Expedition 13
The Bathysphere
Hello and welcome to the thirteenth expedition of the Bathysphere. Fortunately, we are not superstitious or we would be concerned about clambering aboard an early 20th century submersible on such an auspiciously numbered journey. There is nothing unlucky about this week’s newsletter, however, which contains our new Guest Recommendations section and an essay about hiking in video games among other treats.
Please also consider taking up a paid subscription which will help us continue our voyage. It is £25 a year and you get access to our archive of previous expeditions.
Now join us as we descend!
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
I’m still reading The Other Side, Jennifer Higgie’s exploration of female art and other worlds, and I’ve just been going through a section about Ouija boards. These things still scare me a little, which is why I’m glad the board game Ghosts Can’t Draw exists, which replaces the board with a drawing surface you can wipe clean and gives each player images they have to create on its surface without seeing what they’re actually doing.
It’s ludicrous fun - so much so that I don’t think we’ve ever bothered with the game’s deeper rules. My daughter and I just pick cards and get drawing. It’s a phenomenal game. CD
Do you like maps? I like maps. If you too are cartographically inclined, then you might be interested in Route Scouts, a free game hosted on itch about mapping a secret route and sharing coded messages with a friend so they can try to recreate it. I haven’t tried it out yet but I appreciate the game encouraging players to engage with physical mapping and rethink how they represent the world around them. FSN
Interesting things
TikTok is great for discovering artists, and one of the first I encountered was Owen Pomery. I have several of his prints now, as well as his beautiful, melancholic book Victory Point. I wish Pomery made games, partly because I can’t imagine how that would work. His detailed, thin-lined architectural drawings capture a moment in perfect stillness and separation. I would love to see how he would make it move. CD
If you’re interested in interactive theatre, and live in the north of England, then I’d recommend checking out the BOX Northern Larp festival. The next one will be held in Leeds on February 14th 2026. If you fancy not just taking part in a larp but designing one yourself, BOX is also open to submissions until July 2. FSN
As a completely normal adult, I spend a lot of time scouring YouTube and other online sources for clips of early video game coverage. Recently, I discovered this treat on the BBC Archive – it’s from the ‘youth TV’ series Something Else which was broadcast on BBC2 from 1978-1982. It starts as a sort of awkward joke comparing the arcade game business to football, before going into a discussion about the emerging pro gaming scene. The archive has a whole section on old gaming reports and it’s well worth a browse. KS
Guest recommendations – Holly Gramazio (part one)
Holly is a game designer, event curator and best-selling author. Here is part one of her wonderful recommendations.
A non-fiction book: Bruno Munari's 1967 book Fantasy is so good on invention and creativity, why things are funny or strange or frightening, different modes of design and storytelling - and there's a new English translation that came out a few months ago! Munari worked across so many different areas of art and design - he made games and toys and sculptures and weird objects and paintings and mobiles and books, just to start - and his view of fantasy and how it functions and what it means to make imaginative work is so engaging. A really inspiring and wide-ranging read.
A novel: Let's go with Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel. It's a short novel from 1940 about a man on an island where everyone else seems to be stuck in a time loop. It's very satisfying - one of those novels where it starts out all mysterious and you think it's just going to be vibes, but as it goes on there's suddenly a story as well, and everything just works. It's great at setting its scene and carrying you along with the story and giving you an understanding of the weird mechanics of the island.
A museum or gallery: I'm gonna go for Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker - it's great partly because it's a bit of a remote slog to get to so by the time you're there it's invested with specialness, but also because you get to see two layers of time really clearly; you get the bunker as it was originally intended and then you also get the people who've turned it into a museum without much budget or, possibly, museum experience, but who've come up with ways to explain what it was and why it was there - a kind-of double-layered storytelling.
A festival: A couple of weekends back I went to Voidspace Live, the second annual Voidspace festival, and it was so good! Basically it brings together people who are making live game-related and interactive work in a bunch of different modes - larp, jubensha, interactive installations, experimental arcade builds, live art, immersive theatre, anything in that sort of "be in a place and interact with a thing or a person or a ruleset" space. It's really wonderful to see people from these disparate fields getting together and comparing notes, and the festival is a great way to get to try out a bunch of different things. If you're near London and that sounds interesting to you at all then definitely keep an eye out for next year's event.
