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October 2025

Created: 2025-10-31 (12:53:46) — Modified: 2025-11-01 (15:06:12)
Status: completed

October is my favourite month. Everything is getting green and overgrown, but the evenings are still a little cold and spooky, fêtes and fairs are starting up again, and Halloween looms. Another offline month for me but there are a couple updates!

SCREAM JAM 2025

I participated in a SCREAM JAM for the first time! This is an annual jam in which participants have seven days to develop a horror game. My game was a text adventure called Eidolon in which you explore and retrieve things from a contaminated wilderness. You can find it here and at Itch

It was an interesting challenge to try make a game in seven days. The creative highs and lows get compressed into a daily, if not almost hourly, cycle, both exciting and stressful.

There were almost a thousand submissions. It has been genuinely inspiring to play the other entries and see what people came up with. Some beautiful, cohesive games, but also lots of fascinating experiments in design and storytelling, which you can appreciate even when their implementation is somewhat broken. Some of my favourites below.

Crank traps you in an oubliette with a gachapon dispenser, a vending machine and, well, a crank. My experience of this game rapidly shifted from wary curiosity into compulsive cranking.

Danse Macabre puts you in control of a rondel of dancing skeletons attempting to escape the crypt. If your timing is good you can avoid enemies and grab equipment, but more likely you will careen helplessly around, off walls and directly into danger. Favourite moment: my skeletons colliding with an enemy at the exact moment it fired a spell, killing it but themselves dying in the process.

Exquisite Cadavre is an eerie story involving psychological manipulation and body horror. The only bitsy game in the jam, it is also gorgeously illustrated.

The Tree Cycle puts you in the role of a wounded knight trying to fight off something in the fog using only what you have in reach. The ritual you need to perform is opaque and the items littered around change on each playthrough, which gives the game an unsettling, cyclic quality, as though your grisly fate has been the fate of many before you.

Tricky Treats asks you to hand out candy to the children and monsters that knock at your door. You have to figure out which is which, and hand them the correct treat, otherwise they will make a disappointed egh sound at you. It reminded me of Halloween Night II in its creepy-cute tone.

To reiterate though, there were a lot of submissions to this jam. I have been playing through submissions for almost a fortnight and have still barely scratched the surface. SCREAM JAM represents an abundance which is almost alarming, but which is a lovely corrective to the kind of mainstream conversation that can only focus on one or two games at a time.

My plan is to keep adding finds to a collection, available at SCREAM JAM 2025 faves

ECTOCOMP 2025

Riding high off the fun of the jam, I entered another competition at the end of the month. ECTOCOMP 2025 is an interactive fiction competition split into two categories, La Petite Mort for works written in under four hours and Le Grande Guignol for the ones that took longer.

My story was finished just within four hours and is called Heatsick. It involved a dry well, sensory overload and attempted murder. You can find it here and at Itch

Submissions to the competition were only published after Halloween, at the same time this newsletter was being written. I will revisit ECTOCOMP 2025 in the next newsletter!

Marginalia

I have been immersed in horror this month, between books, games and jams.

I reread Daemonomania by John Crowley, the third book in his Aegypt tetraology and possibly my favourite. Not going too much into the weeds, the earlier books in the series are about the act of setting out, and the early course of love, clothing themselves in the symbolism and warmth of spring and summer.

Daemonomania, in contrast, is autumnal. Things are becoming tangled and uncertain for the characters, both in the wider narrative set in upstate New York, and in the book-within-a-book set in Renaissance Europe. Cults and werewolves and witches are proliferating. If the earlier books are coy about just how much magic was truly at work, by this point it is clear that something is going on, and the question of whether it is real or unreal is quickly becoming meaningless.

It is interesting that there are four books, in a way. Daemonomania only gains momentum the further in you read and culminates in a satisfying catastrophe, which unfortunately does not leave much for the final book to do except some tidying up. I really want to finish the cycle again and write about it at length, plus a few other novels by Crowley. Consider these promissory notes for a longer website entry.

Speaking of promissory notes. After that hectic week developing Eidolon, my only plans were to lie in the dark and immerse myself in videogames. I bought a preowned PlayStation 4 and a copy of Control. Coming from someone whose last mainline console was a PlayStation 2, new videogames look really amazing.

I am excited to immerse myself in everything that came out over the last fifteen years, and to hopefully write about it all. Really keep to the bleeding edge of the critical discourse, by talking about games that came out a decade ago.

Around the grounds

A brief one. Chipzel keeps putting music out that becomes my whole soundtrack. Shaman is fucking fantastic trance and the CROWDED. FOLLOWED. Original Soundtrack is thumpingly ominous. Put them on while you walk through crowded city streets.

Goodbye October! Goodbye Halloween! I will miss you both!

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