of a road sign: you can’t not see them.

Take Peter Max’s palette, funnel it into a video game, and you get Ultros. It’s set on a spaceship, though it feels closer to a greenhouse, lush and overgrown. The result is the visual equivalent of chocolate for your retinas, and the black silhouettes around those color explosions only intensify the trance.

I’m convinced the real objective is to get lost and enjoy the colors. That’s what I understood, anyway. Sure, there’s lore: a “sarcophagus,” seeds, giant critters in every room, an unknown language. But my takeaway was simple: keep staring.

The ship is lush, strange, and overflowing, and little by little you realize the map is something you can cultivate. Plant a seed, let time do its thing, and you’ll get something you can actually use. It sounds like a simple idea, and maybe it is, but in a world this alive it heightens that feeling of exposure, like you’re inside something dangerous, something that’s going to contaminate you sooner or later.

The first time I booted up Ultros, I thought it was going to break through the screen. It didn’t, but it definitely punched straight through my brain.

Hadoque (2024) Ultros [Videogame] [Metroidvania] [12 hours] (PlayStation 5) [Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S] Kepler Interactive

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If you’d like to live a psychedelic experience in a park, there’s no need to resort to any special substances. Just go to Keukenhof. A place where tulips take the place of Ultros’s pixels.

On Peter Max’s official site you can buy original, signed prints and lithographs. The prices are… psychedelic.

My last two coins

What if the world really were painted in these colors? How would our lives change? Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe we’d just get used to it. That’s what we do: give me ricotta semifreddo every day for months and, eventually, even ricotta semifreddo turns into background noise.

But in a world like that, think about the shock of beige. Dark brown. Military green. Those would land like jump scares. And yes, we’re also like that: once you’ve had too much of a good thing, even something that tastes like it came out of a gutter starts sounding weirdly appealing. Or maybe it doesn’t. I need to think about it. Until the next episode, ciao!

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Inside the red rectangle you see on the map there’s an area that includes four counties. That’s the heart of Oregon and, with great pragmatism, it’s called Central Oregon. In the center of the center there’s a city called Bend, famous because the last living specimen of an extinct species survives there: Blockbuster. For those too young to remember what a Blockbuster is, just know that, before movies reached our couch through Netflix, we used to go pick them up there. And they also sold ice cream and popcorn because we are unbelievably snacky, but that’s another story.

Bend Studio is named after the city where it was born. And honestly, what else could the folks at Bend Studio possibly make, when even the video store where they go rent movies has the subtitle “The Lone Survivor”? It was basically mandatory: a game where you explore Central Oregon during a zombie apocalypse.

The truth is, Oregon has landscapes that are perfect for a nice nature vacation. And I’ll prove it with a slightly traumatic approach: let’s wait for the sun to set and go explore the hills. Nighttime is horror’s natural habitat, but in Days Gone it’s beautiful, and it seems to take advantage of the fact that urban light pollution no longer exists. The sky is full, dense, theatrical, and it makes you want to stay hidden in the bushes until dawn, just so you don’t miss a second of the Milky Way.

The advice for a safe trip is: don’t stick out too much from the grass, and make as little noise as possible. Looking doesn’t make noise, but one sneeze too many and someone might remind us that we’re not part of the scenery, we’re part of dinner. And if we hear some weird grunting in the distance, it’s time to move.

The sharpest among you have already pointed it out: ““Wait. Sneezes are dangerous… but motorcycles are fine?” Glad you asked. First of all, we ride a motorcycle because we’re cool. Second, and maybe more importantly, a motorcycle is faster than zombies. Add to that the fact that on a bike every trip feels more real: you feel the road, you feel the wind, you even feel the potholes. All while surrounded by landscapes that look like postcards.

Inner Oregon, the Cascades, where fir trees pop up everywhere, is full of interesting characters. You can pick any random corner and the photo will always be gorgeous. For the more reckless among us, taking advantage of the apocalypse, it’s recommended to venture onto towers and pylons.

