On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. "It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed," she says. "That pain was worse than childbirth." Rosenkranz's migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz's 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a "red beam behind her eardrums." It didn't occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses.

Pendulo Studios' Vertigo begins, just like the 1958 film, with a visual and musical motif of spirals. Round and round they go until you meet author Ed Miller in the worst moment of his life. Ed narrowly survives a car crash, but he loses his wife, Faye and their daughter. Staring down at the wreck of his car in a ravine, Ed suffers a debilitating bout of vertigo, only to relive the suicide of his father shortly after. A little later, you step into the shoes of Dr Julia Lomas, a therapist called in to deal with Ed's vertigo and why he keeps talking about a wife and child whom no one but him seems to recall. While it's called Vertigo, complete with the licence of Hitchcock's name and likeness, the game makes hamfisted references to the director's work.

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Chance appears to name a single, unitary thing. But its genealogy, its family history, turns out to be a tangled one. One way to understand its branching origins is to turn to literature: We may look, in turn, to two very different novels. Anton Chigurh, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men, forces his victims to guess the outcome of a coin toss, taking their life if they guess in error. That chance is entirely contained, not in Chigurh, but in the toss--in nature itself. This is one source of uncertainty.