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Islid lets you enter that curious half-asleep state while fully awake

Unnatural shapes, swirling colors, inexplicable lights, droning music, and a world that is constantly changing in texture and size: welcome to the hypnagogic state. You’ve been here before, probably. And, if I can let you in on a secret, I’m just about there right now. It may sound ridiculous, but everyone you have ever known has been there: even your grandmother, and hell, even your dog. That’s because, while it sounds like something your one uncle who’s really into the Grateful Dead might try to induce on the weekend for kicks, a hypnagogic state is actually just the feeling that takes over right…

Cho-am
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A videogame about the impossibility of grieving for Pol Pot

“Much of the experience of the site takes place in one’s head,” says the itch.io page for Cho-am, a new game from Aaron Oldenburg. The site described is the place where Pol Pot—the brutal dictator behind the Cambodian genocide in the late 70s—was cremated. In “real life” Cambodia, this site is near the Thai border, and is host to a small shrine made up of a tin roof over a mound of ash and dirt. Sometimes it is decorated with flowers or incense. Cho-Am deals with the difficulty of understanding the way others process incomprehensible national trauma. Oldenburg writes of…

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The Blair Witch Project of videogames comes out September 1st

There was a trilogy of Blair Witch games back in the early 2000s but they missed the point. The 1999 movie worked because it blurred the line between reality and horror. Before the film even came out, the low-key website detailed the fake legend itself and presented its actors as real documentary makers, including photos of them as kids. The website was then updated over time as the documentary was supposedly being filmed. It was shown as going from unremarkably smooth to it all going awry. Over on IMDb, those same ‘documentary makers’ were then suddenly listed as “missing, presumed…