Of course, like in all the best vacation spots, the malls, restaurants, and rest stops are extremely crowded. So are the caves. Don’t get mad if you can’t find a spot, and above all remember: locals don’t look kindly on tourists who think they own the place.

Bend Studio grew up in Central Oregon, and it shows. The real-life inspirations are so obvious that the people who live in the region are excited to play Days Gone. Some even put together a tour and shared the route on Google Maps (it’s just under nine hours, if you’re interested).

But the most beautiful and cinematic part is definitely Crater Lake National Park, a national park born around the flooded mouth of a volcano. There’s also a wonderful little island that plays a very specific role in the game. A place so breathtaking in a world where you often have to conserve your breath carefully, because you might need it for running.

Visit Days Gone and you won’t regret it. Even if the locals’ affection can seem a little too hungry, don’t be discouraged: they’re zombies, after all, you have to understand them. To relieve everyday stress, there’s nothing better than some wholesome hiking in the woods, then resting on a porch with a friend. Oregon at its finest.

Bend Studio (2019) Days Gone [Video game] [Action-adventure, open world] [36½ hours] (PlayStation 5) [Windows, PlayStation 4] Sony Interactive Entertainment

My last two coins

Most people I’ve asked (a statistically valid sample, exceptionally) claim the real vacation is by the sea, on the beach. Maybe it’s an Italian thing: we’re basically made of coastlines, cliffs, and saltwater. Personally, I like the cold, the snow, the gray clouds. My problem, you say? Yeah, you’re probably right. Until the next episode, ciao!

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Quentin Tarantino (1994) Pulp Fiction [Audiovisual work] [Drama, crime, gangster] [154 min.] Miramax Films

It won’t be easy. What comes first arrives later, comes back, loops around again. I’d like to tell Pulp Fiction in a single paragraph. Meaning comes from emotional juxtaposition, from suspense, (Basically, I’d like to stage it without getting lost in too many words. In the end, maybe we’ll lose the thread, but we’ll be hypnotized by the story.) from revelation that doesn’t depend on events unfolding, but on the moment they’re told. Everything in Pulp Fiction is built on editing, even this paragraph. It would be even better to make it real: use words to show the mechanism, not to describe it. Chronology doesn’t matter. In Pulp Fiction, scenes don’t follow the chronology of events.

Christopher Nolan (2000) Memento [Audiovisual work] [Psychological thriller] [113 min.] Newmarket

In Memento there are two narrative lines: one moves forward, the other moves backward. Maybe we can’t even trust ourselves. Without the comfort of cause and effect, as reassuring as gravity, the whole film feels like a nightmare where there’s nothing to hold onto. Forced to invent connections, look for patterns, latch onto details that might be useless. Sometimes they aren’t even clues, they’re simply what the film puts in front of us. The effect comes first. And like the protagonist, we cling to the few clues we have. Tattoos, photos, people. Without knowing whether we can really trust anyone. We lack context. Only at the end do the two lines meet, but it’s too late.

Gaspar Noé (2002) Irréversible [Film] [Thriller] [97 min.] StudioCanal
[Note: the film contains a sexual assault scene and very graphic imagery. If this is a topic you prefer to avoid, do not watch this film.]

Everything is shattered, in pieces, even when nothing has happened. Without meaning to, we discover that the beginning was stained by the end. You can’t escape into the past: once you’ve known pain, it sticks to your skin. That makes it even crueler. Watching normal life, calm and ordinary, knowing that violence will come later (actually, for us it has already happened) does not soften what we know. It makes it worse. We know the story went that way, it’s Irréversible, exactly. Painful. Still brutal. A descent into hell doesn’t become an ascent into heaven, quite the opposite. It’s the way we read the world that changes, not the story itself. And yet something changes. Deep down the story stays the same. What happens if you tell a story backward?

Editing isn’t just the way a film “flows.” It’s the way a film thinks. And some works force us to think the way they do. Luckily, in video games we can grab the steering wheel again, even if that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be an easy ride.

