Expedition 16
The Bathysphere
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.
The Supernatural Enhancements, Edgar Cantero
This was a TikTok recommendation. It’s a clever spin on haunted house novels and it concerns a mysterious couple who move into a vast home that was also the place where a secret society used to meet every year. Ghosts, dreams and lots of puzzle grids follow, and while I was initially slightly unsure of the whole mixed-media approach to telling the story, it eventually started to make sense. A couple of last thoughts: while the book is set on the east coast of the US, I couldn’t help suspecting the story’s mansion properly belonged in the author’s home town of Barcelona, in the same way that the London of Jekyll and Hyde is clearly Edinburgh. Gaudi would have done a proper number on this place. Also, exactly who was Betty?
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
What a glorious, exhausting thing this is. I don’t really want to spoil anything about House of Leaves. I first read it, I think, when I was twenty, and yet I find that I am still thinking about it pretty regularly. Anyway: a family moves into a house which is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. But this one is less about the story and more about the way the story is told.
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton
Stuart Turton is a fan of videogames, and you can tell from his debut, which drops readers into a handful of different characters within a classic Agatha Christie mansion in the woods. Puzzles abound and it pays to think spatially as the plot reveals itself. There’s a lovely nod to Bill & Ted, too, but that may just be transference on my part. Turton is always wonderful.
The Tattooed Potato, Ellen Raskin
Ellen Raskin is one of my favourite writers, and this, for my money, is the best of her four puzzle-mystery novels. A homage to Sherlock Holmes it offers both a series of short stories and an ingenious over-arching narrative that brings them all together. The thing is full of mysteries and surprisingly deep dives into art - the detective is a slick society artist - and it’s also set in the house Raskin lived in on Gay Street in the Village. I am obsessed with this house, but that’s for another day. Read this magical book pls.
Seconds, Bryan Lee O’Malley
Just re-read this because I went down a rabbit hole about household gods, and BLO’M’s graphic novel is kind of about that stuff. The house is a restaurant, the puzzles involve time manipulation, and the art is absolutely transporting.
Hawkeye, Matt Fraction and David Aja
A friend told me I’d love this years back, and so it was. This is a landmark comic book, as far as I can gather, but it’s also an inventive treat that shifts shape with every book, throwing in jokes, visual puzzles and all sorts. It focuses on Hawkeye from the Avengers, but mostly on his downtime when he isn’t actually being an Avenger. Instead he hangs out with a dog and a found family in a Brooklyn apartment building and gets into scrapes. It’s clever and heartfelt and even better than I hope I just made it sound. CD
Retrospective adventures
Inspired by the return of Neurocracy (see above), I thought I’d share this magazine advert for the 2001 Electronic Arts title Majestic, an early commercial example of the alternative reality game (ARG) genre in which multiple media (emails, websites, fax, premium rate phone lines, etc) were used to construct networked narratives. A sci-fi thriller with an X-Files feel, it was a surprisingly experimental release for the publisher, based on the Majestic 12 shadow government/UFO conspiracy that also influenced Deus Ex. If you want to know more, here’s a contemporary feature on the project from Salon.