The horde is relentless. Every time I naively get overconfident in the timing of my laser sweeps and think I finally have the advantage over my enemies, the next wave comes in tenfold just to put me back in my place. I flatten them, they come back stronger and overtake me, and our little dance starts all over again.

In Laser Sphere, a Playdate game made by Pulp creator Shaun Inman, it’s just you and your prone-to-overheating space laser against the world. From the game’s description:

The lights in the sky are fading. A massive shell around an ailing star is the last bastion of a civilization witness to a cosmic extinction level event. But at the edge of the gloom lurks a horde driven mad by darkness, bent on snuffing out the last of the light.

Your job is to defend the Sphere from the incoming attackers, using the crank to control the direction of the laser beam and ‘A’ to fire. You can hold ‘A’ for a continuous blast of the laser, but this is a time-limited action — after a few seconds, your laser will overheat and be unusable until it cools down, leaving you completely vulnerable. To prevent that, you can instead shoot in short bursts to conserve power. But when tiny, high-speed enemies are coming at you in droves, good luck trying to snipe them each individually. When all else fails, you can deploy a bomb to take out a large number of enemies at once.

Shaun Inman

There are ways to improve the Sphere that'll give you a better shot at holding off the swarm. After destroying the ships, you can collect their materials and use the currency from this at the end of each level to purchase upgrades and make repairs. One add-on will reduce the laser’s cooldown time, while another fortifies your shield.

Thanks to the overheating/cooldown element, every decision feels high-stakes, and Laser Sphere as a result is an extremely engaging little action game. (The music by Mike Freuden is pretty solid too). There are enemies of different sizes, each type moving at a different speed, and you really have to stay on your toes to make sure you’re making the best use of your laser for whichever threat is most pressing at the moment. Otherwise, you’ll end up without a weapon when a couple dozen attackers are right on top of you. You can get Laser Sphere on the Playdate Catalog for $6.

New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Chuck Tingle may be best known for his oft-memed erotica titles, but the author has also been making a name for himself in mainstream horror in recent years. Tingle’s second full-length horror novel, Bury Your Gays, was released this week, and if the title didn’t make it abundantly clear, it calls out one of Hollywood’s tiredest tropes: queer storylines that inevitably end in tragedy or erasure.

In Bury Your Gays, bizarre circumstances befall the book’s protagonist, an Oscar-nominated scriptwriter named Misha, after he refuses studio executives’ orders to either kill off two lesbian characters “in a blaze of gay glory” or make them straight. It’s got monsters (not just the corporate kind), gore and basically all the ingredients for a great summer read. And, for anyone who prefers audiobooks, the narrated version of Bury Your Gays has a particularly stacked cast, including Mara Wilson and authors Stephen Graham Jones and T. Kingfisher.

Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change by Cady Coleman

If you’d asked me a few days ago how I thought astronauts sleep on the International Space Station — something I’ve never really given much thought to — I probably would have made a little joke about them floating around in sleeping bag cocoons, occasionally bumping into walls and furniture over the course of the night. Just one page into the first chapter of Sharing Space, former NASA astronaut Cady Coleman confirms this isn’t actually that far off from the truth, at least for some ISS dwellers:

Many astronauts hook their sleeping bags securely to the wall and slither inside each night, but I like to sleep with my bag untethered. I tuck my knees to my chest, zip the sleeping bag up so it holds me in a ball, and float off to sleep, literally. So when I wake up, adrift, it takes a minute to figure out where I am.

Spoiler: she wakes up under her desk. Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change is a glimpse into the life of an astronaut who’s traveled to space, and what it takes to get there. Coleman writes in a way that is instantly engaging, and this should be a fun read for anyone who is space-curious and seeking a bit of inspiration. 

Precious Metal by Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram

This recommendation is kind of a two-fer. Precious Metal, from Image Comics, is a new sci-fi miniseries set in a future, (more) dystopian version of North America. It’s the much-awaited prequel to Little Bird, a critically acclaimed series about resistance under an oppressive regime that was published across five issues in 2019. While you could probably get away with reading Precious Metal without having first read Little Bird, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by skipping over an impactful work of art, so make sure you check that out at some point too.

Precious Metal takes place 35 years before Little Bird’s story begins and follows a mod-tracker — a bounty hunter of sorts — named Max Weaver whose mission is derailed after he realizes his latest target, a child with special abilities, may be able to help him recover lost memories. It has hints of Blade Runner and the art is seriously breathtaking, with striking color work by Matt Hollingsworth. The first issue of Precious Metal, which is nearly 60 pages long, dropped in June, and the latest was released this week. The full run will have six issues in all.