A MAZE. / Berlin 2024

13th International Games and Playful Media Festival

Cyberside Picnic

Cyberside Picnic

by Michael Luo (China, USA)

Genre: adventure, text adventure, puzzle, interactive animation, narrative, 2D, 3D, experimental, art games

Cyberside Picnic is a eulogy for the cyberian commonplace that just eluded us. A love letter to a lost future of alternative video games, delete and overwrite.

You play as a worker tasked with maintaining and assessing the efficiency of 2ELLIOT, Arteon Corporation's flagship AI behind its best digital media algorithm. Splintering and reconfiguring a decaying library of video games, you explore the fragmented terrain of our collective cyberspace through conversations with your responsibility and your partner. Uncovering who or what is really behind this algorithm, and the trauma you both share by navigating a multitude of "updated" nostalgic games and shifting text adventures.

Cyberside Picnic contains games within a game within games in this digital lethargy interlinked.

Platform: PC, Mac