Embrace the Strange and dive in to our weekend long exhibition of experimental games. It’s going to be exciting, moving and very, very Strange.
Get ready to play like you’ve never played before.
Advisor: Elderly Paradigm
Lucas Vially
As an █████ Agency Advisor, you’ve seen it all. You have trained selected Uppers. You solved the Shifting Ticks epidemic.
But this Event? It got you stumped.
When things are desperate, your only option is to plan ahead and hope for the best. Let’s get started.
Content warnings: Death, Suicide, Violence, Physical decline; Dementia; Agony; Cult
Bite the Hand
Gary Chadwick
A visual novel about offering blood up to get closer to the person you are.The story of a boy, or a girl, or a person. Who meets with a woman, or a vampire, or…And the person gets whisked away as a girl. Which is what she always wanted. Or they always wanted to try. Or…
The Book Ritual
Alistair Aitcheson
An interactive art-piece played using a real-world book of your choice.
Write in your book to tell it about yourself. Deface its pages in creativity exercises, so that your book can understand you.
Tear out pages to keep the conversation going, as it reveals to you how it came to be and why it wants to know you.
The Book Ritual is about dealing with loss and accepting grief. The process of tearing up a book allows players to live out the experience of loss and examine the emotions that arise.
Contacting the Outer Planes
Jennifer Wiegel
Thank you for contacting The Outer Planes. We will be with you shortly.
If you feel that the madness is becoming too distracting, please press #9.
Embrace
Skye Von
Embrace invites participants to restore color and balance to a fading world through presence and a (consensual) hug — a quiet metaphor for how connection and empathy can reawaken the spaces between us.
Faultlines
Mark Ward
A queer, choose-your-own interactive sonnet about picking through the fragments for the truth when love goes sour.
The Invisible Casino
Chris Diffin
What appears to be a simple card game has a strange twist: all the cards are completely
blank.
Players can leave their mark on the deck and perhaps, by working together, figure
out how to beat the Dealer.
Kiss Garden
Ada Null
Generative narrative installation about dyke sex and malaise. Two accounts unfold in parallel.
A dyke falls in and out of endless half-hearted relationships, as someone explores a garden strangling itself. Take what you want and leave.
A receipt printer is installed from a high-up place. An endless stream of procedurally generated text slowly descends. The audience is encourage to rip off sections of text to take for themselves.
Little Red Riding Hood
Gary Chadwick
A thorough retelling of the classic fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood aka Little Red Cap aka Red Riding Hood.
Taking in tellings from across time to combine into one expansive and definitive text about a girl, a wolf, a grandma and a woodsman (in the versions where he exists).
After you play, perhaps you may feel it’s lacking something. If you want to suggest new paths or avenues to add, then you can submit your suggestions. Submissions are incorporated in real time into the ever-growing web of passages for future players to explore.
Love with NO FUTURE
Ducky Elford
Love with NO FUTURE is inspired by Lee Edelman’s writings and his theories on how politicians and activists often use the notion of the figurative child to argue against the rights of queer individuals.
More recently, this concept has been utilised to push queer adults into conforming to family-friendly and heteronormative ideals.
This interactive experience is designed to echo classic love quizzes, which ask users a series of questions to generate predictions about their future love and sex lives.
The results provide a reactionary queer or non-normative perspective on relationships, encouraging users to consider potential partners beyond the confines of a traditional heteronormative nuclear family structure.
The work employs voice recognition technology and laser-cut interactive artworks to immerse the user in a new realm of sexual possibilities.
Milk Teeth
Hannah Raymond-Cox
The interactive poem is about losing my front teeth, losing innocence, the children’s book Heidi, and queerness.
NeoArcana
Mike Damager
neoArcana is a generative cyberpunk diegesis engine. It uses large language models and modified computer hardware to reconfigure the reader as an interloper in a story they were never supposed to see.
Next Door’s Telly Has Games On
Amy Godliman
In this miniature living room set in Britain in 1982, two Atari style games are housed in a vintage dolls house television. You play tennis and fishing against your unseen neighbour in an unfamiliar but comfortable setting, your feet digging into the carpet and eyes drifting to the scattered magazines and décor.
