Phosphenes are those lights you see if you press your fingers against your eyeballs for a few seconds. Actually, "lights" doesn't quite do it. Phosphenes often look like cosmic checkerboard tunnels, curving and warping into the infinite distance. They're such a strange sensation, and such a private, insular one, that it can be quite weird to look them up online and find that they have a name, and that everyone gets them. Odd business, really: things that the eyeball decides to see when it has nothing much to look at it; lights flickering and fizzing without the obvious involvement of photons.
Phosphenes make people do funny things. If I understand the story correctly, Newton once stuck a bodkin in his eye to learn more about them - "betwixt my eye and [the] bone as neare to [the] backside of my eye as I could," if we're after precision, which we probably are if we're exploring the territory in which bodkin meets eyeball. And Jeff Minter, another otherworldly genius if ever there was one, has pretty much carved out a career from conjuring light and movement and a sense of infinity, all of it racing out of the darkness.
Polybius, the latest from Minter's micro-studio Llamasoft, has an obvious selling point. Named after a brilliant urban legend about an arcade cabinet that did very bad things to its players, Polybius is the first Llamasoft game that you can stick your head in. It supports PSVR, as well as normal and 3D-enabled tellies. A tiny download - how does all of this fit into 171.8MB, with its peerless frame rate? - it's a wonderfully rich experience. Of course it is. A Llamasoft game you can stick your head in!
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