This year’s Venice Biennale marks a major shift in European cultural politics suggests CLARE CAROLIN
Latest editorial
Voyages to tyrannical island and deep philosophical ground
BEN COWLES Game on: Reports from a virtual frontier
ANGUS REID applauds the potential of an ambitious show about Gaza, and encourages it to keep its nerve
MATTHEW HAWKINS considers the opening offering at the National Festival of Korean Dance
ANDY HEDGECOCK welcomes an effective and entertaining overview of those who see erroneous ideas as self-evident truths
KENNY MacASKILL welcomes that rare thing: a readable analysis and explanation of the capitalist economy
The world of fake news, where people don’t believe what they are fed, will lead to a demand for authenticity, suggests PAUL DONOVAN
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