Liminal Game Jam 2022 (https://itch.io/jam/liminal)

Liminal Game Jam 2023 (https://itch.io/jam/liminal1)

Liminal Game Jam 2024 (https://itch.io/jam/liminal2)

Liminal Game Jam 2025 (https://itch.io/jam/liminal3)

Premise

You have a few months to create a game centered around the concept of liminal spaces, anemoia, kenopsia, "oddly familiar places", "Dreamcore", or "Weirdcore". The rules are very relaxed, you can start working on your game before the game jam starts (yes, you can even finish an old project that you may have laying around and submit it for the game jam!).

Rules:

1. Your game must in some way relate to the concept of liminal spaces and/or weirdcore/dreamcore/etc.
2. Violence, blood, and gore are ALLOWED, but try not to include unnecessary sexual elements in your game.
3. You will get extra points for releasing your game or at least part of it, such as the soundtrack under a free/open source license .

What is a liminal space?

Adapted from this (https://old.reddit.com/r/LiminalSpace/comments/v6ihmx/you_must_read_this_before_posting/) Reddit post:

Liminality is a combination of multiple things: In concept, it refers to a transitional point between two regions or states. In concrete terms, this would be things like paths, hallways, roads, etc. In abstract terms this is usually things like the act of waiting, the state of being between uses, transitional stages in life, transitional times of day, etc - things that could be compared to a state of limbo.

Without mixing concrete and abstract qualities, an image will only be transitional in one dimension, falling short of liminality’s depth. In practice, therefore, liminality is not just transition in one sense. A road is transitional in itself, but not all pictures of roads are liminal. It’s only when you combine several transitional qualities that a space becomes liminal.

Liminality in photography and other media revolves around the sense of lingering in a region or state that would usually be passed without a second's thought.

People pass through the hallways of an airport in an instant, so lingering in them would feel unfamiliar and almost wrong, but since you live in and around the rooms and hallways of your own home, such unfamiliarity is absent, removing that deeper element of transition. The feeling is generally stronger when the space is devoid of people and animals.

Liminality naturally draws on other concepts - although only pertaining to physical people, the concept of kenopsia defines well the kind of emptiness we seek, pertaining to the surreal atmosphere of an empty place usually populated by people. This ties in with the abstract transition of a place being between uses.

What is weirdcore?

Weirdcore usually refers to images that are confusing and/or give off a strange vibe (https://old.reddit.com/r/weirdcore). These are usually accompanied by low-quality graphics and nonsensical and/or unsettling text. In the recent months, weird core has been "taken over" by TikTok kids who twisted the "genre" to make "OC's" (original characters) which are basically mash ups of images taken from various sites made to look like people, but with weird objects, such as flowers where their heads should be (https://d2zia2w5autnlg.cloudfront.net/141809/60d38abfeb79b-large). We (the hosts) personally dislike that kind of stuff, but you can use them in your game if you really want to.