Happy Halloween! This week, Florence returns to a haunted house, Keith explores a haunted castle and Christian haunts a mortician. As far as we are aware, the Bathysphere is not haunted. However, sometimes late at night, many fathoms beneath the surface of the ocean, there are strange tapping noises on the exterior of the chassis, as though the ghost of a diver, long lost in the briny depths, has found our little craft and now seeks to escape the cold, dark depths – or drag us out to join him...

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I have a couple of spooky game recommendations this week. The first is The Annual Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival by Adam Robinson-Yu (also known for A Short Hike). It’s a freely available multiplayer space in which you and other ghosts can take part in seasonal activities, from pumpkin carving to an escape room. I tried it for the first time last year and immediately fell in love. Also, it’s worth paying at least $2 dollars because then you get to give your ghost a hat. FSN

My second recommendation is the puzzle game Spooky Express which, you guessed it, involves spooky trains. You trace routes for monsters to reach their destination while also accommodating their specific foibles. Oh, and apparently the zombies in it say “trains” instead of “brains.” FSN

My Halloween recommendation is really just an excuse to point people towards A Mortician’s Tale. It’s not remotely spooky, but it offers an approach towards death that most games - and most media in general - does not consider. It’s quiet, kind and filled with reverence for humanity. CD

Interesting things

The British Library has a new exhibition called Secret Maps. Two of my favourite words right there! The exhibition looks at a range of maps that were not meant to be seen and explores the manner in which they can control knowledge as well as defining territory. The whole thing runs until January 18th. Cannot wait to see this one. CD

As it’s Halloween, I am reading the excellent Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror, and the Spectre of Nostalgia, a really fascinating book about Derrida’s concept of hauntology and how it can be experienced through TV, films and music. I am obsessed with this idea of nostalgia, belief and forgotten pasts infringing on the present and future, and I think it applies very clearly to video games, a medium that is haunted by the genres, concepts, and rules of long lost software and machines. KS

Essay: No Return

It’s Halloween and I’m trapped in a haunted house. No, that’s me being hyperbolic for effect - I’m just back in my childhood home to look after my parents’ little black cat. In any case, there is something particularly uncanny about returning to a place that seems to have remained much the same when you’ve changed so much. This topic is one that many media have tackled, including several video games.

The first that comes to mind, of course, is Gone Home. Originally released over a decade ago in 2013, the first-person exploration game centres around a young woman called Katie returning to her family abode in Oregon after travelling. She arrives late at night while there’s a storm and no one is home. The game unfolds as Katie explores the house, unravelling what has happened to her family members in her absence. It's knowingly set-up to feel unnerving. One of the most memorable tableaus in the game for me was discovering red liquid in a bathtub; is this evidence of a murder? Nope, just remnants of red hair dye when Katie’s sister’s girlfriend helped her dye her hair. Turns out the real monster was 90’s homophobia.

Returning to your childhood home can feel like wearing a jumper that doesn’t fit anymore, and Night in the Woods captures this feeling all too well. It centres on Mae returning to her hometown of Possum Springs after dropping out of college. Mae hangs out with her old friends and (fittingly) witnesses strange happenings at the local Halloween festival. Night in the Woods is in part a meditation on the slow decay of small-town America, and the melancholia of having to face who you have become as an adult.

I grew up in a small market town in Lincolnshire called Sleaford. Apparently the name originates from Old English words that can be roughly interpreted as “ford over a muddy or slimy river.” I have met plenty of British people who have never heard of the entire county of Lincolnshire, let alone Sleaford. On my train from London King’s Cross I idly started searching for “video games set in Lincolnshire.” There is a Wikipedia page for this that contains a single entry, and its for the 2006 first-person shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. Apparently at one point the protagonist visits Grimsby.

And yet, people from Lincolnshire end up in unexpected places. James Turner, born in Lincoln, worked for Game Freak and was co-director on adventure game The Plucky Squire. Turner also was the art director on Pokémon Sword and Shield, which was set in the pocket monster version of the UK. Funnily enough, there is a Pokémon in Generation VIII that is oddly similar to a figure from Lincolnshire folklore. Impidimp is a mischievous imp-like creature that some people think is based on the Lincoln Imp, a grotesque in Lincoln cathedral.

Forgive this rather self-indulgent blog post, but like many millennials, Pokémon played a pretty sizable role in my childhood. While ghosts of the past haunt me in this home, there’s also dust and Pokémon cards, memories of cradling my Gameboy Colour like it contained another world (because it did). Games have used the prodigal child as a theme, but they also form part of a shared prodigal childhood.

The Lincoln Imp is associated with an old proverb about envy: “looking as the devil over Lincoln.” Between 1311 and 1884, Lincoln Cathedral held the record for the tallest structure ever built in the entire world (at its full height), only to be eventually surpassed by the Washington Monument. I don’t know if the devil still looks covetously over Lincoln, but the shadow of that tale lives on in a digital world, familiar yet strange. Old, but never aging. FSN

Retrospective adventures

Continuing the Halloween theme, I thought I’d share the cover of the first horror computer game I ever owned - the 1982 action adventure, Transylvanian Tower. It’s an extremely minimalist maze exploration title set over five floors of a vampire’s castle. Rooms randomly contain vampire bats and sometimes weapons, and if you kill a bat you get a brief glimpse of the maze map, allowing you to make progress to the next floor. It is typical of horror games from the early 1980s which often took inspiration from the great gothic horror archetypes: Dracula, Frankenstein, Werewolves and Mummies. Although the rooms were effectively empty boxes, it still managed to generate a sense of unease, though I quickly abandoned it when more complex horror titles, such as Forbidden Forest and Mastertronic’s great platformer Chiller came along. KS