Diving Bell

Diving Bell is a small game poem about sinking slowly into strange waters. It's lightly inspired by a passage in B.K. Evenson's book Dead Space: Martyr (seriously, it's good) that describes the protagonist's long descent into the ocean. It's equal parts dreadful and beautiful.

Diving Bell is best played in Chrome or Safari. There's a bug in Firefox that prevents one of the level's background images from loading properly, so avoid that one unless you like unintended absences. The game works on mobile, but the visual effects tend to stutter as you progress (which admittedly has its own beauty). I'd also recommend playing at night, while relaxed, with a nice set of headphones. There's no horror or scares—the game just feels better that way.

For the technically-inclined, the game was originally prototyped in Stencyl in 2013, ported to JavaScript (Phaser CE) in 2017, then finally wrapped up in April 2021. I don't usually work that slowly, but sometimes you have to live with ideas for a while. Most of the audio was improvised to handheld cassette with miniature synthesizers. The more melodic bits were composed with expert synth wizardry in Ableton Live.

Big thanks to my playtesters Zac Price, Scott Benson, and Jared Pettitt for their thoughtful feedback. And thank you for playing.