by Purpose Made

Friday, 15 May 2026

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I went into the cinema today not expecting much from Obsession. Then it scared the absolute crap out of me. Curry Barker wrote it, directed it, and edited it himself. The film is weird in the specific way that only happens when one person carries an idea from first thought to final cut. I don't know what the hell that says about the kind of horror that actually gets under your skin, but I'm starting to think single-author control is the variable.

The thread this week is uncomfortable for an industry that keeps trying to engineer certainty. And I for one am happy the work cutting through is still being made by people willing to be specific about what they're making and for whom.

Obsession is currently sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and opened across UK cinemas today. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a music shop employee who buys a cursed supernatural toy and wishes his childhood friend Nikki (Inde Navarrette) into loving him. Think Christine meets Hereditary meets Talk to Me.

The credits are what makes it unsettling: writer, director, editor - Barker did all three. Same configuration as Jordan Peele on Get Out. Not a guarantee of anything, but it shows up on the credits of an awful lot of films that escape the house style of competent, expensive, and forgettable. The auteur's fingerprints are on every layer.

If you haven't seen it, try to. It's uncomfortable but probably the best horror I've seen in years. Curry doesn't faff around with jump scares. He just makes you feel uncomfortable and keeps you there. I won't spoil it, but I do think this is the formula for modern horror.

Sources: Rotten Tomatoes, Variety

I have been talking about Mixtape all week on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and to anyone else willing to listen. Johnny Galvatron's second game with Beethoven & Dinosaur is, at around twenty quid for three to four hours, one of the best arguments for auteur-led development I have seen on console this year. Three friends in a fictional Californian town in the 1990s, on the last night before one of them leaves. Twenty-eight licensed songs that the levels are literally built around: Devo, The Cure, Iggy Pop, Joy Division, The Smashing Pumpkins.

As I put it on LinkedIn earlier this week: it's the kind of small, specific, unmistakably authored game that proves you don't need a $200m budget to make something that lands. You need taste, a point of view, and a little bit of Portishead.

Galvatron told Lucy James at GameSpot "growing up in the '90s and early 2000s, my life was based around albums. Whereas now I'm algorithm-focused, based on whatever it thinks I want to listen to." Read that sentence again with the publishing industry's last decade in mind. The album is the auteur form. The algorithm is not. Atmosphere wasn't a chart hit in 1980. It became canonical anyway. That is what specificity buys you.

You can feel the difference between a soundtrack assembled from a spreadsheet and one built from memory. Mixtape has the latter. Twenty-eight tracks that came out of Saturday afternoons in some dingy yet cool, Pink Panther-esque record shop in the mid-90s (God I miss The Pink Panther), songs that meant something specifically to the person making the game and to the moments he was making it about. Six outlets gave it 10/10, including IGN, VGC, and Insider Gaming. The furious dissenter at NoEscapeVG is mostly complaining that the nostalgia is for a 90s adolescence nobody actually had. I would disagree. It's very much my nostalgia and clearly Johnny's too.

Too much of what gets made now is engineered to appease and target everyone. Safe. Optimised. Designed for all, forgettable in an instant. The result is a sea of properties that fails to move or truly connect with anyone, because nobody walks out of a film, plays a game, or listens to an album thinking in a positive light "that was reassuringly inoffensive."

We gravitate toward the things that make us feel.

Which is why nostalgia is reigning right now. As Simon Pulman put it on LinkedIn this week: "In virtually every part of media — film, games, music, TV — nostalgia is a primary driver of commercial content. The shift is what specific audiences are nostalgic for." That is the part the industry keeps missing. Generic nostalgia is just safe content with a vintage filter. Specific nostalgia, written by someone who actually lived it, is something else entirely. Mixtape is that something else. Twenty-eight songs laid out, rearranged, the story emerging from how the tracks sat against each other. The soundtrack is the clear fourth character. Galvatron made the game he would have made if no one was watching, and the people who needed it found it.

Mixtape is not for everyone. That is precisely why it is for someone.

Sources: GameSpot, IGN, VGC, Insider Gaming, Simon Pulman (LinkedIn)

Sega arrived at the same conclusion by the expensive route. In its 12 May fiscal year results, the publisher disclosed that the Super Game initiative (announced in 2021 with a roughly ¥100 billion lifetime revenue ambition) has been cancelled with no additional cancellation costs. More than 100 free-to-play developers have been transferred to teams working on mainstay IP: Yakuza, Persona, Sonic, Football Manager.

That is five years and a hundred-billion-yen ambition to arrive at a conclusion the people building Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Balatro, and Subnautica 2 arrived at without spending any of it. Subnautica 2 sold over two million copies in twelve hours into early access yesterday and hit a peak of 651,000 concurrent players across platforms, with 467,582 on Steam alone — the biggest Steam launch of 2026 by some distance. Balatro is one guy. The free-to-play GaaS gold rush did not stall because players left. It stalled because the dominant titles in it were built by people who genuinely wanted them to exist, and the chasers were built to a chart.

The disclosure that matters in the Sega filing is not the cancelled project. It is the 100+ people now being moved onto teams led by creative directors with long tenure on franchises those directors actually care about. Sega has accidentally explained the rest of the slate. The industry keeps engineering for certainty. The audience keeps rewarding the people who refused to.

Sources: Sega Sammy Holdings FY2026 results, Game Developer, GamesRadar+, PC Gamer

A few smaller things. Bungie has confirmed two new experimental modes for Marathon Season 2 — one PvE-focused, one PvE-only. The kind of move you only make when a creative lead is allowed to look at three months of player response and admit publicly what isn't working. Forza Horizon 6's Japan-set instalment hit early access today, with some of the strongest reviews of the year. It is the first mainline release since the long-time creative lead departed for Maverick Games, which is its own interesting question about whether the auteur was the franchise or the franchise was always the system. Crimson Desert shipped a major combat patch this week with new finishers. And the leaked Xbox Elite 3 controller surfaced online (not auteur work, but I gave myself a look).

The smallest one, and the one I have been thinking about most: Karen Pittman in Netflix's Forever, which I watched on Sunday night. The plot is the plot, but Pittman has been quietly turning in the kind of performances television keeps not quite knowing what to do with. Single-actor lift. Like the Obsession lead. The pattern keeps showing up. Strong work surviving weak vehicles.

Sources: Bungie, VGC, GamesRadar+, Netflix

Oh, and one last thing. I'll be at the Nordic Game Conference on the 26th and 27th. Heading to Denmark first, then Malmö for Tuesday and Wednesday. The conference is small, the conversations and people are great, and exploring Malmö by Lime bike is always good for the soul. If you'll be there, or planning to be, drop me a line.

Have a good weekend.

Pete

The Daily Digest by Purpose Made.

Entertainment intelligence for the people shaping the future of franchises.

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