Game Review: Pigface

 

You wake up bleeding on a concrete floor, head ringing, body wrecked. A phone buzzes in the dark. Pick it up: they’ve drilled a bomb into your skull, and you’re not leaving until you’ve done what they want.

Welcome to Pigface.

This thing is the bastard child of Manhunt and Hotline Miami—raised on VHS static, soaked in blood, and set loose in an abandoned warehouse at 3AM. Gameplay is stripped down to the bone, but every second hits with weight. No filler, no fat. Just violence, grit, and the ugly satisfaction of smashing your way through hell.

Weapons don’t just feel different—they sound different, they carry different weight in your hands. Going in melee is a filthy thrill, and the missing aiming reticle forces you into this weird sweet spot between instinct, muscle memory, and dumb luck. Every fight feels half-skill, half-chaos, and that chaos is addictive.

The masks give you extra perks, yeah—it’s a wink at Hotline Miami—but right now they’re more flavor than game-changer. I’m betting they’ll evolve with updates. Still, even in Early Access, Pigface already has enough teeth to bite down hard.

My Take

Pigface rules because it owns its aesthetic. That lo-fi VHS grime, the blown-out colors, the distorted edges—it’s not just decoration. It’s a mood. It crawls under your skin and makes every fight feel dirtier, meaner, more personal.

The sound design slaps, the music drives, and the weapons are a joy to play with. Guns crack, bats crunch, headshots go splatttt—it’s all feedback, all payoff. You can smash through missions like a wild animal or try to play it with some precision, but either way, the game pushes you forward with this relentless, ugly energy.

It’s violent, it’s raw, it’s nasty. Pigface doesn’t want to be clean. It wants to be effective. And I loved every second of it - 

The dev's X account is here https://x.com/titolovesyou

Kaze no NOTAM (風のノータム) (PlayStation, 1997)

 

Artdink — the masters of weird, niche experiments (A-Train, Aquanaut’s Holiday, Mr. Domino) — once made a hot air balloon simulator. Kaze no NOTAM asks a single question on the box: “Did you luxuriate in the wind?” That’s the entire game distilled. Not action. Not score-chasing. Just the quiet chaos of floating wherever the air decides to take you.

Controls are stripped to the bone: a burner to climb, a flap to adjust, and the rest is up to shifting winds. There are two ways to play — Try Task, where you set up custom scenarios like beanbag target drops, and Round, a string of nine levels built from those templates. Every flight plays out differently because the wind won’t sit still. That unpredictability is the game.

The box art comes from Hiroshi Nagai (famous for his city pop album covers), setting the tone before you even boot up. Inside, you get mid-’90s 3D visuals with some subtle flourishes — night burners flickering against the dark — plus a soundtrack of smooth, Weather Channel-style jazz fusion that makes drifting feel timeless.

Kaze no NOTAM isn’t for twitch reflexes. It’s a meditative PlayStation oddity, a slow-burn experiment about surrendering control and enjoying the ride. Not a game for everyone — but for the right player, it’s a strangely beautiful hidden gem.

Blame! by Tsutomu Nihei

I never really know how to start when talking about Blame!.

It’s probably the single most influential comic (manga) for my personal art journey. Every time I see an image from it online, I can’t help but freeze and stare like an idiot for a full minute — which, by internet standards, is an eternity.

The story itself is messy, fragmented, and often hard to follow, but that’s not what hooked me. What hits like a truck is the art style: unapologetic lines, massive brutalist structures, and architecture that completely ignores any notion of human comfort. It’s raw, harsh, and indifferent to the people wandering inside it.

Corridors, staircases, walkways, and endless rooms stretching into infinity — that’s the stuff that gets under my skin. Tsutomu Nihei has made it a signature element. Even in his newer works, the obsession with impossibly large, non-Euclidean spaces remains central. It’s like the backrooms mythos, but not as a meme or creepypasta — here it’s part of the DNA of the story itself. In Blame!, humanity doesn’t just live in these spaces; it’s shaped by them. Nihei builds what you could call “anti-human architecture” — structures designed not for people, but for the indifference of infinity.