If, in the three films we covered in the first half of this episode, editing manipulates us through style, trauma, or amnesia, in Immortality the power to decide the viewing order is in our hands, and it becomes the tool we use to understand what happened to Marissa Marcel. The art of editing turns into the game’s interface.

We have access to an archive of footage tied to the actress, the star of three films that were never released. So far it sounds like the story of an unlucky career, but since Marissa Marcel vanished, the feeling grows that somewhere, between one clip and the next, there’s a truth just waiting to be uncovered.

The game’s strength is exactly how it tickles both our inner detective and our more questionable curiosity for gossip. Beyond the footage from all three films, the archive includes interviews, rehearsals, behind-the-scenes material, and other scraps you can use to piece together what happened. You can pause any clip, scrub back and forth, stop on a single frame, and cut to another fragment by clicking on a face or an object.

In Pulp Fiction, Tarantino uses every cut to create rhymes and returns. In Immortality, everything that attracts us becomes a thread that guides us through the knot of footage. It feels like being hypnotized by a detail, then chasing it without really knowing what we’re looking for. Even when we’re unsure, every jump we make creates a deeper complicity between us and the story we’re dissecting. We invent the rhymes ourselves. The meaning too.

And if in Memento Nolan flips chronology to pull the ground out from under our feet, in Immortality there’s too much context: fragmented, contradictory, and industrial in quantity. Putting everything in order, building a linear story, might be an impossible mission, but the real pleasure is in the edit we create ourselves through associations and visual echoes. Immortality is a labyrinth where our intuition builds the exit route.

If the idea of watching footage on top of footage doesn’t scare you, don’t miss Sam Barlow’s latest creation.

Sam Barlow (2022) Immortality [Video game] [Interactive film] (iOS) [Windows, Xbox Series X|S, Android, PS5] Half Mermaid Productions

Information Desk:

Some time ago we already talked about Pulp Fiction, but back then we were obsessed with Mr. Wolf and the thankless job of cleaning up crime scenes.

The kind of editing we looked at in this episode serves ideas and concepts, but it doesn’t have to work that way: It’s a Wrap! is a puzzle-platformer where you prep the scene like a director, deciding the timing of events, gags, and hazards, and then you run through it as the protagonist, playing the big star of a bargain-bin B-action movie. In It’s a Wrap!, your work doesn’t change the moral meaning of the story, and it doesn’t make deep concepts tangible. It only decides whether something explodes in your face at exactly the right second.

My last two coins

You may not realize it, but we’re all masters of the art of editing. In real life we cut, paste, and rearrange our experiences however we like. We take pieces of a day and put them in order so we can say, “See, this is how it went,” even when it didn’t go that way at all. Someone will call them lies. In reality, we’re expert editors. The truth is we don’t do it to understand. We’ve understood, unfortunately. We do it to survive. See you next episode, bye.

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These days I’ve been playing Arc Raiders a lot. For anyone who doesn’t know this wonderful game, here’s the gist: the world is in ruins. Alien Roombas from space have taken over the surface, while humans live like rats underground. The coolest rats occasionally dress like they’re going to a costume party and go on raids outside to collect trash. We’re among the cool ones who decide to stick our nose out. Often you make it back home with a precious toaster or a lightbulb; other times you get disintegrated by a Roomba missile, or by some other raider with an ingrown toenail who can’t be bothered to walk and just waits near the exit for the idiot with full pockets to come back. Every now and then there are also moments of great friendship and social justice. All in all, you could absolutely live in Arc Raiders, considering the state of the real world.

Artcade has a tradition (or at least it does now) of ending the year with fireworks borrowed from video games. This year I figured a social (and slightly psychopathic) game like Arc Raiders would be the perfect stage. I got my hands on two nice packs of fireworks, a few firecrackers, and headed out to the Buried City at night without even a weapon. You should know that at night the machines are jumpy, the loot is better, and the other players are pretty tense too.

