EWAN CAMERON picks out two fascinating music shows, fusing the Korean, and the Celtic, with the modern
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Voyages to tyrannical island and deep philosophical ground
BEN COWLES Game on: Reports from a virtual frontier
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
The bard confirms that the right has a humour bypass, and replays the English Revolution on period instruments
MARIA DUARTE and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Sunny Dancer, Tony, Songs of Forgotten Trees, and The End of Oak Street
JOHN GREEN relishes a powerful and moving drama that explores the lived realities of west London’s Punjabi community
MARTIN HALL welcomes a plea for greater compassion between believer and non-believer via the framework of philosophical enquiry
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.
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Elon Musk says AI will make work optional. The world of abundance he predicts actually spells the end of the capitalist system, argues FAWZI IBRAHIM
MIKE SCOTT assesses the AI threat to jobs in the first of a pair of articles on the problems it poses
SCOTT ALSWORTH searches for something – anything – worth recommending from the year’s releases