A skate through cyberspace: on the edge with the Now Play This festival of experimental video games | Games

For per week or so yearly, Somerset Home in London turns into residence to a mini-festival of experimental video video games: final 12 months’s have been all on the theme of affection. Now Play This has been working for 10 years, and this 12 months’s theme – liminality – is particularly well-suited to the medium. Video video games are in-between areas: they’re fictional worlds through which real-world relationships are made; they’re an artwork type that exists throughout and between expertise and tradition. You could possibly make a case for the inclusion of loads of video games on this choice, and those which are right here discover the theme from some sudden angles. There are video games right here about transition, growth, life and dying, borders, and skateboarding by way of our on-line world.

The number of interactive experiences right here is, as ever, big, displaying the complete vary of what video games and digital artwork could be. There are comparatively typical items of interactive leisure right here – akin to Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, through which you stroll by way of a procedurally generated dreamscape – and Unhappy Owl Studios’s Viewfinder, an outstanding sport about notion and pictures. After which there’s Labyrinth, a lattice of interconnected ropes that mild up vibrant LED cubes once they contact, and a playable suitcase (Pamela Cuadros’s Shifting Reminiscences). In a single room a movie about journeying to the damaged, glitchy edgelands of the sport Cyberpunk 2077 performs reverse a sport (Crashboard) the place you put on 3D glasses, stand on a skateboard and tilt your means by way of an impediment course of pixellated imagery from the early days of the web.

Cis Penance: Transgender Lives in Wait, one other sideways strategy to the theme, is a sequence of interactive interviews with transgender and non-binary folks about their experiences of the world and the frustrations of accessing gender-affirming care (although it’s price noting right here that for a lot of non-binary folks, current exterior the gender binary moderately than between its two extremes is moderately the purpose). Pippin Barr’s v r 5, in the meantime, is an exhibition of shadows on an island constructed inside the sport engine Unity.

A trio of video games about life and dying sit alongside Astro.Log.IO, which invitations you to enter your birthday, sit in a tent, and take heed to the sound of the celebs on the time you have been born. It’s price in search of out the interactive comedian Artworld Gaiden, which sits in its personal vibrant orange cupboard faraway from the remainder of the exhibition – it’s endearingly foolish, in an exhibition the place lots of the video games are fairly severe. The magnificently discomfiting Maze Walkthrough can also be price a play: you wander by way of a endless sequence of corridors that recall the aesthetics of various sci-fi movies. It’s like being caught in a loading display screen.

Although this 12 months’s theme has the potential to really feel overly introspective – liminality could be an unsettling idea and loads of the reveals lean into that – there may be additionally loads of area for playfulness right here. Outdoors Somerset Home, children play an endlessly reconfigurable tackle mini-golf. Inside, there’s a room devoted to crafting, junk-modelling and scribbling. A cute scavenger hunt invitations attenders to decode a message to win a sticker. Now Play This can be a showcase of gaming’s avant garde, but it surely’s additionally a enjoyable day trip – and, as ever, it’s assured that you’ll play one thing right here that makes you are feeling otherwise about what video games can do.