The new Propaganda

How years of struggle led to Brainwash Gang revealing seven games at once

Why announce just one game? Brainwash reveals its lucky seven

By now we’re used to online showcases from publishers and platform holders, packaging a tranche of new games (or at least new trailers) into a single YouTubefriendly broadcast. But one from a single developer, with seven games squeezed into less than 15 minutes? That would have grabbed our attention even if the face of the presenter on screen hadn’t been hidden behind a balaclava. “We can’t afford to work on just one game,” she says, her voice distorted as if to protect the innocent, “because – what can I say – we just can’t seem to stop coming up with cool ideas.” This is The Brainwash Propaganda.

The brash presentation suits the games of Madrid-based development collective Brainwash Gang rather well. The titles on show range from sidescrolling shooters to slice-of-life musicals, but they all share a certain swagger. Grotto is a broken-telephone narrative game in which you can communicate only by drawing in the stars. Friends Killing Friends is a 1v1 FPS with a built-in card game. Laika: Aged Through Blood gives you a motorbike and a gun that reloads whenever you backflip.

On top of these conceptual twists, each game has its own striking visual aesthetic – monochromatic pixel art; 3D cartooning; hand-drawn in pen strokes – that sits apart from, but comfortably alongside, those of the other titles. The whole thing is tied together by the songs of Beícoli, Brainwash’s resident musician and the woman behind the balaclava. The stream ends on a theme tune, with the catchy chorus “Give us your money now”.

Tongues are firmly in cheeks here, of course, but it does speak to a real transparency in the collective’s approach. In the video, the masked Beícoli shrugs out admissions that “we have no idea” how to monetise one game, or to implement the intended VR features of another. It’s a transparency that’s even more apparent in our conversation with Beícoli and designer Edu Verz. “This is not a story of success or, like, ’Look at us – we have so many games, we’re so cool,’” Beícoli says. Verz steps in to clarify: “It’s the opposite.”

Verz was the first to use the Brainwash name, when he was making Newgrounds games and taking part in game jams. In any other studio, he’d most likely be credited as creative director and founder, but Brainwash’s horizontal structure means it prefers to “avoid set titles” for members, Verz says. He gathered friends together and formed a company, “but the point is that I don’t have any clue about how a company works.”

Brainwash’s first commercial game was action platformer Nongünz, released in 2017. A new version – Doppelgänger Edition, released across various platforms in May – is one of the seven games on show, and its presence in a 2021 broadcast is testament to the troubles Brainwash encountered following its initial release. The game’s original publisher, Sindiecate, closed its doors in 2018 amid allegations of unpaid wages and labour fraud. “We had a really, really bad time with them,” Verz says.

Damnview, set to be Brainwash’s second game at the time, was another victim of this partnership. Verz refers to it as “the match that set the fire” in Sindiecate’s collapse, accusing the publisher of attempting to push him off the project and “develop the game with other people”. Following the company’s closure, according to a 2019 report by Spanish newspaper El Confidencial, its two founders left for Peru. Or, as Verz puts it, “They decided to ghost us – and the Spanish law.”

Without a publisher attached, Brainwash has been unable to finish Damnview, an open-world life sim containing an entire top-down city. Damnview’s structure means completion would require “a lot of money, or a lot of trust,” Verz says. “To make a vertical slice, you would need to make 99 per cent of the game first.” Brainwash’s solution, revealed on the stream, is Damnview Stories, a series of episodic shorts focusing on a single worker, such as a taxi driver or the manager of a motel. “And then we have that system for the whole game.”

There’s a hard-earned pragmatism that underpins all of Brainwash’s decisions. “The point of making seven games is that we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” Verz says. “To make sure that not everything breaks at the same time.” The collective has plenty of experience with things breaking, after all. Brainwash is now working with Digerati and Raw Fury to publish Nongünz, Grotto and The Longest Road On Earth, but it still needs publishers for the other games it’s developing – hence the stream.

“There are hundreds of developers with super-cool games,” Beícoli says. “To survive, we ended up making a hundred games and creating this stupid Propaganda thing just, like, maybe this way someone will look at us, you know?” Verz returns to the earlier point: “It’s not a story about success, it’s the opposite – but we wanted to make this into something that other people could watch and enjoy.”

“The point of making seven different games is that we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket”