ISSUE 003

The cover this week is a silhouette with a sledgehammer and no face.

That's not an aesthetic choice. That's a position statement.

myfacebelongsto.me has never been more relevant, and we wish it weren't.

While we've been deep in game development, heads down, deadline real, demo in active production, the United Kingdom has been quietly dismantling the argument that your face is yours. In April, the High Court ruled that the Met Police scanning three million faces to make 2,100 arrests was proportionate. Last month, 80,000 protesters in London had their biometrics harvested and compared against a police database. The Home Office is planning 40 new live facial recognition vans. No legislation. No parliamentary debate. No consent mechanism. The police write the rules. The infrastructure goes in first. The safeguards, if they ever come, arrive when the architecture is already permanent.

The manifesto we published years ago, the one that said your face is a liability in a surveillance state, that facelessness isn't paranoia, it's a rational operating position — keeps ageing into accuracy.

We're not taking a victory lap on that. We're reiterating the argument because it hasn't been won.

On the other side of the desk: The Hollow Circuit®.

The YouTube engagement on recent dev log content has been something we didn't fully anticipate. Game dev communities move fast, and when the internet decides to show your work to the right rooms, you find out quickly whether the work holds up. It's holding up. The demo is in active production. KHOLWA is real. The Steam Early Access countdown is running. 31 August 2026.

If you found us through the videos, welcome to the deeper end.

This issue also carries the ongoing argument about what the game industry is actually built on, who gets to distribute, and what the toll-gate model costs the people making the work. That argument isn't abstract for us. It's structural. It's in every platform decision we make.

Let's go.

myfacebelongsto.me

There was a time when the human face was simply a face: a surface that revealed, concealed, or ignored the world according to its own will. A time when image meant memory. A time when presence meant proximity. A time when privacy was the ground upon which freedom quietly rested. That world is gone.

Art of FACELESSFACELESS