Expedition 10
The Bathysphere
Welcome to the tenth expedition of the Bathysphere! This week we have safe-cracking, Solarcans and sassy French games. Chris’ essay is on an interesting trip to Newhaven. And as for the retro section … It’s thinking!
As ever, part of the newsletter is free, part is only available to paid subscribers. Please consider signing up for an annual subscription which will allow us to stay aboard the Bathysphere for longer. Thank you – and enjoy the journey!
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
I am going to admit that I only discovered Wagon due to Mount Your Friends developer Daniel Steger posting his List of Underrepresented Steam Games on Bluesky. It’s sort of a narrative deck-builder that combines The Oregon Trail with the visuals of Return of the Obra Dinn. If you enjoyed Inscryption but felt that what it lacked was dysentery, you’re on the right ride. KS
Just a quick one from me this week and a reminder that there are safe-cracking games on the Apple Watch that allow you to use the crown as the safe’s main dial. Here’s one. I don’t have an Apple Watch, but I still think this is a perfect piece of controller implementation. CD
Interesting things
My growing interest in weird photography has reached photograms, or images made without a camera. I’ve spent a few weeks messing around with cyanotypes, which involves sheets of blue paper that develop images just by being in sunlight, and last week I installed a Solarcan on the south-facing wall of our house. I’m not sure if a Solarcan counts as a photogram or not, because the can itself becomes a pinhole camera. Mine lasted a few days before the wind removed it, but I’ve kept it going - still recording - and it’s now on a more protected bit of wall. I’m sure the eventual image will be largely unreadable.
This sudden middle-aged urge for printmaking feels like it’s occupying the same part of my brain that likes videogames. I’ve always enjoyed puzzle games where you’re left with an image you sort of made by playing at the end of a round, and there’s that same sense of accidental creativity to something like a Solarcan. The mistakes become part of the image. If this one is any good - or if it’s memorably bad - I’ll share it on here in six months when it’s done. CD
If you want to get bang up to date with the French game development scene, I recommend watching this video from ActuGaming – it’s a recording of AG French Direct 2025, a recent digital event celebrating French and French language games. There are 45 trailers and it’s a joyfully eclectic bunch. One game – Kosmocean: The Endless Sea – even features a bathyscaphe, which is close enough to a bathysphere to be our favourite of the event. KS
This week I went to the “A World of Games” exhibition at the Världskulturmuseet in Gothenburg. It explores how games and play have developed in different contexts across the world over 4000 years, from analogue to digital. I really appreciated how they included playable examples of indigenous games, such as the Moccasin Game that has a long history in North America, and involves hiding an object in a slipper. The exhibition is running until May 2026 so you still have plenty of time to catch it. FSN
Trans Technologies is a new open access book by Oliver L. Haimson. It discusses how trans people use and can be empowered by technology, but also how trans perspectives can influence and broaden technological possibilities in turn. Games come up a fair bit; there’s a section on the “Trans Fucking Rage Jam” hosted on itch.io, for example. Sometimes it’s good to get angry and make things. FSN
Essay: Soft play with Asbestos
Question: Why do you do inflatables instead of just art on canvases?
Answer: I really like it when people can play with the artwork. And that it’s perhaps not finished by the artist, that it’s finished by the people that come to visit.
This weekend I went with my wife and daughter to Newhaven, which is just up the road on the bus. I’d planned to take everyone to see a bunch of large-scale wall art that has turned up all over town, and which I’d accidentally caught on a recent visit. But instead we ended up going to a gallery behind the train station where there’s currently an installation running, by the artist Bruce Asbestos.
Bruce Asbestos is a pop artist who does a dizzying amount of different things, as far as I can tell. But this installation was about his paintings and his huge inflatable monsters. Weird coincidence, but we’d just seen one of his monsters in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. It was a large, colourful snail. But at the Turbine Hall there was a long queue to see it and, perhaps because of the queue, people were being very deferential. It felt not like art but like Art.
In Newhaven it was very different. Alongside some lovely, playful paintings, all of which had an enviable brisk energy to them, there were these goofy inflatable monsters that people were encouraged to touch, hug, and treat as if they were pets. One of my favourite parts of the whole thing was when you got in close and saw all the places where these inflatable beasties had been patched and repaired over time. The star of the show, a sort of gaping mouth and throat called Treakle, had tape wrapped hastily around many of its teeth, presumably to stop air from escaping. Good on you, Treakle. You were excellent company.
I went away thinking about how brilliant it is when artists set out to make art for children. In this respect, I think Bruce Asbestos belongs to the same tradition as people like Keith Haring. I can’t see this kind of work ever really going out of fashion, not because, hey, kids like anything amiright? But specifically because kids don’t like anything - the stuff that really draws them to it is often of a wildly high imaginative quality.
And I also went away thinking about games a bit, and about something I’m clearly thinking about a lot at the moment because I keep kind of writing about it. My first piece on here was about rest spots in games, and I think since then I’ve mentioned The Art of Play, a wonderful picture book that takes in playgrounds all around the world. Asbestos’ monsters turned an art gallery into Newhaven into a kind of playground, and I think I only noticed this because everyone there was interacting with the pieces in a very different manner. There was no single right way to go about it.
I think maybe this is the key to a good playground: it offers stuff that has plenty of potential for play, but it tries not to guide you too closely towards approaching it in a certain way. And this, I think, is where playgrounds diverge from the kind of spaces you often get in videogames. Or rather - I am back to front here - why I keep a list of videogames that feel like genuine playgrounds, and it’s a very short list.
Lots of videogames are fun, and lots of videogames encourage playfulness, but not every videogame wants to be a playground - which is absolutely fine! - and not every videogame that thinks it is a playground actually is. I’ve been pondering this all morning, and while I’m not remotely ready to unstitch it all yet, I do have one observation.
The games that I tend to think of as being good playgrounds - warning, they’re the same games I go on about all the time - are the games that I’ve spent a lot of time playing after the campaign is done with. This feels kind of important. Crackdown is great to jump around once all the baddies are dead. Jet Set Radio is great to skate through once there’s no more graffiti to place. Burnout Paradise is a treat once all the crash gates are gone.
I think they all survive the end of their campaigns for very different reasons, but I think what they share is spaces that don’t need all sorts of rewards or puzzles scattered over them in order for them to be compelling. These are game spaces that have clearly been shaped by design, but which are happy to be experienced at a point at which a lot of the design stuff has been stripped out, or has gotten out of the way.
One of the questions I always used to ask to game designers was “how do you know when you’re done?” I got a variety of interesting responses to that, but designers often used the question as a prompt to talk about one of the most difficult parts of design: the awareness that some things need less design rather than more. Some art, to borrow a line from Bruce Asbestos, needs the people who visit to help finish it off. CD
Retrospective adventures
As we’re fast approaching the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2 I thought Id take you back to August 1999 and the run up to the UK arrival of the Sega Dreamcast. This piece is from the first issue of DC-UK magazine and it’s about the frankly terrifying US Dreamcast ads which featured the tagline “it’s thinking”. These days, sinister self-awareness is what everyone is looking for from their gadgets, but back then only Sega understood. Tragically ahead of its time as usual. KS