Heterotopias is the video game publication that your favourite video game publication reads. It’s different from the games writing you see every day. Here at TheGamer, we provide you with quick news, fun lists, and handy guides. You’ll find none of that in Heterotopias. It’s features top to bottom, essays from masters of their craft. While we do have features over here (hey! You’re reading one!), the time and care put into Heterotopias by true visionaries of the medium creates a volume of unparalleled criticism. This is the kind of writing I personally aspire to create, and represents the epitome of our craft.

The zine comes from the mind of Citizen Sleeper creator Gareth Damian Martin. We briefly talked about their interest in architecture and how that informed the creation of Citizen Sleeper in my profile of them last month, and Heterotopias was an extension of this, one of their many interests sucked up by Francis Bacon’s pulverising machine and spat out in the form of an artfully designed essay publication.

Related: What A Tabletop Version Of Citizen Sleeper Would Look Like, According To Gareth Damian Martin

The first issue of Heterotopias was, as everything seems to be with Damian Martin, an experiment. From Inside to Tomb Raider, its essays cover all manner of games – nothing is too big nor too small, too mainstream nor too niche. There’s also an exclusive interview with Rasmus Poulsen, art director of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, with accompanying 35mm photographs. This is the sort of thing that would be nigh-on impossible to produce in online media, and for years it lived as a PDF, but this physical edition feels like the true form that Heterotopias should have always been published in.

Heterotopias Metroid Prime

Issues two and three cover games as huge as The Last of Us and GTA V, to cult classics like WipEout and NaissanceE (the randomly capitalised E seems to be a surefire way to achieve cult classic status, it seems), and everything in between. While issue one clocks in at a little over 100 pages, its two sequels are 240 and 270 page tomes respectively. All three are available separately, or in a deluxe bundle which also includes a 340+ page hardcover Studies book, filled with more essays and photographs collated and curated by Damian Martin.

The physical editions have been created by Lost In Cult, who have produced many of my favourite video game treatises over the years. Playing with form is a given here – its Sable Designworks book is as much origami as it is artbook, and the quality of both paper and printing with its Lock-On series befits the premium price.

heterotopias physical zine kane and lynch

There’s no doubt in my mind that Lost In Cult’s physical editions of Heterotopias will be the definitive way for these essays to be read. Not scrolled on a phone screen, flicked through with fingers, and tangible on your table. The sheer number of pages involved mean that this collection will be as imposing as the structures it describes, and the bonus trappings of the deluxe edition will only transcend it further. Have you ever wanted to see an exploration of Metroid Prime on a series of 35mm postcards printed in metallic ink? Me neither, but now I do.

Heterotopias is filled with the kind of criticism that defines our medium, and the posters and postcards are the sort of thing you expect to find in museums, not your own home. If you really care about video games as an art form and want to expand your horizons when it comes to thinking about them, there’s no better place to start your education.

Next: Spellcraft Created A New Gaming Genre, But At What Cost

You can pre-order Heterotopias on the Lost In Cult website