That’s not a firework, it’s a flare rocket, which means someone’s already been downed. But I didn’t get spooked: I found a spot that seemed suitable, placed the boxes of fireworks, and fired them off a little too fast.

I wasn’t fully satisfied, so I tossed a few firecrackers with a pretty underwhelming effect, and as a last resort I decided to call in a supply drop for one final boom.

Ok, that gave me a bit of satisfaction. But I still had this feeling it could be done better, somewhere nicer… so in the end I went over by the Dam, with three packs of fireworks and, again, no weapons. I have to say nobody shot me. Actually, before heading home we even danced together, but that’s part of a game where everyone plays whatever role they want: there are traitors, helpers, people who mind their own business. There’s also the kind who behaves like a perfect war photographer. I’ll probably end up like that too.

For now, with this last spectacular clip (starting tomorrow there will be videos online of two hundred players firing billions of fireworks together, I already know it), with this video, I was saying, filmed with reckless disregard for danger, I wish you a happy New Year and a fantastic start to 2026. Take care.

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Even in video games, you can’t escape presents. Up above you can see the protagonist of BioShock (which I covered in an episode: BioShock, Brave New World, and a Dash of Radiohead) looking satisfied with the present his parents got him. Ah, Mom and Dad gifts. Forget Santa.

This massive consumerism holiday reminds me every single time that material goods aren’t the road to lasting happiness, but they’re definitely the easiest road to brief, momentary, wonderful happiness. What are you getting yourself this year? Because we all know the gifts we buy ourselves lose the surprise factor, but gain precision. A video game? Or something else entirely? Let me know. Now I’m off to stuff myself with panettone, Italy’s Christmas cake. Until the next episode, ciao!

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Sometimes I forget Spain isn’t just the chunk of land attached to the continent. If you look closely at the map, you’ll notice two splashes of red: one in the Atlantic and one in the Mediterranean. The Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands. Today we’re landing on an island that’s part of the latter archipelago, off the eastern coast, more or less level with Valencia. We’ll explore a tiny little island that feels like a “best of” the Balearics, including its greatest clichés. Welcome to Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.

It all starts with the developers’ childhood vacations: days at the seaside with their grandparents, etched into memory. The idea behind the game is to recreate exactly that kind of recollection: a week on the imaginary island of Secarral, in the town of Pinar del Mar, between ice cream, the sea, and adventures.

The game puts us in the shoes of a little girl named Alba: at first we see her when she’s tiny, but by the time we take control we’re already old enough to roam the island on our own, and to realize not everything is going great. On the island, everyone’s talking about a plan to build a massive tourist hotel, the kind that would draw hordes of visitors but threatens to destroy the nature reserve. Faced with that prospect, even the multi-story building (the kind of “eco-monster” we’d call it in Italy) towering over the coast starts to look like a well-integrated part of the landscape you might even feel fondness for.

Alba decides to take the problem into her own hands, and this is where we get to the first big realistic element in the game. Not the island. Not the biodiversity. The smartphone.

Alba photographs animals to catalog them, identify them, collect them in a digital bestiary that feels like the eco-friendly version of Pokémon. In a world where your phone usually helps you disappear, here it becomes a pocket field guide, a reason to look around and actually learn the place you’re in. It’s a subversive use case, which is why I suspect there’s already a bill drafted somewhere to make it illegal.

With the only limitation being sunset (and our grandparents waiting for us at home for dinner), every day we’ll discover sunset beaches, orchards with short trees heavy with oranges, the town square, cultivated fields, and all the little details reconstructed with loving precision. In a great article by Jessie van Aelst, one of the environment artists on Alba: A Wildlife Adventure, we learn how many real-world places became part of Secarral’s imaginary island.

