You probably still know Fullbright as the studio behind Gone Home, a delicately experimental first-person yarn about a girl exploring her family home after travelling overseas, and learning about the turmoil in her absence. Picture that game in your mind: the quietness of the hallways versus the crash of a thunderstorm outside, the sickly-sweet 90s décor, the fairy lights and screwed-up balls of paper, the gentle amber pressure of cloistered teenage memories. Now, imagine a faint scuttling behind the skirting boards. A rattling in the pipes. Was there a toilet in Gone Home’s autumnal mansion? I can’t recall, but you should probably steer clear.
Now available on Steam, Toilet Spiders is the first in a new anthology series of “short, strange, lo-fi games”, gathered under the label Fullbright Presents. To crib unceremoniously from the Steam blurb, it’s “a short, replayable lo-fi first-person survival horror game where you must learn to judge your odds and manage your resources to avoid or scare off the giant radioactive spiders laying in wait inside filthy toilets that contain the keys and items you need to complete your mission and escape with your life.”
The game takes place in some kind of Exclusion Zone, with you playing a nameless “volunteer” sent by an evidently tyrannous regime, and the map is broken into several floors. “Scavenged items like old light bulbs, surplus flash grenades, and lucky coins will aid you on your mission, but their numbers are precious few,” the Steam page continues. “You must learn how best to weigh your odds and make your own luck if you want to live.”
Personally, I think the game has missed a trick by not including some kind of pooping mechanic, because as every arachnophobe knows, the real terror of the hypothetical toilet spider is realising you forgot to check the bowl before plonking yourself down. Mind you, you can always increase the intensity by downloading on Steam Deck and playing it while riding the porcelain express.
Fullbright’s games have always contained the suggestion of horror, of course. Gone Home plays with your expectations a bit, dangling the red herring of supernatural activity only to swap it for the, er, emerald pilchard of it all being a metaphor for closeted emotions. Fullbright’s subsequent Tacoma makes that more overt, being set aboard a space station haunted by holograms. Still, I’m impressed at the speed with which Fullbright have transited from “psychological motif” to “literal atomic arachnid gnawing my face off”. Could the giant spiders be a metaphor for something as well? I wouldn’t be surprised if the game’s B-movie stylings were another red herring.
The less-fun context for all this is that Fullbright aren’t the same Fullbright who made Gone Home or Tacoma. Back in 2021, co-founder Steve Gaynor was accused of mistreating staff and creating a toxic workplace by several former employees. Gaynor subsequently stepped back from his role on the company’s “short but bittersweet” fable Open Roads, and parted ways with the development team, who became a separate entity.
As of September 2023, Gaynor was Fullbright’s sole remaining employee. I think Toilet Spiders is mostly his work. It is… dangerously easy to read Toilet Spiders as some kind of commentary on the events above, and on Gaynor’s state of mind since. Don’t let that stop you, though.