44 times down to the sea in ships! Welcome aboard. This week, Chris gets the measure of Vholume - with an H - and celebrates brilliant friends. Meanwhile, Florence glitches out of bounds.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

The Bird Oracle is a keepsake game, that is, in the words of its principal designer Shing Yin Khor “a game where you - the player - makes a physical artifact as part of the process of playing the game.” This specific keepsake game invites you to create your own personalised bird-themed divination system. Augurs take note. FSN

Interesting things

Brilliant friends at Jank.cool have launched a website that’s essentially perfect? My highly partisan take is that it’s a really good games website from back before SEO was overly heavy-handed in dictating what you could and could not afford to write about. That’s my own description! What it means, anyway, is lovely writing and lovely game recommendations. This piece on Kolydr is a perfect example, and Kolydyr itself is MAGNIFICENT. CD

On the theme of brilliant friends, this week sees the publishing of Keza MacDonald’s new book on Nintendo. I feel like I’ve ever-so-slightly fallen out of love with Nintendo over the last few years for nobody’s fault but my own, and if anyone can bring me back in it’s Keza. Nobody writes about this company like her. I am so excited to read this. CD

Chris’ piece had me musing about speedrunning, and this in turn led me down a path to revisit Madison Schmalzer’s Worlds Are Just Suggestions. In this short paper Madison reflects on her experimental video project in which she records herself performing out of bounds manoeuvres in games such as Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Land 2, and Pokémon Red. Glitch out. FSN

Essay: Vholume’s volumes

Vholume with an H - the traditional spelling, as Frasier might put it - was developed by at least one of the people behind STRAFTAT and BABBDI, which I have only found out about by trying to talk to Graham Smith about Vholume. Can we park this, and I will return to those two games in a future newsletter, as they sound completely glorious?

Vholume is also completely glorious, happily, and it has a free beta on Steam right now which I urge you to download. It’s a melancholic parkour game, and that’s already a genre that strikes right to my heart. And it’s set in what feels like an abandoned Brutalist world that stretches off, dense and anfractuous (that was a punt), in every conceivable direction. Marry me.

Speedrunning is the point here, I think. You’re certainly encouraged to race through the first level as fast as you can to open up the second, and even more pleasing, level. What I love about this is it’s only when you’re moving at speed that Vholume works its greatest trick. You’re a thing of pure momentum, your eyes and hands making decisions without the rest of the brain’s involvement. And yet every few seconds you race past something - or slide or wall-run past - that your brain only registers, moments later, and then tells you that you kind of want to go back and take a second look at that thing you almost saw.

I have played this short beta for hours, and what I have uncovered is that it’s not really a short beta. Rather than a single route through most spaces, there are dozens of different routes, and you often access them almost entirely by mistake, by wall-running too far or too high, say, and mantling to a ledge that you didn’t even see until you’re on top of it.

This is wonderful, and if you add to that the sombre, derelict Brutalism, that feels at once modern and weirdly ancient, you have something very special. The Library - I think it’s called the Library - is often the most derided of Halo levels, but what I loved about it, in amongst the frustrations, was feeling that I had found myself lost in the middle of something terrifyingly deep and complex and I was unlikely to ever see the sun again. It was a moment where I felt the fear of being tiny in a massive universe. I get that feeling here. I’m racing along and I don’t dare stop because if I did I’d have to deal with the horrific reality of where I actually found myself. 

I haven’t mentioned the movement much, because it’s so wordlessly perfect, such a lovely play of momentum and gymnastics, that I am powerless to describe it in any kind of adequate way. I have lots more to say about this game, but I’m in Jubilee Library in Brighton and my laptop is dying so it will have to wait - or if you see me in the real world, stop me and I’m very happy to talk about it a bit more. CD