Over the seven days of vacation, we won’t roam the island just to take photos. There’s another gesture we’ll find ourselves doing often, a small gesture that still matters: picking up trash. Apparently even video games have their local litterbugs, and we’ll be the island’s superhero, ready to pounce on every disgusting thing people leave behind. And if the idea of cleaning up Secarral isn’t enough for you, know that every time you toss a piece of trash in a bin, the game gives you a little heart: instant moral approval.

As the days go by, our actions start earning the locals’ support, and even the local newspaper notices something is changing.

Alba: A Wildlife Adventure is a small game, but it’s meticulous. What it asks of us, attention and care, the developers put into the code: every tiny detail feels dictated by affection. To confirm that, for every copy sold, ustwo games committed to planting a tree. They already passed one million. One more push to save the island, along with all our memories.

ustwo games (2021) [2020] Alba: A Wildlife Adventure [Video game] [Adventure] [2½ hours] (PlayStation 5) [Nintendo Switch, Windows, iOS, macOS, PlayStation 4, Xbox One/Series X/S] ustwo games

My last two coins

I know how this ends. I’m about to start telling some anecdote about my vacations with my grandparents and get emotional. But I have an institutional role here, maybe I should change the subject as fast as possible, talk about environmentalism, Greta Thunberg, the transition to clean energy. Better to pivot to commitment, the future, the legacy we leave to the next generations. These are all serious topics we need to talk about. It’s just that an entire photo album has opened in my head, and it’s full of beautiful images. Never mind. See you next episode, ciao!

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We keep telling ourselves we are exposed to too many emails, too many notifications, too much information, too much content (and too many lists). Yet, never satisfied, the moment we get a free hour we definitely do not sit and stare at a blank wall. We sit in front of something that promises to fill our head a little more: a TV show, a social feed, a game (or a list). It’s a dependency, and if we cannot beat it we should at least choose carefully what we cram into our brains. If you’re reading this, take it from your bartender (who’s obviously biased): you’ve got good taste. Enjoy the read!

Jackson Pollock (1948) Number 1A [Painting] [Abstract Expressionism] [Oil and enamel on canvas] [172.7 × 264.2 cm (68 in × 8 ft 8 in)] MoMA, New York

Let’s try to imagine Number 1A without the résumé: no “masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism”, no exhibition space at MoMA in New York.

Or let’s try to forget that Number 17A was purchased for 200 million dollars.

Jackson Pollock (1948) Number 17A [Painting] [Abstract Expressionism] [Oil on fiberboard] [112 × 86.5 cm (44 in × 34.1 in)] Private collection of Kenneth C. Griffin

If we just look at them, they are only a web of lines, stains, drops, as if a doodle had been copied over and over until it occupied every inch of the canvas. This is usually the moment when someone snaps and goes for the classic “I could have done that too.”

In reality Pollock dismantled the idea of a painting so much that for a while he replaced titles with numbers: Number 1, Number 10, Number 29… different versions of the same file. The canvas is just a rectangle laid on the floor, with a man walking around it like he is performing some kind of strange ritual.

Pollock is not sitting at an easel refining details. He walks, drips, throws, lets paint run out of the can. The canvas is a floor where something happens and the result no longer has a center, your eye wanders because every point seems as important as the others. Goodbye perspective, figures, classical representation. Behind the apparent mess there is a system of repeated gestures that he controls just enough to never paint the same canvas twice.

Jackson Pollock (1952) Blue Poles [Painting] [Abstract Expressionism] [Enamel and paint on canvas] [212.1 × 488.9 cm (83.5 in × 192.5 in)] National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1952 Pollock paints Blue Poles. On top of his usual whirl of lines and splashes he plants eight dark blue columns that cut across the canvas. Whether you see utility poles in the middle of a storm or characters trying to hold back a party that has clearly got out of hand does not really matter. When the National Gallery of Australia bought the painting in the Seventies for one million three hundred thousand dollars, the country erupted into exactly the kind of controversy newspapers love. Decades later the painting has become one of the museum’s symbols. Chaos, at some point, always wins.

