Cosmo D, also known by his real name, Greg Heffernan, is making a new game, Moves of the Diamond Hand. Divided into four parts, the first is already available, and the rest will come out over the course of 2025. I’ve been following Cosmo D’s game-making career from the start, beginning with Saturn V—essentially an experiment with the Unity engine and an early showcase for what would become his visual style—through Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, Tales From Off-Peak City, Betrayal at Club Low and now Diamond Hand. Retrospectively, each game represents a further gradation in Cosmo D’s development as a game maker. In Saturn V, you can only look. In Off-Peak, you can pick stuff up and talk to people. The Norwood Suite has puzzles and denser, more-detailed production design. Tales From Off-Peak City introduces bona fide mechanics in the form of constructing custom pizzas, the composition of which has bearing on certain narrative scenes, and Betrayal At Club Low—and now Moves of the Diamond Hand—are ‘playable’ in the sense that a card game or even an RPG can be called playable. As the sheer sizes of the games have increased and the interactivity and The Things That The Player Can Do have gotten more complex and more ‘ludic’ in the general sense, Cosmo D’s aesthetic, and the emotional and thematic impacts of that aesthetic, have changed more subtly. Moves of the Diamond Hand feels more complete. But even a decade ago, Cosmo D was using game-making tools and the instruments of imagery in ways that mainstream videogames still haven’t caught up to.

There’s a paradox in the philosophy of videogame creation whereby we—that is videogame makers, videogame players, and videogame critics—fetishise realism while spiritualising escapism. Almost every single videogame, especially the major, mainstream successes, is set in a world where rules of law, morality and reality don’t apply—Grand Theft Auto 4 is set in Liberty City, not New York City, and though its aesthetic is inspired by the real, essentially everything that the player does is unreal. There is escapism by visual design, escapism by mechanics (you can die and come back to life) and escapism by structure, that is, popular games are often literally, physically big enough and provide a sufficient quantity of hours of entertainment, that they can provide a second, alternative life to the actual life. This is more than escapism. Call it ‘replacism.’ 

But while the history of videogames and the prevailing philosophies that compel videogame creation are rooted in fantasy—we like magic worlds, player freedom, consequence-free exploration and experimentation, and designs that give utmost precedence to player choice, and put players at the centre of attention at all times—videogames, their creators, and their audiences are also preoccupied by verisimilitude. You can die and come back to life in GTA 4’s tulpa of New York, but the cars need to look like real cars—there’s an entire game engine committed to simulating plausible-looking physical reactions when a character gets shot. Horizon Zero Dawn is set in an imagined future where the planet is ruled by robotic dinosaurs, but Guerilla Games makes sure that the main character, Aloy, has tiny, soft, blonde hairs on her face like a real person. You can get ray tracing, which is meant to emulate how beams of light vary in tone, reflectivity, and brightness when they bounce off of different materials, in the remake of Resident Evil 2. Post-apocalyptic monster shooter Metro Exodus has convincing water and cloth physics.

We want breezy, free escapism. We also want elaborate detail. If nothing we do in the game feels like it has consequences, or at least any lasting moral consequences, within the context and world of the game, that’s pretty normal. In most videogames, you can kill a lot of people and nothing really happens as a result, and that somehow feels more ‘acceptable,’ and not as detectable as some kind of dereliction of duty on behalf of the game-maker to be ‘realistic,’ than if the virtual sky doesn’t look like a real sky, or the virtual water doesn’t flow like real water. Such is the established nature of videogames. At the macro level—mechanics, aesthetics, characters, plot—they can have absolutely no relation to reality at all, and in fact, are often judged commensurate to their detachment from the real: the highest-rated videogame of all time on Metacritic is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. But at the micro level—lighting effects, physics, textures, fastidious in-world details—the opposite is often true, and realism, or some facsimile of reality, is important.

It’s why so many videogames, aesthetically at least, are unconvincing, or feel somehow disingenuous. Spiritually, they are ‘all about’ freedom and expression and liberation and a kind of frivolity, but visually, you can detect an enormous amount of labour, construction, industry, money. Videogames are rooted in a—often messianically characterised—idea of ‘play,’ but the practicalities of their creation, particularly in the mainstream, are anything but playful, and you can feel that: When you see the big robot dinosaur in Horizon, you also know it took dozens of hard-working employees several hundred hours to make. It’s one of the things, perhaps the thing, that I find the most uncanny and disgusting—spiritually or philosophically, or art-spiritually or art-philosophically disgusting—about games, where all this money, work, commerce, and engineering cooperate to create something which, by the admission of the creators, is childish and unprofound and airy. It’s, apparently, all about the free flowing of imagination and expression, and a kind of liberation from propriety. But that essence is disingenuous to the art of game-making, which is all about meticulous, fastidious, arduous work—an investment of people power and money that inevitably produces conservatism, that is, given the amount of capital involved, what may appear in videogames to be creative or spontaneous or imaginative is the product of market research and laborious, quality-assured design. Passion by committee. The fun factory.

