Long-gone House developer surprises bathroom spiders into early access

Fullbright, the studio behind the likes of Long Beyond House and Tacoma, has exempted its next game from early access.

Fulbright is led by solo developer Steve Gaynor. In 2021, Gaynor made headlines after an exodus of 15 Fulbright employees was attributed, in part, to his behavior toward coworkers. He announced that he would go solo in 2023.

With very little, if any, fanfare, the day before yesterday the developer surprise launched Bathroom Spiders on Steam. The sport is said to feature a “lo-fi hellish world where giant spiders jump out of toilets and into your face.”

In a post on Steam, Gaynor said he had started an “ongoing series of small, weird, low-fi games” that would be exempt in early access, as part of a ‘Fulbright Products’ push. And Bathroom Spiders is one of those video games.

“This isn’t a very rough early access alpha release either, the game is actually a pretty polished version of itself,” Gaynor wrote. “There’s a bit more in the way of features and content to add, balance to improve, and bugs to help me find that I’ll have to fix, but really, at its core, this is the game as it was meant to be played.”

Gaynor’s youngest daughter, Juniper, gave him the bathroom spider theory. It seems like he once asked some spiders to jump out of the toilet and scare his grandmother. “And of course my immediate response was, well, I could make a video game out of that,” Gaynor explained, and now we have Bathroom Spiders (with credit to Juniper, of course).

“The idea for the game ended up aligning with a number of other conceptual elements I wanted to play with: a game set in an abandoned research facility, a straight-up horror game, a game about managing your resources and tipping the scales. inspired odds on the brilliant Buckshot Roulette. And so, for better or worse, TOILET SPIDERS was born.”

Gaynor added some fun general quotes to his post, proclaiming that Bathroom Spiders is “what Psycho did for showers…” and “Jaws did for the ocean.” So, will you be able to look at your bathroom the same way again?

If you’re interested, Bathroom Spiders is available on Steam for under £5.

As for Fulbright’s previous video games, we’d taken Long Past House relatively seriously, calling it a “triumphant exploration of a beautifully textured family space” in Eurogamer’s overview.