Hello and welcome back inside our spherical deep sea exploration craft! This week, Keith reveals his love for games with multiple simultaneous lead characters, while Florence walks out of a door. Christian is poorly and has been confined to the sick bay – get well soon, buddy!

There will be no newsletter next week as we are taking a short break on dry land, but we’ll return the week after. Thank you for joining us on our expeditions!

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Today I was mesmerised by how to walk out the door, which I could describe as a melancholy FMV typing game, but that doesn’t do it justice. You have only 20 seconds to walk out the door, can you type fast enough? Feels like holding your breath in a once familiar room. FSN

Like anyone who remembers using cassette tapes, I am drawn to games that let you record and replay things. I’ve only just started MotionRec, a mostly monochrome puzzle platformer, in which you tape and then restore your character’s movements in order to navigate each 2D map. Can’t cross a chasm? Record the little chap walking, and then replay the captured footage on the edge of the platform and he just walks across the space. It’s really clever, not too taxing and the visual style is sharp and cute, like a lost Game Boy classic. KS

Interesting things

Voidspace Live has an open call for interactive performances, installations and exhibitions to be shown at Theatre Deli in London next June. I went to this year’s iteration and had a great time learning how to design an escape room, among other things! FSN

Also at Theatre Deli next year, Adrian Hon is organising a Jubensha convention. Jubensha is a “scripted murder” game format involving roleplaying and group sensemaking - it's a distinct genre that has become immensely popular in China where it originated. This is a great opportunity to try out some English language Jubensha and meet designers as well. FSN

Essay: multiple control freaks

As someone who hates multitasking (and is awful at it), I’ve nevertheless had a lifelong obsession with video games that allow you to control two or more characters simultaneously. In the late 1980s, I used to design Dragon 32 games with my friend Jon and at some point we came up with a scrolling platformer in which the lead character finds her consciousness split into two bodies and two parallel realities; the idea was that the player would have to control both versions of her and get them to the escape point at the same time.

To be honest, we put most of our efforts into writing a backstory, and then trying to think of a title. The best we came up with was Parallela, which we immediately realised was quite difficult to say. We had images of enthusiastic gamers wandering into their local Dixons, trying to ask for a copy then giving up and buying something else. For this reason, the working title of the game became Para… Para Bombjack.

Many years later in 2012, I entered a charity game jam at the London Games Festival in which games journalists were pared with student coders to create a game in 48 hours. Together with university student Theo Chin, I came up with a game called Double Droid, a side-scrolling endless runner in which you simultaneously controlled two robots avoiding incoming objects as they trundled along parallel walkways. Thankfully, there is footage available:

To my surprise, our game won – I still have trophy somewhere. I promise it is not on my mantlepiece.

Anyway, I think there is something amusing and compelling about the challenge of controlling more than one character – and there are actual great games that do it well. Pikmin of course, which has a fascinating development history: Shigeru Miyamoto had been working on a GameCube prototype entitled Mario 128 where he wanted to see how many controllable Marios he could get on screen at once. Meanwhile, co-creator Shigefumi Hino had read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins and was interested in the cooperation between different cells in basic organisms. From these roots, a great puzzle game emerged.

Hideki Kamiya’s brilliant (and shamefully overlooked) Wii U title the Wonderful 101 has you commanding a whole army of superheroes in a sort of crazed rabble. Kamiya had been thinking of working on a Super Smash Bros type game with a large variety of fighters and then thought, "Why don't we just bring out all the characters at once?"

There is a compelling sense of chaos that comes with attempting to control more than one thing on screen at the same time, and I think it’s the challenge of managing and directing this chaos that attracts certain game designers. I’d recommend you play either of the games mentioned above, or a more experimental take on the subject – 2013’s The Swapper, a sci-fi platformer in which the lead character is able to create and control multiple clones of themself. Sadly, what you’ll never be able to play is Para… Para… Bombjack. Although I designed several levels on graph paper, Jon realised the poor Dragon 32 couldn’t handle our lofty concept. It turns out I’m not alone in my inability to multitask. KS

Retrospective adventures

If you were playing video games in the mid-90s, I am willing to bet that whenever you think of the festive season, you think of Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams, the seasonal demo edition of Sega’s beautiful adventure game. It was distributed with Sega Saturn consoles in Japan, as well as Sega magazines in the US and elsewhere, as a marketing boost for the machine. Featuring a mini adventure for heroes Elliot and Claris, the story has them setting out to retrieve the star for the top of the Twin Seeds City Christmas tree. It was a rather beautiful thing, later added to the NiGHTS Into Dreams remasters. KS