Expedition 18
The Bathysphere
Hello, and welcome back to the Bathysphere! On this journey into the deep, Donlan dives into a pristine puddle before playing with cubes and learning about a forgotten forest, while Florence gets poetic and Keith visits Canada. Come aboard, it’s perfectly safe!
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The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
I hope that CUBE eventually gets a name that’s a little easier to google. But that’s only because I want more people to discover this beautiful and ingenious game. The developers say that the less you know going in, the more fun you’ll have, so I will keep this brief. Roll a cube over complex nougat-y surfaces and prepare yourself for…well, that would be telling you too much. This is wonderful stuff. CD
I am in Vancouver this week so I decided I had to recommend a title from the country’s incredibly fecund indie development scene. I opted for Outlast, a 2013 survival horror adventure from Red Barrels, following an investigative reporter as he explores an abandoned asylum. It’s incredibly creepy, generating a real sense of dread from its familiar horror environments. Also, survival depends on being able to run away from scary stuff as quickly as possible, which feels more authentic and relatable than most similar titles that expect you to fight the monsters. It’s still on Steam and really worth playing if you’re brave enough. KS
Interesting things
I absolutely love this book. The Great North Wood is a graphic novel/essay that explores the site of an ancient wood that covered what is now a good section of South London.
The illustrations are beautiful and the text is spare and effective, but the best thing for me is that the way that time is jumbled within these pages, with the woods taking you back and forth through history in a way that only woodland truly can. Transporting! CD
This week I got to pop into the Manchester Poetry Library. It’s the North West’s first public poetry library which is free to enter and immediately gave me a sense of calm amidst the throngs of pedestrians on Oxford Road. I was enticed in by a display of zines. FSN
On the theme of poetry, there is a poetry-inspired TTRPG jam hosted on itch this month. You can join in or enjoy one of the poetic games that have already been submitted. I particularly like Septa et Cetra by Rookery Games, which asks you to “Recognize that the city both moves and stays still.” FSN
Essay: A way in
One of my favourite things happened this week. That is, I saw a picture I’d never seen before and I had to stop what I was doing and just stare at it for a bit.
The picture was called Puddle, and it’s by Escher. It’s a muddle of browns and creamy whites at first and then it comes together, for me at least, in stages. First I get the thick black lines that put me in mind of French and Belgian comic book art. Then I get the fact that the surface of the earth - the brown stuff - contains footprints and tyre tracks, and they given things a weirdly modern feel. Then - rather than stages I guess it comes together in levels - I’m inside the puddle, that clear, mirror-smooth surface is water and I can see trees reaching down into the bottom of the image before my brain does the work of turning them around because it’s a reflection and I understand that these trees are actually overhead. Finally, I get the moon, or perhaps the sun. I still have to search for it a bit every time I look.
Puddle is a wood cut, and Escher created in in 1952, so my Tintin vibe is sort of bang on time-wise. In the book I just borrowed from the library, Puddle is slotted in between two other works on a similar theme. The first, from 1950, shows more trees and another moon reflected in water, but the water is agitated and you get these wild zig-zags in the tree trunks. I get the idea that what happens to the water has an impact on the image, but the spell that works so well in Puddle - the sense of real nature and real woodland textures - is missing for me.
On the other side there’s a lithograph from 1955 which doesn’t work for me either. For one thing, it’s called Three Worlds, which kind of does the viewer’s work for them, and it shows another pond, with more reflected trees, but there are leaves on the surface and a carp below the surface. It’s too busy for me, and too eager to explain itself.
Here’s the thing: those other two images are ultimately a bit too Escher for me. In that they confirm my prejudices about an artist I’d always kind of written off. Escher’s good for textbook covers and the ceilings of dentist’s offices, but anything else? Puddle, at least, makes me think he probably is. It’s an image that I have completely fallen in love with - I cannot stop looking at it - but it’s also that most valuable of things in this world: a way in.
By which I mean a way in to something that I was previously unaware of or, even worse, had ignorantly written off. And this has made me think about how precious and unusual - how unpredictable - that a good way in can be.
Sometimes, quite often actually, the way in only becomes apparent long after the fact. An example of this from me - all these examples will be from me, such is the nature of a good way in - is the Dick Tracy movie from the early 1990s. I love that movie, but in the end it wasn’t a way in to comic strips so much as it was a way in to Bogart films and Raymond Chandler and anything where people walk around in cool hats.
Games are filled with ways in, of course. When I was a kid I was exclusively interesting in platformers, because platformers were the showiest of genres. But Sim City - on the SNES of all things - was a way in to sims, and from there I was into strategy games and all sorts of weird off-shoots. My way in to tactics, meanwhile, and this is really pretty late, was XCOM, the Firaxis reboot. Not the game itself, although that was true love when I finally connected. Rather it was a video Firaxis made to advertise it, which had Jake Solomon knocking around a game store trying to convince people to play his new game. I remember thinking: if the game is half as quick and adaptive and interesting as this person’s mind, I have to play it.
Looking at it from this angle, I reckon a way in to something is such a gift because you get two things: you get the new art and the new worlds you’ve discovered, along with all the things you’re going to discover from them in turn, but you also get this memory of the thing you saw that made all the difference. This thing that sent you on a journey somewhere new, or made you reconsider something you’d already decided was not for you. So thank you, Escher, for your playful, sombre, game-like puddle. For its glimpse of one world hidden inside another, which has in turn opened up a whole new universe of stuff for me to think about. CD
Retrospective adventures
Continuing my Canadian theme, this advert - as featured in the January 1997 edition of Intelligent Gamer magazine - is for Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey for the N64, an okay-ish hockey game that lacked some of the anarchic charm of the classic 16bit title, NHL 94. I really like this ad though, which was extremely subtle and cleanly designed in contrast to the visual chaos of most games marketing in the mid-1990s. It also reminds me of an era when, as a British gamer, I was discovering North American sports stars exclusively through the games they sponsored. Larry Bird, John Madden, Wayne Gretzky – these legendary athletes existed to me only as pixellated automatons or photos on the covers of Mega Drive game boxes. I wonder if North American gamers felt the same about Daley Thompson or Brian Jacks? (Younger readers may have to Google those.) KS