Charles Manson, Timothy Leary, and the Animals of NIMH is a narrative-driven eco-horror video game that could be described as a "playable hallucination." The game is being developed with all original assets, music, and code by Softethix, a computer entertainment production studio conceived by newtonn.io, incorporating elements of early stealth games and puzzle-platformers in a fine art context. The Animals of NIMH tells the story of a society of rats enclosed in an experiment facility known as Universe 25. The members of this rodent community have inherited a metacognitive mode of consciousness—a sense of self—as a result of psychedelic animal experimentation by a team of mysterious and sadistic scientists, an echo of the cruel and bizarre experiments conducted by the CIA in the 1960s. The sentient, demented rats are confined inside a labyrinthine enclosure modeled after the ghettos that emerged in the early 1960s. As the rats develop human-like sentience, two of them assume the identities Charles Manson and Timothy Leary, each with his own agenda to lead colony through a time of transcendental or catastrophic change—through evolution or through extinction. Drugged and trapped in bizarre experiments conceived by psychotic jailors, the animals, though isolated and afraid in captivity, find solidarity in their shared drive to escape or take control of the twisted reality thrust upon them. Together, but with drastically divergent ideals, they attempt to find hope and liberation in one another and within themselves. Softethix is thrilled to present an interactive installation for The Rats of NIMH at PAF Olomouc in December, 2023. Curated by New York based collective DIS, the installation features original artwork by the team as well as a demo of the upcoming game installed in a conservatory of live animals and jungle greenery. The demo build is available to play at gaming stations created by the art team throughout the palm greenhouse of Výstaviště Flora Olomouc, between December 7 and December 10, 2023. The game developers will be present to guide you through the level and discuss the project and its future. The team will also be showing an original animated film created by lead 3D artist and directed by Rafael Foster and Paul Gondry.