Welcome back! And batten the hatches. A weird fog is rolling in…?

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

You’re invited to a party on the internet! Except: you are a cursor, you dance by clicking, and there’s no music. The first time I visited no one else was online, which isn’t surprising since Cursor Dance Party originally came out 14 years ago according to this old reddit post. However, I checked back and suddenly there were other cursors! Two hour glasses were having an intimate moment on the dance floor. Then one morphed into a classic cursor and spun around on top of me. I think this is what the internet was really made for. FSN

Interesting things

Brilliant friend Dr Mike Cook has a book out! It’s called Next Level: Making Games that Make Themselves. Every time I have spoken to Mike, I have left giddy with possibility and filled with interesting new ideas. He is the best. CD

Essay: Redfall and Widow’s Bay

There’s a lovely show that’s just appeared on Apple TV called Widow’s Bay. It’s a sort of horror comedy about a small New England coastal town in which every sort of monster and urban myth imaginable seems to be converging. I love this part of the world and Widow’s Bay depicts it with moody, overcast lighting and an ominous ruffle of clouds on the grey horizon. It’s a TV series about terror, but it also seems to know that living in this kind of small town is a dream for a lot of people, even if they’re sharing space with vampires and whatnot.

I watched the first episode dimly aware that it was reminding me of something. After rejecting Ray Bradbury and Eerie Indiana as likely candidates, I realised I was thinking of Redfall, the wonderfully evocative online shooter thing from Arkane a while back. Redfall feels like it knows all about Ray Bradbury and Eerie Indiana, so maybe my confusion is forgivable.

Redfall, for me, is one of those games that only grows in the memory. I think I reviewed it back in the day - I can certainly remember writing about it - and while I didn’t really connect with the online shooter parts, I remember thinking that the game itself seemed to be rejecting them too. Online shooters are fast, but Redfall comes from a team that made those more thoughtful action games, immersive sims, and it stocked Redfall with all these things you’d really have to slow down to enjoy. Notes, character snapshots, little bits of loving detail. It’s hard to make the most of that when you’re being picked off by snipers.

I can only imagine that everybody actually making Redfall knew all this very well, and that the genre stuff had come from on high. The thing is, even with a mismatched pace, I still had a brilliant time. This is because Redfall’s one of those games that doesn’t just tell its deeper story in emails and letters and plaques you can read in the local museum. It uses the texture of the world itself to draw you in. 

I definitely remember writing about a safe house I loved because, after a while of visiting it to stock up on ammo and bandages, I started to really see the other things scattered about: cake displays, freezer cabinets. I kind of worked out backwards that the place had once been a fancy juice bar before the apocalypse came. From then I worked backwards some more and realised the street it was on was part of a gentrified hipster quarter of the town. All of this added to the drama and sense of place to Redfall, but I didn’t read a single note or page through a conversation. It was all written in the fabric of the country.

A few years later, I realise that this is a world I’d deeply love to go back to. Perhaps dropping in and out between episodes of Widow’s Bay. I imagine there will be a bit of negotiating with the missions and the bosses and the mechanics and all of that jazz, but underneath all that there’s something rare and magical, I reckon. A game that has seen part of the world very clearly and worked out how to deliver it to players in an imaginative way. CD