Hello! And welcome back to our series of journeys into the depths of games and game-adjacency. Thank you so much for reading! Today, Christian looks at various books that give him the Blue Prince vibe, Florence returns to Neurocracy and Keith discovers an interesting game at the Develop conference that he really ought to have already played. Meanwhile, from the past, did you know that Electronic Arts once released a highly experimental episodic alternative reality game that sent you faxes? More on that below…

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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

The Exit 8 is a gloriously claustrophobic puzzle game that has blown up on TikTok due to its backrooms adjacency. It’s such a clever, playful idea: you need to navigate your way out of a seemingly endless underground station, and you do this by spotting various weird things that shouldn’t be there. I’ve got it down to about five minutes, but people online can clear it in well under two. Clever game, wonderfully horrible sense of place. CD

The sci-fi hypertext murder mystery game told through Wikipedia entries, Neurocracy, is returning for its third and final season on July 16th! It’s an incredibly unique game that runs over ten weeks, evolving as the player community comes up with theories. This season has a stellar roster of both new and returning writers. I think Neurocracy has been hugely influential on other “wiki-likes;” and it's been consistently prescient at depicting a dystopian world grappling with AI ethics. FSN

I was at the Develop conference in Brighton this week and during an open roundtable session entitled Representation in Games: Beyond the Surface a member of the audience recommended the visual novel strategy game I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, which shamefully, I’d not heard of – it’s about spending your teen years acclimatising to an alien world and it was praised in our Develop session for its interesting approach to gender and romance, so I’m going to play it all the way home to Somerset. KS

Interesting things

I’m obsessed with the novel Strange Houses by the mononymous writer, Uketsu. It’s a murder mystery, but with a twist - it’s all based on the author figuring out what’s odd about a set of houses based on their floorplans. It feels like a collaborative ludic detective story, because you as the reader also get presented with the plans as the novel progresses. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it before, and it’s a really wonderful example of how we can “read” material culture. I should also say that Chris coincidentally also originally recommended this book in his piece below! So that’s a double recommendation! FSN

My daughter’s school has just done a “beyond the curriculum” week, where they all ditch regular lessons and sign up for other stuff, like photography classes and crocheting. She’s really loved it, and it makes me feel that it’s such a shame we rarely get to step outside the everyday when we’re adults. CD

The second volume of On Magazine has just launched. It’s a beautifully designed video game publication, which both I and Christian have contributed to. There are articles on Pokemon, PlayStation and rhythm action games. Christian writes about path finding in games and I obsess over my favourite subject: horror games of the mid-to-late 1990s and their influence on contemporary developers. KS

Essay: Some books that offer a little of the Blue Prince vibe

If you’re like me, you’re still returning to Blue Prince and its shape-shifting mansion a couple of times a week, just to tease out more secrets and get a slightly better understanding of what’s really going on. But while I’ve been doing this, I’ve absolutely by accident read two books that really remind me of Blue Prince and what it’s doing with the idea of houses and homes. This has made me realise just how many great books take homes and turn them into puzzles. So here’s a few of them in case you’re short on something to read.