The Banshees of Inisherin shouldn’t be too disappointed that – despite being nominated for a whopping nine Oscars – it walked away with a grand total of zero, as it looks like it may now win Game of the Year.
The Academy Award winning nominated film, The Banshees of Inisherin, has been transformed into an incredible 8-bit game, inspired by Pac-Man.
Why am I speaking so highly of such a simplistic game? I have spent four of the past four and a half working hours playing it. Anything that can distract me from my work inbox is a holy artefact in my eyes.
Cogs & Marvel, an Irish-founded agency, were the – and I’m not using the term loosely – geniuses behind Banshees: The Game, which sees you play as Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty, as he traverses across the Irish landscape, but instead of doing a Pac-Man and finding fruit, you’re collecting… Bloodied, detached fingers.
(As someone who hasn’t eaten an apple in well over two decades, I don’t which of the two is grosser.)

It’s down to the likes of Colin Farrell’s Pádraic and Barry Keoghan’s Dominic to catch you and cause you to lose all three of your lives. But if I’m being totally honest; if I were being chased by Colin or Barry, I think I’d just lay down and let them have me. They’ve earned it.
And before you start booting off, complaining that this game doesn’t fully encapsulate the deeply affecting, gorgeously shot, evocative story that Martin McDonagh so perfectly crafted… JUST KNOW THAT JENNY THE DONKEY MAKES AN APPEARANCE.
What more could you want?
“As an experiential agency, we wanted to create a novel piece of interactive storytelling that would appeal to and resonate with a global audience,” said Jon Hozier-Byrne, the creative director at Cogs & Marvel.
“As well as celebrating a film that has real cultural importance, and of which I’m personally a huge fan, Banshees: The Game was a fascinating exercise in exploring how you can reimagine an amazing story and tell it in a new and unexpected way.”
So why don’t you shove that in your pipe and smoke it, Everything Everywhere All At Once? Who needs your seven Oscars? Who needs your hundreds of millions of dollars that you grossed worldwide? Do you have a video game about your film?
They probably do, to be fair. And I bet it’s fucking brilliant.
