Game corruption is the art of messing with a game’s code in such a way as to break it without making it unplayable, creating with it a whole of jittering madness, flying symbols and access to places the developers probably never thought you’d see.

With Deios II // DEIDA, the aptly named developer //BARCHboi has given us a platformer (or, in the dev’s words, a “exploration atmosphere video artwork”) with free access to the game’s innards: by using a special game corrupter, you can make the game self-glitch at real-time, changing the landscape, music and sound effects with each byte you mess with.

What stands out the most out of DEIDA’s screenshots is, however, its beautiful parallax backgrounds. A composition of pixel art with corrupted noise, the developer names this aesthetic “Deitysprite” in honor of the DeytyRPG tool used to create DEIDA.

Here, the only thing more prominent than the vectorized landscape are the ASCII symbols and coding terminals superposed during your corruptions, and the games delivers the whole “hacking a MS-DOS game” vibe like no one’s business.

DEIDA is still an exploration game, and your job is not to get lost in the scenery, but to map it and use your knowledge to reach deeper into this world every other run. There are plenty of available alternate paths, most of them locked away for good – but little should that matter for someone with the power to alter the very fabric of this universe, right?

The game’s music and sound effects also change to suit the (corrupted) state of the game’s code and your own movement, and the limits of what you can do with the visuals is hardly shown by the screenshots or trailer, but let’s say you can do some really trippy stuff.

Deios II // DEIDIA is available for $9.99 on both Steam and Itch.io. You can follow BARCHboi, on YouTube and Twitter.