I wish I could find the article. It was written maybe a decade ago, and I don’t remember the author and I don’t remember the title, but essentially, this person argued that, given how the tools used to create videogames can be used to make ‘anything’—how a mid-range computer and a rookie’s knowledge of the Unity engine was all you needed to create a functional homegrown game—why should games be so preoccupied with characters that are human and verisimilitude of any kind? I think the example they used was Thomas Was Alone, not to argue that Thomas Was Alone is a good videogame (it’s not) but that the language of videogames and videogame mechanics could be abstract enough to evoke something reminiscent of human experience using moveable rectangles and platformer gameplay. It’s a rope to climb out from the uncanny valley, and this problem whereby the creativity and ‘playfulness’ of high-budget or realistic-looking videogames is inevitably dependent on commerce: If the closer games look to real life the more they also feel in some way inadequate at capturing real life, and if the nature of the production of technically high-quality games is disingenuous with the spirit not just of games but art itself, then abandon realism—videogames are inherently either best or perhaps only suitable for abstractionism.

But that also feels like a capitulation. If we concede that games are only ‘for’ abstraction and expressionism, and can only approach realism via the adjacent roads of metaphor and allegory and emblems, rather than discovering, and finding within that discovery the true power of the nature of videogames, that feels to me like defeat. We can’t proceed along the idea that there are certain things that games are essentially unable to capture or render. It’s not verisimilitude or abstraction—we have to believe that we can have it all.

And I think the work of Cosmo D has it all. He’s one of the few current, prominent (to an extent) videogame makers who seems able to make full conceptual use of game creation tools, who’s proficient with modelling and animation and code in the technical senses, and has a vision that he is able to produce by utilising game-making tools’ inherent esotericisms. His aesthetic is distinctive and rich, but also crude and eccentric. His games are unusual. They’re funny. There is mischief and abandon, and although each one feels like a complete and coherent work, they also feel like first drafts.The games are filled with objects, scenery, and even mechanisms that serve no ludic function and are also tertiary to any grander meaning. There is craft, but not preciousness; purpose, but with an overture of unpredictability. The games look like games. They are visual in a sense that can only be achieved using videogame-making tools. But they are not designed, in the sense of being frictionless, easy to use, and immediately and effortlessly intelligible in a way that may commonly be considered as true to good videogame design—they are visually, exclusively ‘of the game,’ but not influenced by other videogamic notions like instantaneous readability, helping ‘flow,’ or telegraphing to the player how to progress. But they’re also not entirely abstract and ‘playful'. Whether large and thematic (the conflict between a commercial enterprise and its workers) or microcosmic and jejune (sharing pizza with friends) Cosmo D is able to consolidate real experience into imagery that is exquisitely videogamic and also full of dramatic motive, and able to pull something, emotionally, from a mature audience.

In Off-Peak, you find the commuter and businessman, standing on the train platform in a full suit, breakdancing. The Norwood Suite has the Rube Goldberg-y, pizza-making machine that’s shaped like a dog, something impractical and dreamy that also has a distinguishable, tangible purpose. In Betrayal at Club Low, when you rescue your friend and drive away, he climbs onto a unicycle and rides it on top of the flatbed trailer that you’re pulling behind you. Cosmo D’s latest game, Moves of the Diamond Hand, begins in a train station where a police cordon has trapped musicians, artists, political activists, and chefs inside.And in Tales From Off-Peak City, there is a rowhouse that has a giant stone face built on top of its brickwork, which is alive and talks to you. 

All of these images contain something that is characteristic of Cosmo D’s work. Sometimes it’s peaceful, other times less so, but there’s the suggestion of a harmony between the real/grounded/functional/earthy/solid, and also the ethereal/spiritual/evocative/liberated/carefree. It’s not abstraction for abstraction’s sake, or a verisimilitude that is doomed to feel false because of various aspects of gaming’s nature and culture. It’s abstraction to achieve verisimilitude. Impact and truth don’t suffer for the expressiveness of the interpretation, and at the same time, the inherent abstraction of the form isn’t being pulled down to earth in order to scoop up themes of reality. Realism doesn’t have to mean obsessional graphical detail, physics engines and an attempt to recreate reality at as close to 1:1 scale as possible. Fantasy, abstraction and metaphor don’t require a total divorce from the real—or any great division from the real whatsoever. Put another way, the unique qualities of game-making tools are useful for more than just showboat realism or fireworks-display fantasia. Neither the gold rush for photorealism nor the everlasting reiteration of pyrotechnics and sensory escapism are likely to help anybody realise the videogame’s aesthetic potential. On the contrary, Cosmo D is the closest anyone has come to singularly encapsulating the exclusive characteristics of the game’s formal language.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.