Bramble
Bramble
Cartoonist: Luke Baker
Publisher: Hollow Press
Publication Date: May 2025
Video game strategy guides have become a lost art. For all the convenience of being able to access a seemingly infinite number of walkthroughs on YouTube, it’s a shame that curated strategy guides are no longer printed on paper. These books were inexpensive but lavishly illustrated chronicles that meticulously documented each nook and cranny of a sprawling digital world, and they often served as fuel for the imagination of children who would have to wait for a birthday or holiday to play the actual game.
The Italian publisher Hollow Press has committed itself to resurrecting the lost art of video game print media, and its latest offering, Luke Baker’s Bramble: Rise of the Amalgamoids, is a grim but gorgeous strategy guide for a PlayStation-era dark fantasy game that never existed.
“You are,” the beginning of the guide tells you, “a marionette, a creature made in the image of a long dead race of failures.” A craftsman has pieced together your small but sturdy body from bits of wood and twine and sent you out into a postapocalyptic world with a mission.
The craftsman has thoughtfully equipped you with a dismemberment toolkit that you can use to craft amalgamoids, autonomous creatures (much like yourself) fashioned from twine connecting various pieces of scavenged corpses. This is horrific business, to be sure, but you’ll need all the help you can get to survive.
After the seed of a xenobiotic organism fell from space, the earth became encased in “bramble,” the roots and branches of a gargantuan tree whose canopy prevents almost all sunlight from reaching the surface of the planet. Your goal is to make your way to the vulnerable underground core of the original growth of bramble, although what you choose to do there will depend on the secrets revealed during your journey.
Bramble is akin to a graphic novel in its narration of a story by means of annotated illustrations. The reader is invited to follow a character on an adventure, and the twist is that this character is “you,” the player taking on the role of the marionette as it navigates the themed areas of its ruined world.
Bramble also serves as a guide to a nonexistent game of the same name, marking important encounters with NPCs, offering advice for tricky combat situations, and listing the pros and cons of various amalgamoid configurations. Creature illustrations are accompanied by blurred and grainy gameplay screenshots whose charmingly poor quality is a respectful nod to real strategy guides from the PlayStation era.
Though Bramble indulges in ample worldbuilding and navigation, its primary emphasis is on the compilation of something akin to a monster manual of grotesqueries. In this postapocalyptic world, humans have been driven underground, and evolution has not been kind to the species. Some feral humans still scramble through shadowy underground tunnels, but Bramble’s world is largely populated by hybrid creatures with horrific mutations suited to their dystopian environment. Bramble presents these characters in their morbid glory as illustrations and pixel sprites helpfully accompanied by text boxes and item drops.
Bramble’s publisher, Hollow Press, is perhaps best known for Vermis: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods, a loving homage to Dark Souls and its PlayStation-era predecessors created by the dark fantasy artist Plastiboo. In his insightful essay on Vermis, “The Guide to a Game That Doesn’t Exist,” Patrick Fiorilli writes, “As a strategy guide, Vermis makes good on the promise that such volumes once made to their readers: that there is a world beyond these pages waiting to be explored.”
Bramble is a worthy successor to Vermis, and the book proudly stands on its own as an accessible introduction to the emerging genre of original strategy guides. Its story is driven by the forward momentum of a traditional graphic novel and augmented by the intriguingly fragmented worldbuilding presented by digital RPGs. As a physical object, Bramble also suggests the nostalgic mystery of forgotten media, and the reader can easily imagine coming across this book hidden in the back of a closet or buried at the bottom of a box at a flea market.
Like the video game strategy guides of an earlier age, if you have what it takes to brave the dangers of a world at the close of an apocalyptic cycle, Bramble gives you the tools you need to survive and explore to your heart’s content.
Bramble is available from Hollow Press.
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