Slope downwards to thy depths, o sea! Welcome back onboard the Bathysphere. This week Floss considers becoming a moogle beautician, while Chris goes cleaning windows and singing songs to plants.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

One of the joys of visiting big cities is spotting window-cleaning daredevils high up on some building somewhere. Sky the Scraper captures all this beautifully. It’s an arcade game about cleaning stuff off skyscrapers. It’s a trick-filled delight in which you swoop back and forth, managing your level of adhesion and the cleanliness of your wiper, while trying to get everything done as stylishly as possible.

Brilliantly, though, that’s only one part of what’s going on here. That’s because, in between cleaning buildings, you also have to manage the rest of your life, conserving money and energy, decking out your apartment, and visiting museums and going for walks. 

Sky the Scraper’s menus are quite fiddly - unlocking new skills by activating neurons is far more complex than it needs to be - but I kind of like that. This is a game where real life is a difficult cludge of choices and demands, but your moments up there on the sides of buildings are pure arcing beauty. CD

Fantasy in My Backyard is a cooperative worldbuilding game about taking any city map and rendering it into an urban fantasy space through play. The landmarks and transport infrastructure of your city can be stitched into an intricate tapestry of magical communities. It’s currently looking for backers on BackerKit. FSN

LITHOBREAKERS have once again published a series of new games as part of their latest jam, this time with the theme “Event Horizon.” Check out unknown signal from our starboard which is described as a kinetic novel about two people and a computer stuck on a space station. FSN

Interesting things

River of Reverence is what creator Tim Holman calls a “patience toy.” A river of ASCII symbols and ambient music flows in and out, and you are instructed to do that one, excruciatingly important thing: wait. FSN

Mort Garson’s 1976 album Mother Earth’s Plantasia contains music that was created for plants to listen to. The whole thing has an Ellen Raskin vibe, and I love it. Also, what kind of games would plants play? For some reason, I reckon they’d love Bangai-O? CD

Essay: A Moogle is a Designable Surface

The designed experience of a video game doesn’t start the first time you move your playable character on screen. It’s not limited to the main questline. In fact, and to borrow a concept from live-action role-playing, in games everything is a designable surface. That includes the flavour text on a Steam Store page, an Instagram post, an itch.io devlog. Even a moogle can be a designable surface.

Now, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s set the stage. Recently I had a hankering to go back and play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, originally released in 2003 on the Nintendo GameCube. With no violet cube to hand, I had to make do with an emulator. In the single-player mode of Crystal Chronicles, you take on the role of an adventurer travelling around in a caravan collecting mana in a special vessel in order to repel the miasma that has engulfed the world. You know, standard Final Fantasy stuff.

When you’re exploring on foot through the miasma, a moogle called Mog will carry this magical chalice around, and you have to stay within the radius of its protection. I say this to explain just how critical the rotund creature is to your gameplay experience, and the delightful friction that relationship continually presents. For one thing, you can’t race ahead of Mog, or you’ll step outside of the protective circle. Every so often, beads of sweat will indicate that he (understandably) needs a break from his duties and will ask you to take your turn carrying the chalice. You can’t attack while holding it, so you’re rendered vulnerable. It would have been easier just to have Mog never break a sweat, but I really appreciate how the game nudges you to think about the labour that your companion is doing to keep you alive.

I wasn’t going back to Crystal Chronicles for the combat, though. I went back for one very specific activity: Moogle Paint. Moogle homes are dotted around the map, and if you enter one you’ll find your fuzzy companion waiting for you in front of a fireplace. You can rotate Mog and airbrush his fur red, green or blue. The colours correspond to different spell abilities, but who cares about that? I want to spend hours tending to my cherubic friend and his aesthetic sensibilities.

As was the case with the chalice carrying, I can’t help but think how the developers didn’t really need to add this feature in. It would have been much simpler to just be able to customise the colour or accessories of your moogle via a menu. Instead, Moogle Paint provides a tactile expression of care. I can gently wash Mog, or trim his hair so he doesn’t overheat when we journey to a warmer part of the world.

Much has been made of “tend and befriend” mechanics in game discourse, and Moogle Paint certainly is an invitation to do that. Somehow it reminds me both of making custom designs in Animal Crossing and resting at a bonfire in Dark Souls. We talk about cosy games, but what about cosy mechanics? Cosy moments? Moogle Paint could be considered as the kind of ritual that is mentioned in a report on Coziness in Games, a mechanic that “can create familiarity and contentedness” through repetition. The report also mentions how safety can be conveyed to a player through a setting where other characters are relaxing, and this is certainly the case with the warm moogle home that has a genius loci of hygge.

In Moogle Paint a moogle is quite literally a designable surface. I can paint hearts or polkadots or whatever else I like on him. But it’s more than that- Moogle Paint reveals something of the design philosophy of Crystal Chronicles and its distaste for negligence. According to the Final Fantasy Wiki, Mitsuru Kamiyama came up with the idea just two weeks before the game was completed, wrote it on a chopsticks wrapper and showed it to the Executive Producer. I have no idea of the veracity of this anecdote, but in any case, Moogle Paint is in my estimation a (brush) stroke of genius. FSN