Our Boat, The Thread
Ada Null
Steer a motorboat into the underworld with a physical tiller.
The game tells a branching narrative of queer grief and empire within a necropolitical mythology. Depending on the path taken, the game concludes in one of three wildly divergent endings.
Together, they tell a story of cultural death, rebirth, and betrayal. Not all is as it seems.
Made in collaboration with Alex Brettell.
Rarity
Mary Tallontire
Explore and re-organise the small landscapes and story so can get back to reality again.
Short little 3D, first person narrative game about life continuing after COVID and the weird time skip that occured for people as their lives drastically changed in an ephemeral but 3 year time period.
Explores themes and feelings around University, friendships, the notion of time passing and experiences that feel over before it’s they’ve even really begun.
RE-DELEGATION: An Interactive Novel
Riley Gene
After the fall, the world learned to survive by refusing to let things end. That refusal became power. The Craft. Now released from containment, you must prove your utility through the process of re-delegation.
This interactive progression fantasy challenges you to grow stronger, choose your path, and decide how much pressure you’re willing to hold.
Because in this world, power is not given. It’s sustained.
Roots
Irina Tsokova
Roots is an autobiographical point and click visual novel created in Unity.
By using 3D scanned objects found in my childhood room in Sofia and my grandma’s hometown where I used to spend most of my summers, I wrote a branching story narrative, which the player can uncover by clicking on the objects and inspecting them.
Following my life from childhood through teenage years and later immigration to the UK, the piece provides a look at my impressions, stories and lived experiences in post communist Bulgaria and my arrival in the UK during Brexit.
Audio elevates the experience, situating the player in soundscapes evocative of my emotions in the different environments and stages of my life.
Slash
Unwired Dance Theatre
Slash is a VR experience that explores the fluid, fragmented nature of identity in contemporary life. Inspired by the subcultural term “slasher” – someone who holds multiple roles in parallel (artist/producer/teacher/freelancer, etc.) – the piece examines what it means to exist as a composite self rather than a singular, stable identity.
Who are we between the slashes? How does the body register the constant shifting between contexts? The work stages identity not as a fixed category but as a sequence of embodied transitions. Using choreography, motion capture and audience interactions, Slash explores the manipulation of digital bodies and disjointed body parts. Limbs detach, multiply, fragment, and recombine. Avatars overlap. Gestures glitch and reassemble. The body becomes both interface and archive, carrying traces of every role and identities it inhabits.
So this is Innovation?
George Larkwright
The surge in interest in AI over the last year has resulted in a slew of new AI projects. Most are utter bunkum.
This is a game that satirises the sensibilities of the second-rate ‘entrepreneurs’ who peddle these projects across social media and the internet.
Answer a set of questions to select your tech bro and generate an innovative AI project in a sector of your choice.
The game has:four ludicrous tech bros to embody 32 different AI projects to discover — all were fictional, though I have since discovered that some do exist.
Soup for The Consumer
David Gadelkarim
In a bid to understand the core of how humans derive meaning and emotion, The Consumer, a hollow cosmic entity, entraps humans within Its kitchen.
They are tasked with but one thing: imbue the vat of soup before them with parts of their soul, and then serve it.
The Consumer will provide emotions for Its human chef to interpret, and the chef can only interpret it through inedible common objects.
While the chef can resign at any time, the parts of their soul they offer to The Consumer can never go back to being hidden ever again.
Tamagotchi Seance #3
Nick Murray
Tamagotchi Seance #3: Memory Garden is a gently interactive narrative game about how we tend to our memories and how we can compost our grief.
It imagines a more care-full world where digital pets were the evolutionary stem for mobile phones, and online forums never died.
Very Hungry Caterpillar
Kira Guo
A completely soft game controller inspired by the children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Players wear a caterpillar shaped hand puppet to control a computer game. Pressing inside the soft fabric mouth allows the caterpillar to eat food that appears on screen. But not everything is good for it.
Players must avoid unhealthy food and be careful not to bite too hard. Too much pressure or greed can destabilise the game.
Built with e-textiles, conductive threads, and microcontrollers, the controller turns touch into playful interaction.
It explores softness as both material and rule, combining competition with care, restraint, and embodied awareness.