Welcome back to the Bathysphere! Today Chris is getting really lost and kind of loving it. Florence tries to remember to forget something.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

Late to this but Morse is just incredibly good. I could describe it as a kind of tower-defence real-time twist on Battleships, but really it’s a frantic and frequently overwhelming game about using Morse to fight off incoming enemies and it’s utterly original in all the important aspects.

Everything of consequence in the game revolves around dots and dashes. There’s a demo and the game itself is out too. Thank you to, I think, Chris Schilling for this one. (Thanks to Chris Schilling for an awful lot of things, tbh.) CD

If you have any interest in solo TTRPGs, you will have likely already heard of Tim Hutching’s Thousand Year Old Vampire. The game has you answering prompts to chart out the long life of an immortal being. Chris mentions the freedom to forget in his piece, and I particularly like how Thousand Year Old Vampire forces you to choose between memories to lose as you progress through your lifespan. FSN

Interesting things

I recently moved to Copenhagen for a postdoc, and I’ve been reading Copenhagen Tales, an anthology of stories about the Danish capital. Predictably there are some by Hans Christian Andersen, but also lesser known tales such as “To Catch a Dane” by Eugen Kluev about the prejudice that immigrants face in the city. I’d love to see some fiction anthologies themed on video game cities. FSN

Essay: Getting Lost

I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost at the moment, and it’s completely wonderful. (While I’m briefly on the subject, this podcast with Solnit is just unmissable good too.) The book’s about a lot of things, but I think part of its central argument is that it can be very useful to be out of one’s depth a little:

“Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, ‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?’ I copied it down and it has stayed with me since.”

I can tell it will stay with me too.

At the same time as I’m reading this - and almost by coincidence - I’ve been getting wonderfully, pleasurably lost in a game. Not metaphorically. I am in a game and I consistently lose my way in it. It’s brilliant.

The game in question is Bernband, by Tom van den Boogaart. It’s getting a proper remake/reimagining soon - here’s a piece in the Guardian about it - but I thought I’d go back to the free original while I waited. I am so glad I did.

Bernband is a game about wandering around an alien city, and really that’s it in terms of objectives. The city is made of little interlinked hubs and they’re all very characterful. One will be a sleek black Death Star corridor, say, while another will be a viewing gallery offering a panorama of candy-windowed skyscrapers. I think these places are all fixed in relation to one another, but there are lots of options to go in different directions and it’s not too long, each time I play, before I’m properly confused as to where I am and how I got there.

As such, Bernband often plays as a bunch of familiar landmarks - the classroom, the place with the floating orb, the church - that I stumble upon again when I least expect it. And it plays as a bunch of discoveries and happy accidents. Last time out I fell down a gap I didn’t even see and ended up far below the town in a little circuit of sewers that didn’t really go anywhere. It was kind of rad.

What I am taking from this is this idea that Bernband is a primer in something that it is useful to know about if you play a lot of games. I’m thinking of the big modern, often Ubi-developed games, but also FromSoft stuff with its intricacies and its oxbows. These games are so big and so filled with possibilities that I often really struggle with choice within them. Which door to choose? Which passageway to move down? Sometimes I’ll make a bunch of progress in one direction and, delightful as progress is, it comes with this stinging worry that I won’t be able to find my way back here again, that I’m not taking notes, and that all the opportunities I’m passing up are gone for good.

Apologies if this is a familiar thought from me - I think I had kind of the same worry recently when playing MIO for Eurogamer. But what’s so good about Bernband is that the stakes are so low, and the city is so gorgeous, and the mission, really, is just to wander and see what happens. Because of this, I don’t worry about where I’ve been, what I’ve chosen not to explore, and what I’ve already forgotten about. Instead, I am free just to be lost in a game. And maybe - maybe! - this is the right way to play all those other games too. CD