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Rituals, the four-year artistic videogame diary, is due to arrive on May 27th

Tymon Zgainski is coming to the end of a four-year journey that has taken him from ennui to something closer to contentment, from teenager to adulthood. And now he has a date. His first-person exploration-adventure Rituals—formerly The Official—will be out of his hands and into the public’s on May 27th through Steam. “I’ve dreamt of this day and finally it’s happening,” Zgainski tells me. I’ve only spoken to Zgainski twice since he started working on his commercial debut back in 2011. At first he showed me a grim-looking low-poly office: a chair in empty space, a noose hanging over it…

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The Official captures all the struggles of early adulthood, in low-poly beauty

When I last spoke to Tymon Zgainski in late 2012, he had just entered his adult life, being a new student at the University of Edinburgh, and was “concerned with issues of modern civilization and our responsibility towards the environment we live in.” At the time, he was showing an image from his first-person adventure game The Official that depicted a chair underneath a noose hanging from the jagged ceiling of a low-poly office. That image is unquestionably haunting. It’s a reflection of those deep-cutting feelings we may experience during those early years of adulthood struggle, when everything is uncertain, and…

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New trailer for The Official has modern workforce ennui, jaggy PS1-era polygons

The Official is another game about the angst of the work force. It’s based on that familiar daydream that anyone who sits behind at desk from 9-5 has doubtlessly imagined: the one where you fall asleep on your stack of papers and awake after hours alone in a strange alternate version of your office space, which now looks eerily similar to a PlayStation game.  It seems there have been a lot of these games about people who are bored to death or otherwise hate their jobs lately: The Stanley Parable, I Get This Call Every Day, Papers, Please, potentially. Has…