Welcome aboard the 19th expedition of the Bathysphere! This week, Florence watches NPCs fight each other, Christian plays with the universe and Keith gets trapped in an office. There’s also a little look back at a famous video game adult content controversy from the early 1990s. Nothing ever changes.

As ever, please consider taking out a paid subscription as it will allow us to continue our strange journey. For now, please step inside, and be careful of those pipes – they’re hot for some reason.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I’ve been excited for Curiosmos since it was announced, and the new demo is an utter delight. This is a sort of toybox universe sim with the playfulness of a Vectorpark joint. The demo offers a very hands-on approach to accretion theory, and I can’t wait to see what the full game contains. CD

We love a backrooms horror game here in the Bathysphere so I devoured the demo of Pager from Bilge, a forthcoming 1bit horror game set in a 1990s office block, where you must do whatever your pager tells you to do in order to progress your career. Featuring glitch-heavy black and white visuals and weird empty functional spaces, the game is absolutely loaded with nameless dread – which is the best sort of dread. KS

Interesting things

For no reason in particular, this week I would like to recommend the interactive essay “good writers are perverts” by Freya Campbell of DOMINO CLUB. It’s a great meditation on why being unabashedly into the things you’re into is important if you want to create interesting works of art, and that “too many contrasting and unconfident voices have averaged out to a sort of perversion of the commons.” FSN

I will also recommend the Adult Analysis Anthology #3, a collection of fourteen essays on adult games. This is an area of games culture and history that has been side-lined for as long as the medium has existed. FSN

If you’ve been at the free book space in the coffee shop at Brighton Train Station and you were hoping to nab the sun-bleached copy of Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History, I have bad news. I have been, I have nabbed and now it is mine.

This is a wonderful book. Written by Iain Borden, it’s a glorious examination of skating and the urban environment that has shaped it. It’s the perfect read to accompany the recent Tony Hawk remake that I also utterly recommend, and it even fits that my copy is so gorgeously stained by sunlight. CD

Essay: NPC Coliseum

It was the early hours of the morning, battling insomnia, that I first encountered an Elden Ring NPC battle video. Bleary eyed, I made the unwise decision to open the YouTube app on my phone and let the algorithm offer up some mode of distraction, like wandering a polluted beach and seeing what the tide would bring me. My eyes found the headline: “50 Skeletons VS Bosses - Elden Ring.” I clicked and took the plunge.