Expedition 14
The Bathysphere
Hello and welcome to the fourteenth expedition of the Bathysphere. This week, we’ve been looking at Cryptic Crosswords - and more specifically a way in to these teasing, torturous delights. Florence covers recent and future relics, Donlan makes the case for bringing back household gods, Holly Gramazio returns with more recommendations and Keith uncovers the incredible plans for video games based on Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that were sadly lost to time.
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Now join us as we descend!
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
My game recommendation is one that, by the time you read this, will perhaps already feel like a relic of a different time. Robert Yang’s Don’t Rank Cuomo is a short free web game in which you have to repeatedly fill in a ballot paper without ranking the corrupt New York politician Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral elections. In a blog post about the game, Yang explained he was inspired by political memes and the omnipresent cry to, indeed, Not Rank Cuomo. He considered the game to have an expiration date of June 24th, when the New York Mayoral Primary happened. Play it again, today, anyway. FSN
I found out about Order & Chaos on TikTok. It’s a pen-and-paper game played out on a grid. Two players fill squares of the grid with Xs or Os, and either player can place either an X or an O on their turn. Why? Because one player is playing as order, and is trying to get a line of five of the same symbols. The other is playing as chaos and is trying to frustrate order.
And I love this idea - that two players working in the same space might have very different objectives. These kind of psychological quirks animate a bunch of interesting games, such as Quarto, for example, in which you each try to make a line of four of the same pieces, with the twist being each turn you pick the piece your rival is going to play with. Just rethinking player roles makes games seem so fresh again. CD
I’ve been recommending this a lot, so I’m just going to do it again – Quantum Witch is a funny, strange pixel art adventure set in a world of annoying gods and bizarre religious cults. Created by NikkiJay, with help from Paul Rose (Digitiser) and games journalist and streamer Stephanie Sterling it’s like a forgotten relic from the ZX Spectrum. KS
Interesting things
Today I picked up a copy of Amplitudes Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, an anthology of speculative fiction. I devoured Katherine Duckett’s short story “pocket futures in the present past,” which chronicles the activities of a group who collect artefacts that appear through portals from the future. It also includes this great line: “Okay, so someone’s game controller from 2087 popped through a portal.” Gotta love some speculative games archaeology. FSN
A brilliant draft of a friend’s book has reminded me that the Romans used to have household gods. They had gods who would literally live in their houses and watch over everything, each with their own role, their own focus.
This strikes me as an incredibly brilliant idea, and perhaps one we should think about bringing back. I think I’d find the range of little disasters that have always marked the various flats and bedsits I’ve lived at a little easier to deal with if I felt I wasn’t totally on my own in there.
And this is, of course, the kind of idea that’s perfect for exploring in a video game. I can imagine something like Advance Wars where you and your gods are both in the kitchen trying to use deity magic to stop the dishwasher from breaking down. It also reminds me a bit of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s wonderful graphic novel Seconds, which hinges on a semi-similar concept. I need to read it again. CD
Essay: The best way into Cryptic Crosswords
Growing up, my mum was a Cryptic Crossword genius. It was a strangely subconscious business for her, almost like a form of Spiritualism. You’d read her the clue - which made no sense - and she’d just sort of mutter it to herself a bit as she walked around the house. Minutes would pass. More than five, less than ten. Mum would be in something of a fugue. Then she’d be in another room doing something or other that had nothing to do with word games, and she’d suddenly yell out, “MOONLIGHT!” You’d go back to the paper, count out the squares and examine any cross-letters and, jeepers, MOONLIGHT would work. But why? Mum would just shrug and go on to the next one. She had no idea of the internal processes at work in any of this.
All of this made mum a very dangerous guide to the world of Cryptics. She made solving seem magical and deeply impressive - something akin to a super power - but she also gave you no easy way in. I grew up fascinated and slightly frightened by Cryptics as a result. Then, about ten years ago, I decided I wanted to be able to complete them myself. I saw myself as a Cryptic Solver and I liked what I saw. But how to get there?
Cryptics are those special crosswords where the clues initially make no sense when you first read them. Traditional crosswords will give you a definition and you have to hunt for the word and put it on the page. Cryptics, meanwhile, will have a little bit of Modernist poetry attached to each space on the grid. It’s like spending a morning with T.S. Eliot. (This is not a diss.)
In truth, the Cryptic clue gives you a definition and then a bit more. One part of the clue will be a definition of the word you’re after, and another will be wordplay to help you back to that word. You solve each clue in a kind of ludic pincer movement, working inwards from the definition on one side and the wordplay on the other. (There is often a third part to the clue, incidentally - the wordplay indicator. As suggested, this is the part of the clue that tells you what kind of wordplay you should be thinking of.)