The secret of Jackson Pollock’s success lies in the way he paints, which is similar to the way many of us play. Pollock steps into the canvas, inhabits it, repeats the same movements until he reaches that threshold where the painting is done. One gesture too many and he ruins everything, one gesture too few and it feels unfinished. Every canvas is the residue of a performance that plays out the relationship between control and loss of control. In the end the painter stops, and we stop with him. Motionless, watching the chaos.

Look at the empty screen at the beginning of a Vampire Survivors run. Flat green, a few bats, a couple of things on the ground. It looks like the base layer of a Nineties JRPG left halfway through production. In the middle there is a tiny little guy who basically does nothing except walk. It is the phase where the game makes you feel like a hopeless nobody at the center of a gigantic field, when in reality you are a still-sealed can of paint.

Vampire Survivors is extremely simple: you control movement, the weapons fire on their own. At first it is so basic that it feels disorienting. You move, collect gems, pick an upgrade, repeat.

Each choice adds a new “brushstroke” to the way you occupy space. Pick the knife and your character starts spitting little triangles that whistle horizontally. Pick the Bible and here comes a circle of damage orbiting around you. Grab the whip, the cat, the laser, lightning, the rain of crosses. Everything fills the screen with a different kind of stroke.

Once you get past twenty, thirty minutes, the same thing happens that you get in front of a Pollock: chaos takes over the canvas. The protagonist is buried under an avalanche of damage numbers, enemies stop being individuals and turn into patterns, effects close every gap. The character you are steering becomes less important and the weapons spin around you like layers of enamel paint.

The interesting thing is that none of this is actually random. Under the visual storm there is a very precise machine: probability tables, spawn patterns, synergies between items. If you repeat the same build and move roughly the same way, the screen will produce a composition similar to the previous run. Change a single upgrade and suddenly the rhythm of the numbers, the dominant colors, even the shape of the enemy masses changes. It is exactly the logic of Pollock’s paintings: behind the chaos there is a regularity that your brain recognizes even if it doesn’t really understand it.

Vampire Survivors is, in practice, a generator of fleeting abstract paintings. Every run is a half-hour performance where your minimal input (moving a character) gets amplified by a cascade of visual consequences. Only two things can happen during a run: you die, as per contract, or you end up creating your own personal Pollock. Once you reach that level the game almost stops existing. You stand still and stop touching anything. The same effect as a Pollock painting that has reached its perfect cooking point. Chaos has taken shape and there is nothing left for us to do except watch.

poncle [Luca Galante] (2022) Vampire Survivors [Video game] [Roguelike, Bullet heaven] [15 hours] (iOs) [Windows, macOS, Xbox One/Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Android, PlayStation 4/5] poncle

Information Desk:

The story of Luca Galante, the creator of Vampire Survivors, is one of those stories that make the masses dream. From McDonald’s to international awards.

Hard to believe, but Blue Poles really is considered “the most controversial painting in Australian history.”

Ken Griffin, the guy who bought Number 17A for 200 million, also tried to buy Blue Poles, because that one is actually his favorite Pollock.

My last two coins

The old-school look of Vampire Survivors seems tailor-made not to be taken seriously. At first glance Pollock’s abstract paintings look like evidence that a shelf collapsed in a paint store. Yet these are works that have been hugely successful with both critics and the public. This must be teaching us something, but what exactly? Maybe that the formal side of a work is secondary to its meaning. I don’t know. I think those two aspects are impossible to separate cleanly.

Does it teach us that every work has its own value? I don’t agree with that either. Does it push us to value the creation process more than the finished work? Absolutely not. I think I have to give up, bask in what I’ve seen and let chaos point the way. Maybe that’s it: in total chaos the only thing you can do is stay still. An artistic representation of the eye of the storm.

It’s incredible that someone managed to achieve that with a video game, a medium built around action and interaction more than any other. Yet that’s exactly what happens. At its peak, in Vampire Survivors you stop playing. If that’s not magic, what is?

Until the next episode, ciao!

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