Madonna, Dark Souls and Mario meet in a sweet and confounding swimming experiment based on a PS1 obscurity

Image credit: Hatim Benhsain

If you’re playing a “PS1-style” game these days, odds are it’s a horror game. Sometimes, I worry that the association of PS1 with moody, Silent Hillian dankness has gotten to the point that younger players no longer perceive the original PS1 as a video game console at all. Going by Itch.io’s Halloween output, the PS1 was just a rusty bucket of rot and gore in which the faithful might periodically hallucinate the face of Spyro the Dragon.

Here to remind us that the PS1 was capable of colours beside “existential grey” is Water Level/b.l.u.e. EXPLORATION, from New York City-based game designer Hatim Benhsain. It’s a free downloadable experiment inspired by b.l.u.e.: Legend of Water, a Japan-only PS1 adventure in which you are a girl swimming through alien ruins with her dolphin.

In Benhsain’s rework, b.l.u.e. has become a game about games swimming through each other. Levels from the original Legend Of Water appear within it via emulator, but they’re molten and deferred and spliced with other media to the point that you can’t really call this emulation (let alone piracy). The older PS1 game occupies a screen within the screen that zooms and blurs, tilts and dissolves and reappears as you no-clip through a larger, enclosing world of azure and stone, awash with “borrowed” chunks from Dark Souls, Super Mario 64 and Kingdom Hearts. The soundtrack, meanwhile, slops together waterlogged excerpts from American Idol performances and Madonna, as GameFAQ text unfolds across the top of the screen.

The controls are straightforwardly adapted from Legend Of Water – ah, how strange and joyful to play a 3D controller-based game from the pre-Dualshock era – but what they actually do seems to shift in accordance with the game’s steady remixing and refocussing of its source materials. It reminds me a little of synthesising the geography in Mu Cartographer.

The creator’s term for all this is a “plunderludic”, or “game made of other games”. I hadn’t come across this concept before, and am curious to understand what distinguishes a plunderludic from, say, an interactive 3D collage. Benhsain includes a link to a resource page with some tools and examples of plunderludic games. It makes connections with the 19th century playwright Bertolt Brecht and George Maciunas, a member of the mid-20th century Fluxus art movement. I’m looking forward to giving it a proper read at some point.

In the short term, I’ll only say that it’s a delight to play something that takes such delight in swimming, as both a physical practice and an artistic methodology. It’s been a while since I enjoyed swimming in a video game – today’s aquatic physics and lighting may seem miraculous by PS1 standards, but I wonder if somewhere along the road from Legend Of Water to Subnautica, video games have lost the art of making underwater exploration feel magical. If you have any favourite water levels to share, old or new, sing out.