Hello, and welcome back to the Bathysphere! On this journey into the deep, Donlan dives into a pristine puddle before playing with cubes and learning about a forgotten forest, while Florence gets poetic and Keith visits Canada. Come aboard, it’s perfectly safe!

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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I hope that CUBE eventually gets a name that’s a little easier to google. But that’s only because I want more people to discover this beautiful and ingenious game. The developers say that the less you know going in, the more fun you’ll have, so I will keep this brief. Roll a cube over complex nougat-y surfaces and prepare yourself for…well, that would be telling you too much. This is wonderful stuff. CD

I am in Vancouver this week so I decided I had to recommend a title from the country’s incredibly fecund indie development scene. I opted for Outlast, a 2013 survival horror adventure from Red Barrels, following an investigative reporter as he explores an abandoned asylum. It’s incredibly creepy, generating a real sense of dread from its familiar horror environments. Also, survival depends on being able to run away from scary stuff as quickly as possible, which feels more authentic and relatable than most similar titles that expect you to fight the monsters. It’s still on Steam and really worth playing if you’re brave enough. KS

Interesting things

I absolutely love this book. The Great North Wood is a graphic novel/essay that explores the site of an ancient wood that covered what is now a good section of South London.

The illustrations are beautiful and the text is spare and effective, but the best thing for me is that the way that time is jumbled within these pages, with the woods taking you back and forth through history in a way that only woodland truly can. Transporting! CD

This week I got to pop into the Manchester Poetry Library. It’s the North West’s first public poetry library which is free to enter and immediately gave me a sense of calm amidst the throngs of pedestrians on Oxford Road. I was enticed in by a display of zines. FSN

On the theme of poetry, there is a poetry-inspired TTRPG jam hosted on itch this month. You can join in or enjoy one of the poetic games that have already been submitted. I particularly like Septa et Cetra by Rookery Games, which asks you to “Recognize that the city both moves and stays still.” FSN

Essay: A way in

One of my favourite things happened this week. That is, I saw a picture I’d never seen before and I had to stop what I was doing and just stare at it for a bit.

The picture was called Puddle, and it’s by Escher. It’s a muddle of browns and creamy whites at first and then it comes together, for me at least, in stages. First I get the thick black lines that put me in mind of French and Belgian comic book art. Then I get the fact that the surface of the earth - the brown stuff - contains footprints and tyre tracks, and they given things a weirdly modern feel. Then - rather than stages I guess it comes together in levels - I’m inside the puddle, that clear, mirror-smooth surface is water and I can see trees reaching down into the bottom of the image before my brain does the work of turning them around because it’s a reflection and I understand that these trees are actually overhead. Finally, I get the moon, or perhaps the sun. I still have to search for it a bit every time I look.