Happy Thursday Bathyspherers! This week, Florence delves into their archive of screenshots, Chris returns to a SEGA classic and an unclassifiable literary treat, while Keith finds an early description of what would soon become known as cel-shading. Please sit down, read the safety instructions carefully and prepare for launch.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

If you’re looking for a relaxed photography simulator with gorgeous technicolour skies, make Shutter Stroll your next video game destination. The game allows you to hop between different procedurally generated low-poly islands and snap what emergent beauty the algorithm has nurtured. FSN

It still doesn’t feel entirely plausible that there are GameCube games on the Switch 2’s virtual console thingy, but there are, and amongst them is F-Zero GX, which I have been thoroughly lost within. There’s a broader piece to be written about how singularly haunting and liminal older 3D racing games are, but for now I’ll just say that a game that always felt like it had come from the future still feels like it came from the future. To race on arcing tracks under staticky skies! CD

Interesting things

Petra Szemán’s website is a lot of fun to visit. I would recommend starting with their short video “How to enter a fictional realm/TUTORIAL” which is both a guide to entering The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim with a bespoke avatar, and a meditation on digital identity and place. FSN

I can’t remember where I first heard of Anna Kavan’s novel Ice, but I finally read it this week and I can tell it’s going to stick in my mind for a while. It’s an unclassifiable thing - a kind of dreamlike pseudo-thriller wrapped up in anxiety about the Cold War and male violence. It proceeds, through a series of morphing set-pieces that feel like fugue states, to tell the kind-of story of a world threatened by an encroaching ice shelf and three people trying to make sense of it all.

It’s gloriously chilly stuff, and a quick glance at Kavan’s biography suggests plenty of strange harmonies. But for me I was struck most by the narrative structure, which propels you forward constantly while subtly changing the basics of the story as you go, and how much it felt like the headlong pelt of a noughties first-person shooter. As much as Ice is any one thing, it often felt to me like I was playing a really good Half-Life 2 mod. CD

Essay: Screenshots as personal archive

I have played 213 hours of the Final Fantasy VII Remake, and what do I have to show for it? I didn’t even finish the game. I was honestly baffled as to how I’d spent that much time mooching around as Cloud Strife, until I glanced at the media folder on my Steam Deck. A total count of 614 screenshots are attributed to FFVII Remake. Ah. That’s where all the time went.