LEO BOIX recommends a film that portrays how fascism feeds on ignorance, machismo and myth in isolated communities abandoned by the state
Latest editorial
Voyages to tyrannical island and deep philosophical ground
BEN COWLES Game on: Reports from a virtual frontier
Chris Searle speaks to Syrian/French flautist NAISSAM JALAL
With thousands of AI‑written, edited or ‘polished’ books being sold, LAURA BEERS hears an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel‑writing machines’
ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
PLAYING Kitbox Games’s cult management sim The Shrouded Isle, I got a taste of what it must have been like running Heaven’s Gate, the People’s Temple or Scientology.
In this wonderfully monochromatic roguelike game — if you fail, you can’t load a previous save and have to start all over again — players are cast as the high priest of a sacrificial cult in a secluded 16th-century town, whose founders saw that humanity was doomed.
Luckily for the folk on the shrouded isle, lord and saviour Chernobog is prophesied to save us in three years — quite how or why our bloodthirsty deity would do such a thing isn’t clear. But best not go there — questions are blasphemous.
Similar stories
MIKE SCOTT assesses the AI threat to jobs in the first of a pair of articles on the problems it poses
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
JAN WOLF enjoys a British revival of the 1972 come of age farce/panto Pippin
SCOTT ALSWORTH searches for something – anything – worth recommending from the year’s releases