What’s Happening: Taking place inside Claude Monet’s irises to help him finish paintings as his vision deteriorates, The Master’s Pupil challenges players to solve mind-bending puzzles in visually stunning levels meticulously hand-painted by graphic designer Pat Naoum.

The Download: Close-ups of eyes may strike some as a cliché photography trope, but the transfixing work of Suren Manvelyan immediately got painter-turned-graphic-designer Pat Naoum thinking about how to translate the inner workings of irises into a video game set inside them. “I started to wonder whose eye it could be, and how the game could span their lifetime,” he says. He tinkered with his own fictional characters at first, but soon Claude Monet sprung to mind. The French artist’s idyllic paintings would make for memorable scenery, and later in life he developed cataracts that caused his right eye to go blind.

Such forms the premise of The Master’s Pupil, a newly released puzzle-adventure video game on Steam and the Nintendo Switch. Players wander through the intricacies of Monet’s iris rendered as painterly, multi-layered platform worlds, solving mind-bending puzzles by rolling balls and color mixing in order to help the artist complete his own paintings, which are uncovered as backdrops throughout. Unlike recent video games that rely on high-fidelity 3D animations to immerse players inside, most of The Master’s Pupil’s realism stems from each level’s rich textures that evoke Monet’s brushstrokes rendered inside the screen.

That’s because Naoum spent seven years painstakingly painting each element of the game by hand. “There’s this messiness that you can achieve with hand-painted textures that you can’t get with AI or digital painting,” Naoum says. To create each level, he sketched individual elements using pencil, tested his ideas on game engine Unity, and painted over the sketches with acrylic paint. He then scanned them with a high-resolution film negative scanner—to capture more detail than a camera—that he manipulated in Photoshop. The results radiate the essence of Monet’s style with remarkable precision, whether putting the finishing touches on his Water Lilies or solving a more abstract canvas he completed after his cataracts set in.

In Their Own Words: “I’d love for people to experience Monet’s artwork in a different way,” he says. “It’s one thing to look at his images on a screen or reprinted on an umbrella, but to run through them, to help build some of them, and to look at them in a unique way is wonderful.”

Surface Says: Human craft wins this round.

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Near the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountains in Mexico’s Guerrero state, around 35 minutes from Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo International Airport, Andrés Saavedra and his Canadian partner Tara Medina transformed 177 acres of oceanfront Arcadian jungle into the Modern Utopian Society of Adventurers, a.k.a. MUSA.

The Mexican architect sustainably designed every aspect of this nascent community, topping the 18 residences with solar roof panels and finishing the open-air ALBA restaurant with tiles handmade in Oaxaca by Tata Mosaicos. There is also a palapa beach bar, edible forest, and animal sanctuary home to horses, burros, and peacocks. Offshore, artificial reefs are underway along the property’s mile-long coastline, already the draw among surfers for its rare left-breaking wave.

Stylish sleeps range from safari-style canvas tents in a palm-laden oasis and a treehouse atop the jungle-clad Base Camp to the five-bedroom beachfront Casa Musa and the just-opened Hotelito, its eight guestrooms and five suites clad in cantera volcanic rock from nearby Michoacán. But the pièce de résistance is the subterranean hi-fi bar, located beneath a Balinese-inspired water temple, which hosts DJs from the couple’s LOOT gallery and radio station in Mexico City.

“Quality, execution, particular savoir-faire without any compromise,” Marc Newson says about the Louis Vuitton trunk, a stackable monogrammed canvas carrying case that birthed the idea of functional luggage when the French maison introduced it in 1858, predating the notion of traveling for pleasure. After years of designing suitcases for Louis Vuitton, Newson has now reimagined the label’s signature trunk as the Cabinet of Curiosities—a limited-edition display case outfitted with leather-wrapped cubes of varying sizes to display collections.

“It’s a really simple idea. An extremely utilitarian object, an iconic object,” he says, “and give the user the opportunity to do whatever they want with it.” Each made-to-order curio can be configured in more than 1,000 ways and is intended to show off personal keepsakes—or perhaps simply be used as a bookshelf, Newson explains. “They could [contain] anything symbolic to you as a collector, or even if you’re not a collector.”

Fernanda Pompermayer’s fascination with geological processes naturally drew her to ceramics, which the Brazilian-born sculptor explores as a medium to translate these fascinations into richly textured pots with a multitude of textures and glazes. Her latest series, currently on view at Salon Design in New York, captures the mystery and fragility of the deepest seascapes by intertwining materials, surfaces, and shapes by using the Japanese nerikomi technique.

Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.

Elon Musk’s “Fund Your Legal Bill” Tweet Is a Brand-New Level of Bullshit [The Verge]

Do You Love Him Enough to Give Him a Threesome for His Birthday? [Airmail]

Can Psychopathic Tendencies Help You Achieve Success? [Smithsonian]

Why Did My Dermatologist Ask Me for a Tip? [The New York Times]

I Found a Huge Hissing Snake in My Toilet—It Took Two Days to Flush It [New York Post]

Delayed Passengers Growl After a Bear Escapes From Crate in Cargo Hold of an Iraqi Plane in Dubai [AP]

When: Until Sept. 16

Where: Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

What: The ever-evolving world of Sir Peter Cook, the visionary architect and co-founder of ‘60s-era avant-garde group Archigram, finds footing here with a slew of drawings and a VR experience that embodies his radical vision. The centerpiece is a 2023 drawing that has been “enlarged, cut, dismembered, and interwoven” into a site-specific architectural environment that envelops viewers with his visions of megastructures and components of cities.

Founded in 1997, Moleskine revived the legendary notebook used by artists and thinkers such as Vincent Van Gogh and Bruce Chatwin over the past two centuries. Today, Moleskine is known as an iconic brand that is an open platform for creativity, reflection, and sharing.

Surface Says: Best-known for the stalwart minimalism of its classic notebooks, Moleskine also produces bags, accessories, and illustrated books. The high quality of its products, as well as their references to history, evoke a nostalgia that still inspires writers and authors.

Bidding is underway for a historic 68-foot-tall lighthouse on Lake Superior.

IJBOL isn’t a Korean word, but a replacement for LOL and LMAO.

A new Wes Anderson–inspired film honors Singapore’s built environment.

Saint Laurent and Sant Ambroeus open a six-flavor Parisian gelato cart.