The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Game Palace of Hell Master Night arrived in 2022 as a chronological continuation of YS-Uzac's Cubist Trilogy, composed by Vincent Micotti. Where Dawn offered the palace in morning light, Night turns the same rooms over to shadow and aftermath. The concept reframes oud not as ornament but as intruder. According to the house, an intense aromatic blast of Nanmu oud breaks through an almost suffocating atmosphere, overshadowing everything in the palace. It's a deliberate compositional ambush: something rare, almost suffocating, and impossible to ignore. Nanmu oud itself is an unusual material in perfumery, sourced from the Machilus tree and carrying a profile quite different from the agarwood-based ouds that dominate the category.
Nanmu oud is the kind of material that reshapes expectations. It carries something distinct from the oud profiles most wearers recognize: a drier character that diverges from both the barnyard intensity and the medicinal sharpness of more common distillations. That divergence shapes the entire wear experience. Micotti's composition places this material at the center, allowing its drier facets to dictate the temperature of the fragrance.
The evolution
The opening feels less like wearing a fragrance and more like walking into one. Smoke and embers dominate from the first moments, thick and carbonized, carrying a synthetic edge that keeps the composition from collapsing into pure incense nostalgia. There's no easing in. As the wear develops, a dense floral heart surfaces beneath the haze, though the oud has already claimed the composition by this point. It's less a separate note than a structural element holding everything together. The tropical fruit notes hover at the edges, unexpected and almost adversarial against the smoke, their sweetness reading as interruption rather than relief. As the hours pass, the composition thins without losing presence. The Machilus nanmu base gradually comes forward, dry and woody with a faint sweetness that anchors the late stages of wear.
Cultural impact
Game Palace of Hell Master Night occupies an unusual position within the broader landscape of contemporary oud compositions. Its use of Nanmu oud marks a clear departure from the standard agarwood distillations that define most serious oud work, introducing a drier, more austere material into a category often associated with animalic intensity and traditional processing methods. The 2022 release extends the Cubist Trilogy, a project structured as a connected sequence rather than a series of unrelated products, treating fragrance as a continuing story rather than isolated objects.
The House
Ys-UzacYS-UZAC is an independent Swiss fragrance house founded in 2011 by husband and wife team Vincent Micotti and Vera Yeoh. Based in Switzerland, the house specializes in avant-garde olfactory compositions that treat scent as a form of artistic expression. Micotti, a former classical cellist, brings a musician's sensibility to perfumery, creating fragrances that unfold like compositions across time. The brand operates as a niche perfume house, producing limited collections that draw on artistic interpretation rather than commercial fragrance conventions. Each release explores a distinct concept or artistic reference, from musical sensibilities to visual art homages. The house maintains Swiss production standards and has developed a dedicated following among collectors who appreciate its unconventional approach to fragrance composition.
The Creator
Vincent MicottiMicotti favors rich, complex materials and is particularly celebrated for his work with oud. He approaches the ingredient not as a trend but as a medium capable of nuanced expression.