And here’s the dark twist: the world itself outlives humanity. The Megastructure keeps expanding without restraint, to the point where unmodified humans are no longer suited to survive inside it. People become fragile, “old,” outdated. The environment itself pushes evolution — not in a biological sense, but in a cybernetic one. Survival demands upgrades, mutations, or total replacement. In Nihei’s vision, the future doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to synthetic beings, silicon creatures, and AIs that can thrive where humans can’t.

That concept hit me so hard it bled into my own work. For my graduation project in Italy (where you actually have to create a full body of work around a chosen theme), I ended up building everything — a book, a short film, an illustrated collection, and even a photographic set — around the same idea: humanity trapped inside overwhelming structures, dwarfed by the very spaces it inhabits.

Nihei’s vision isn’t just about scale — it’s about perspective. It forces you to confront how small we are against the infinite, how fragile in the face of things that don’t care whether we exist or not. His work reads like architectural horror: spaces that reject us, a sublime immensity that reduces humanity to background noise. And that’s exactly why I keep coming back to it.

Tsutomu Nihei is a Japanese manga artist born on February 26, 1971. He was awarded the Jiro Taniguchi Special Prize in 1995 for his submission, Blame. Nihei has worked on several notable series, including Wolverine: Snikt!, Blame, Knights of Sidonia and Biomega.

Interior dash of a 1985 Nissan 300ZX.

 

The Nissan 300ZX isn’t just a car, it’s a time capsule from the ’90s when Japan was throwing haymakers in the sports car wars. Twin-turbo V6, sleek wedge lines, digital dash if you were lucky—it was the kind of machine that made you believe you were living in the future.

It’s heavy, yeah, and it’ll punish you if you slack, but when it hooks up it flies. A proper highway missile, built for late-night runs with too much boost and not enough common sense.

The 300ZX is everything car culture should be: fast, flawed, a little excessive, and absolutely unforgettable

London and Finale Ligure - April 2024 - shot on Gameboy Camera - Gameboy Color

Pics taken with Gameboy Camera mounted on a Gameboy Color CGB-001

Reference Images - 001

Screengrabs from various SPB videos - really cool stuff 

 

Game Review: Threshold

Don’t speak. Don’t run. Don’t look in the train. Just do your job. It’ll all be over soon.

My Take:

This game swallowed me whole. I launched it with a casual “let’s see what this strange little indie thing is about,” and instead found myself pulled into something I couldn’t shake off. It isn’t just gameplay, it’s atmosphere — an environment that keeps twisting just out of your grasp, a world that feels alive, hostile, and indifferent all at once.

As glass cracks under your teeth, every action feels loaded. Blowing the whistle, running small errands, maintaining routine — these aren’t mechanics, they’re rituals. Each one carries weight, unease, and the quiet certainty that something is wrong, though you can’t ever name exactly what. The air feels thinner the longer you play, like the game itself is watching how many breaths you take.

The story unfolds in fragments, in whispers, in things half-said. You’re left with questions, and the game never promises to answer them. Multiple endings branch out like cracks in the ice, each one making you wonder what you missed, what choice tipped the balance. The uncertainty is part of the experience — you’re never fully in control, and that’s exactly what makes it so compelling.

I came in expecting a quirky experiment. I left convinced I had brushed against something strange, bleak, and beautiful. If you’re drawn to games that unsettle rather than comfort, that leave you with more questions than answers, this one is essential.

 

Made by https://julieneveille.com/

 

Seville - Oct 2022 - shot on Fujifilm x100

Pics I took in Seville 2022 - Shot on Fujifilm x100

Old pics of the original Cans1's Sh*tzine volumes

_Some pics of the very6 fist experiments with the fanzine, handmade and fully DIY - 

A huge thanks to whoever bought one in those years and believed in the project.