One of my clearest memories of lockdown is going for a lunchtime walk with Olaf Stapledon. I think that was somewhere near the start of things, there were no cars on the road, and those government-mandated exercise breaks still felt oddly illegal. There’s a section of southern hills behind my house, and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t go until Covid. One morning, I crossed its gentle grassy hills, over the thing’s buried spine, the almost indescribable expanse of Stapledon’s novel Star Maker playing in my headphones.
Star Maker is about a journey through the universe – deep into space and out the other side, really. But its wild interstellar journey that day actually left me more deeply rooted in the landscape I was exploring. I remember badgers laying them on broken chalk, dew ponds with swallows in circles, a lonely bench pointing at everything, and I sat there in silence for about twenty minutes, maybe an hour. I keep learning. During my walk that morning, I relearned how to integrate into nature.
This is exactly what the Swamp of Paradise teaches. It’s a small game, but a huge one: a true Stapledonian trick of time and space. I load it up, explore the endless colorful wetlands, ride day and night, spring, summer, autumn and winter. There’s a goal — I’m walking around with a net, I have a biology book to capture — but it’s a goal I don’t really focus on most of the time. Instead, I wander. As I watched and listened, I saw different shades of the sky, from peaches to strawberry yogurt to black bubbling storm clouds. I like rain one moment and snow the next. I enjoy silence – my silence.
Actually, this gets to the heart of it. When I usually play a game, I get filled with one sentence: I’m thinking about how to write it, how to get into it, what I might say. The gift of Paradise Marsh, I think, is the silence it brings. I’m playing a pleasant fugue, if that’s possible. The room disappeared with the noise from the road and my cat asking for dinner. Then I loaded up Google Docs a few minutes ago and realized I was still speechless and empty-headed, and this space and silence in my brain is exactly what the game gave me.
So now I have to build the experience from memory – I can play Paradise Swamp twice. I can tell you that in the game, I’m walking through this blurry landscape – sometimes the whole thing looks like it’s rendered with those giant wet markers you get in bingo – and the game will It presents itself as a series of happy discoveries. Trees changed from oaks to pine. The sky darkens or the sun rises, dyeing the world a harsh tango orange. I choose a direction, water to earth, water to earth, and encountering a pile of rocks, I might jump over the river, or a bottle full of a poem.
The landscape is repetitive and confusing. I’ll never be able to get it done, but like one of those old Tom and Jerry cartoons, I often bypass the familiar. Iconic cycles: tire swings, mossy windmills, old tractors half-eaten by grass. There is always a touch of dereliction of duty, and the human stuff gives way to the inevitable. The overhead lights flicker, and when I compare it to the clear beam of divine light passing through the clouds, I only see flickering. A litter box will be surrounded by circles of litter, perhaps pulled out by birds for disposal.
The game’s unique space incorporates an element of animal capture: moths appear at night, but act like a light source. Tadpoles stick to shallow waters. These animals also make sounds and shapes: I’m drawn to flashes and chirps or bells on the horizon. When I caught them, the bumpy connection of the net was almost jarring in such a quiet space.
We’re back in Stapledon, and I thought: The animals I collect will eventually become stars and constellations that hover over me as I continue to explore. A nice distraction, but the appeal of the game lies elsewhere. The more I played, the more I realized I really enjoyed visiting Paradise Swamp in real life. In games, at least, I can linger for days and weeks due to the accelerated passage of days and nights. This is a game about nature and about us. It’s about what nature gives us and what it asks of us – what it takes from us when we’re there, and what it leaves us when we’re gone.