It’s a recent trend in online folk horror to rapidly adapt those whispers from social media aggregates like Reddit, imageboards, and forums into short films and games. The Backrooms are a famous example, still palpable in the current zeitgeist, now blossoming in horror game jams or bespoke developer catalogues, such as PuppetCombo’s newly announced entry.

“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you”

– Anonymous /x/ board user, source: Knowyourmeme.com

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Darting between overhangs, I’m desperate to put distance between myself and the security drone on the other side of the road. Raining, again, but I need space. My battery is running low already, but I can see batteries just one more building away. Not wanting to risk it draining while waiting for the rain to subside, I choose to sprint from this dilapidated sanctuary to the next. The rain proves too corrosive, however, and spells my end. I collapse in the street before my vision goes dark. Time to try again.

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Warning: The following contains spoilers for Can Androids Pray and features discussions of derealization and suicide.

Across the war-torn battlefield, mechanized corpses lay smoking, holding bodies inside like metal sarcophagi. Craters scar the wastes, reminders of the convulsions of humanity sparring for unnamed ideations. In a pocket at the edges, two Venusian Confederacy fighters lie locked up and damaged. Servos burnt out, they stare at each other alongside the wreckage of a Mercury Protectorate soldier, a reminder of who caused their downfall. Here, in their last moments, a momentary rest is found between these two in their solitude.

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Here’s what you’ve all been waiting for! The list of the contributors to the meditations project who reached out to us with their details. We encourage you wholeheartedly to give the list a thorough look, the developers here are doing fantastic work, and we think you’ll find more than one or two projects that’ll just brighten up your day!

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We reached out for comment from Rami Ismail and Jupiter Hadley regarding their thoughts on the meditations project and how it’s been handled. Here are their thoughts.

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We’ve been very interested in the actual workings of the meditations.games project, how the crediting system put in place came to be, and the level of social media reception that developers involved with the project experienced, so we reached out to multiple developers involved with the project for their input. Below you’ll find the second batch of interviews we conducted with the developers who did not opt to be included in the partial credits list for the project, and what they had to say.

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We’ve been very interested in the experiences of the developers involved with the meditations.games project, how they felt about the crediting process and controversy surrounding it, and the level of social media reception that they experienced, so we reached out to multiple developers involved with the project for their input. Below you’ll find the first batch of interviews we conducted with the developers who did not opt to be included in the partial credits list for the project, and what they had to say.

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We’ve been very interested in the experiences of the developers involved with the meditations.games project, how they felt about the crediting process and controversy surrounding it, and the level of social media reception that they experienced, so we reached out to multiple developers involved with the project for their input. Below you’ll find the second batch of interviews we conducted with the developers who asked to be credited upfront for the project, and what they had to say.

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We’ve been very interested in the experiences of the developers involved with the meditations.games project, how they felt about the crediting process and controversy surrounding it, and the level of social media reception that they experienced, so we reached out to multiple developers involved with the project for their input. Below you’ll find the first batch of interviews we conducted with the developers who asked to be credited upfront for the project, and what they had to say.

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There’s one topic I’ve found myself meditating on quite often as of late: exposure. Specifically I found myself asking what the value of exposure actually is, and whether or not the returns we expect are necessarily the ones we get. Of course, one can find countless discussions of the issues with exposure-centered approaches to artistic endeavors scattered across the internet, but there’s one particular project that I believe frames this dilemma perfectly for our purposes, meditations.games.

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