Hello and welcome to another expedition! This week Christian is looking at games about vans, Florence is spending time with the Picts and Keith has found an old news article about how arcade owners could make sure people stayed engrossed in Missile Command. Please step inside and join us, just mind your head as the hatch is lower than you think.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

There have been several games about the turmoil of Alzheimer’s but As Long As You’re Here is a particularly polished and emotionally resonant example. It looks at an unfolding family drama through the eyes of an Alzheimer’ sufferer for whom regular activities and joys slowly unravel as the condition takes hold. This is, of course, quietly devastating, but hugely meaningful and important too. KS

As someone who spent many happy hours as a teen hanging around in Games Workshop and board game stores, I was obviously going to try Tabletop Game Shop Simulator, the latest in a seemingly endless run of shop sims. It’s typical of the genre in that you order stock, design your store interior, employ staff, then manage the business, but it also lets you paint figures and then display them on large dioramas! It is rather lovely. KS

Interesting things

Carved in Stone is a storyteller’s guide to the Picts, an early Medieval Scottish society. The book is absolutely gorgeously illustrated and has been designed with TTRPGs in mind. With input from specialist research, I was most impressed with the transparency around what interpretations had been made about the archaeological record, and the importance of recognising diversity of lived experience in the past. FSN

This week, in honour of its one year anniversary, I would like to recommend the Thinky Games database. Defined as “games you love to solve,” the database includes all kinds of puzzle games, now including visual novel detective games. Objection? FSN

Essay: Vanlife

For the last few months - actually it’s more like all summer - my neighbours have been restoring a van in their driveway. The van is a camper. It’s a VW, but not the classic VW camper. It’s white and powder blue and clearly needs a lot of work: the van never leaves the drive. But it still speaks of adventure and a freewheeling, chummy kind of way of being in the world. The van is an intensely appealing thing.

Personally, I can’t drive, but I still have a sense of this - a sense of what TikTok calls VanLife. On TikTok itself I see people waking up in Yosemite or running small businesses out of their vans, screenprinting at a table that pulls out above the bed before dropping packages off at the nearest post office. It’s hard to watch these videos and not wonder what that life is like, if only for a few days or so.

Then there are videogames. Over the last few years, videogames have fallen in with VanLife.

This year, for example, there was Promise Mascot Agency, possibly the game I’m looking back on with the most fondness. Here’s a compact open-worlder in which you’re dropped into a small Japanese town filled with eccentrics and you have to slowly restore the place. All great. But you do it while tooling around in a van - a pick-up. It’s white and a bit gutless at first, but as the game unfolded I grew to love that thing. I grew to love every backtracking journey just for a chance to hang out in the van a bit more. I came to realise that, when it really got down to it, I was the van.

Something similar occurs in Easy Delivery Co. This one’s a spooky little game about delivering packages across a strange, snowbound community. Once again, though, you’re looking after a white pick-up. It bounces along very sweetly, and there’s a lovely aspect of van management too: I’m constantly forgetting to raise the back gate to keep any packages in place.

The van I’ve spent the most time with, though, is the van in Caravan SandWitch. We’re in sci-fi territory, away on a planet with a ruggedly beautiful Provencal vibe. But the van, while looking like something that you might use to cruise over Martian wilds, is recognisably a van. It jounces and rattles you around. It can take a fall or a collision with rock. Its turning circle is less than ideal. It’s a van all the way.

I love this stuff because it gets at how art can apply characterisation to all sorts of things that aren’t strictly characters. I don’t think any of these vans talk, for example, but they deliver a sense of their life and their personality through the way they move, the sounds they make, the little incidental animations that deliver a sense of their rumbling, clanking reality. These vans feel like friends - and, like the promise of the VW in my neighbour’s driveway, they get me a little closer to a feeling of loose-limbed freedom and adventure. CD

Retrospective adventures

Coin-op games have always come with hidden settings that can be accessed by arcade staff to change the difficulty settings (or in the case of Mortal Kombat, switch the gore on or off) and here’s a little glimpse into the dynamic use of those setting to entice and then entrap gamers. It comes from a 1980 issue of Leisure Play, a 1980s business publication for arcade owners and it’s about Atari’s then brand new city defence sim Missile Command. The advice is to set bonus rewards at a lower score to attract fresh players before ramping them up again after a few weeks to maintain the challenge. Of course, this sort of constant difficulty iteration is now a key element of free-to-play smart phone game design, where challenge is intricately managed to ensure retention. Some things never change. KS