Ahoy! This week, Florence discovers situationist football, Keith discovers trains and gothic horror, and Christian discovers a GTA-themed Tiktok travelogue.

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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

For absolutely no reason, I’ve been replaying MirrorMoon EP by Santa Ragione this week. I can’t think of many times I’ve been so captivated and so transported by a game, and so sure that the studio behind it was composed of people I was desperately keen to be friends with. Do play it if you haven’t, and check out all their other stuff too. (Wonderful reporting as ever by Matt Wales.) CD

Experimental game developer Michael Brough (responsible for the excellent 868-Hack) has made lots of his game jam entries and smaller games available on Itchio. It’s a fascinating collection, well worth digging through. KS

Last weekend I was at AdventureX, the narrative game convention, and I had the pleasure of trying out the demo for The Dark Queen of Mortholme. It flips the script by having you play as the final boss facing off against a hero who returns again and again to vanquish you. The devs also intriguingly describe it as an “anti-game.” FSN

Interesting things

If you’re extraordinarily quick, Professor Angela Wright is giving a talk at the University of Aberdeen on 3 December entitled ‘Lifting the Veil on Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho’. It’s a look at the classic gothic novel in advance of a new edition that Wright is currently completing. This is basically a set text for horror fans and contains ideas, themes and images that still feed and inspire gothic-tinged video games. KS

@dryxio_gta is a TikTok account that is quietly going around LA and looking for locations that turned up in GTA San Andreas. And not just locations - often specific textures that Rockstar found in the world and put in the game. I would love to hear a proper interview about this - maybe on something like Post Games? CD

I’m really enjoying Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s new TV show about a miserable romantasy author who is one of the few people left on Earth that hasn’t merged with a hive mind. How would you design a video game for a hive mind, I wonder? FSN

Essay: Situationist Football

Recently I was rifling through the zines at Housmans, the radical London bookshop, and came across something unexpected. It was a pamphlet with the title "Revolutionary Animism” on it, written by a group known as DAMTP (which stands for DAta Miners Travailleurs Psychique) in 2015. As if that wasn’t intriguing enough, the pamphlet opens with an essay on a sport I didn’t even know existed; three-sided football.