When it works, when it clicks, it genuinely is everything Cryptics fans say it is. Cryptics can actually feel a little easier than standard crosswords because you don’t need much general knowledge - you just need to know how the clues work. More than that, though, you get this wonderful thrill, this instance of the fingerpost, from thrusting a hand into this bramble patch of ideas and emerging with the perfect word or phrase you are after.
Here’s the problem, though: there’s knowing all this, and then there’s putting it into practice. I own several books on Cryptics - how to solve them, and also what they are and where they come from. My favourite is far and away Alan Connor’s brilliant book, Two Girls, One on Each Knee, which gives you the history of Cryptics along with the rules and the entire milieu. It’s a perfect book for a desert island - except once you’ve finished it you’ll wish you had a stack of old Listener mags to work through so you can put what you’ve just learned to the test.
So that’s roughly how I learned to solve - I would have the Cryptic open and Connor’s book nearby, and when I got stumped I’d remind myself of the specific indicators I was missing. What does “for example” mean in a Cryptic? What does a question mark indicate at the end? It wasn’t a perfect education, but through it I learned the basics.
Now, however, I’d recommend a different approach. If you want to get into Cryptics but you’ve never managed to make them click, still start with Connor’s book because, above all other things, it will make you want to solve Cryptics. Then head to the Guardian on a Saturday and its Quick Cryptic.
The Guardian prints a handful of Cryptics. There’s the standard week-day number, which starts fairly calmly on a Monday before getting steadily more hazardous. Then there’s the Quiptic, which is a Cryptic but just a touch more forgiving. All fine. But the Quick Cryptic is where you can really learn Cryptics, if you ask me. It’s much shorter, the clues are a little more transparent - while still being cryptic - and best of all, as a preamble, it explains every kind of wordplay it’s going to be using that week, and it rotates these wordplay types pretty regularly.
There’s something about being stuck and then just scrolling up and getting just a little bit of orientation that makes the Quick Cryptic sing. It’s become a vital ten minutes of every Saturday for me. And it’s finally really bedded in the Cryptic rules. If you’re interested in this intriguing puzzles, then, this is an ideal place to start. Happy solving! CD
Guest recommendations – Holly Gramazio (part two)
Holly is a game designer, event curator and best-selling author. Here is part two of her wonderful recommendations.
A YouTube video: The Aunty Donna "Most Upsetting Guessing Game in the World" series is divisive and hard to watch but also kind-of incredible. The final episode of the first series - I think the fourth episode overall - is indeed extremely upsetting. It's also something like eighty minutes long. So basically a horror film but the horror is the natural results of some particularly bad game design decisions.
A retro video game: Does 2014 count as retro? Let's say it does, and go for Dream Quest, which is just so much fun - it was a deckbuilding roguelike when that wasn't really a genre yet, and I think it mostly was genuinely made by one guy, which you can tell from eg the wildly inconsistent art, which varies between "unpolished but diligent amateur" and "this is literally a stick figure". I love how quickly I grew to accept the art, the writing, the whole setup and how completely I got carried away by the gameplay. And how, actually, I'm now probably more likely to push it on people because the screenshots look a bit ridiculous - there's a joy in going "I know how it looks BUT TRY IT" that there isn't in going "here is this game that seems polished and beautifully designed; guess what, it is".
A contemporary video game: Look, I really love v buckenham's Downpour so it's very possible you've heard me go on about it before. But I do love it! It's an app for making games, it runs on your phone, it basically feels like using the instagram image editor or something, it's like image-based choose your own adventure or a branching picture book - it's such a fun easy way to get people messing around and making little games, and the expressive possibilities are still I think in the fairly early stages of being explored. It feels like the perfect way to make a tiny game as a message or a gift to a friend; everything is kind of personal and messy and physically grounded. Plus, thinking about what you can do within its constraints is a really satisfying game design exercise.
Retrospective adventures
The wonderful Video Game History Foundation has just made a fascinating addition to its online archive of vintage video game materials: a huge batch of industry newspapers. I went straight for the MCV collection, which holds dozens of scans of this vital European newspaper that used to go out weekly to game publishers, shops and journalists. This story comes from the January 16, 2009, edition and it concerns plans to translate a range of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals into video games. I’m pretty sure this never happened, which is a shame as I would have loved a karaoke adventure based on Evita, or a Starlight Express karting sim. Anyway, one of the reasons trade newspapers are so valuable to game researchers is that they present the industry in a state of constant flux, revealing the projects and partnerships that never came to be, as well as the first inklings of ideas, games and developers that would go on to change the industry. KS