Essay: Landscapes and exertion in Death Stranding
A long time ago in the early noughties, I wrote a feature for the Official PlayStation magazine in which I posed as a freelance game designer and sent out a series of weird project ideas to a range of established studios. One of the ideas was a hiking simulator, inspired very much by my experiences walking the Yorkshire moors and Peak District national parks, in which players would simply explore a vast rural landscape, spotting wildlife, navigating by sight, taking rests to eat and drink, enjoying the views but also slipping down hillsides and accidentally dropping their rucksack in a stream. There were no challenges or tasks – just a wild place to ramble across. Of the several replies I received only one was positive; only one studio understood the value of such a peaceful yet quietly demanding game. The rest thought I was crazy.
There has since then been a wealth of games interested in the idea of wandering – A Short Hike, Firewatch, Eastshade, The Trail – but although they are lovely experiences, they rarely capture an important element of the experience – how physically strenuous it is, and how important it is to be able to read a landscape rather than just look at the nice flowers. In this sense Death Stranding and its coming sequel are perhaps the most authentic hiking simulators ever made. While carrying various heavy packages on his back, Sam has to navigate a demanding, topographically varied landscape, constantly addressing balance and weight ratio, to simply not fall over. Using the two trigger buttons to brace yourself, you tread carefully down rocky inclines, loose stones cascading behind. You have to consider the accessibility of every climb, you need to think about the depth of the stream you want to cross lest your load becomes dislodged and floats away downstream. And the rain, or god, the rain. The deadly time showers of Death Stranding are the perfect metaphor for how a good soaking turns a walk into a quest. I remember a school trip to Ravenstor in the Peak District where it rained so much, the water got into my tupperware sandwich box and when I opened it, ravenous for something to eat - the contents were swimming around inside like the detritus after a shipwreck. Playing Death Stranding and experiencing its dread of rain I feel that Kojima too must have once spent a joyless hour sat on a bleak hillside eating damp cheese and tomato sandwiches.
Where, in most walking games, is the sheer effort of staying upright and dry, of climbing onto a rock or over a low fence? I guess the subgenre that gets closest to the aspect of physical trial is the survival sim – titles such as The Long Dark and Among Trees where you scavenge and cook and make shelters so that you don’t freeze to death. Walking long distances forces you to understand your body as a machine that requires fuel and maintenance, and these games definitely get that. But for most of us, hiking isn’t a life or death scenario - we’re usually just trying to not fall on our arses or saturate our packed lunches.
Another aspect video games rarely simulate is the process of reading the landscape – looking for signs in the flora, in the shadows cast, in clumps of trees, in the meandering routes of brooks and gullies. A beautiful example, though, is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – and its successor Tears of the Kingdom – in which you are taught to look out for odd outcroppings of rock, or swirls of differently coloured grass or flowers - because these are where you find the Korok seeds. These games subtly teach you to observe and interrogate scenic features rather than seeing the landscape as some sort of homogenous organic mass, a pretty yet intractable backdrop, like the slatted scenery of a Victorian theatre.
A walk is a story, read in steps, told in signs and portents. It is also a physical experience – the human body is a burden as well as a vehicle. Most importantly, a walk is an expression of freedom, even when following a map or guide – you are free to get from point A to point B and your experiences en route are yours alone. You stop where you like, while the rest of the world continues.
The studio that got back to me and liked my idea was Rockstar. I remember the letter I received from them (I know - a letter!) - it was complimentary and hopeful that such a game could be made - just not by them, they were a bit busy with a little trifle named Grand Theft Auto III. Even though Rockstar makes games about violence, there are trails cut through the landscapes of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, specifically designed rural routes that take in mountain views and forest pathways. Since the launch of GTA Online, there have been impromptu walking groups (see these images of the Los Santos Hiking Club)– although the game doesn’t simulate the exertion of walking in the way Death Stranding does, it is open to the idea of people putting effort into traversing its landscapes for no extrinsic reward.
Wandering was my favourite part of Death Stranding – the crunch of gravel, the fear of falling, the process of stopping and thinking, ‘can I really make it up that hill?’. The world is beautiful but also cruel and dangerous, like the sublime landscapes of the Romantic artists. What all these things capture is a basic truth: it is an effort to be in the world and to move through it safely. And the effort is the point. KS
Retrospective adventures
Microprose, the American developer behind such games as Civilization, UFO: Enemy Unknown and Silent Service as well as countless fighter plane sims, made beautiful magazine adverts throughout its heyday in the late-80s and early 1990s. This double-page spread for Railroad Tycoon is such a treat. I love the way it captures the atmosphere and setting of the game so evocatively, with no screenshots at all. The illustration recalls the classic work of Ladybird artists such as John Berry and Frank Hampson who brought intrigue, action and clarity to the pages of those treasured children’s books. KS