"In fact, most real-life mazes could act as examples of really poor level design-that's part of their nature."Īmnesia: Rebirth contains one of gaming's more horrible mazes. "I think there's probably a lot of great inspiration to draw from studying real-life mazes and labyrinths, but my guess is that most of it would be connected to aesthetics and general layout, and not so much about level design," comments Fredrik Olsson, executive producer and creative lead on Frictional's Amnesia: Rebirth. Even here, though, developers can't afford to bewilder players too much. Mazes and labyrinths might seem obnoxious in a role-playing game with random battles, but that claustrophobia makes them well-suited, of course, to horror games. I was in a drain that was basically the same four pictures of a drain representing 40 different places they could be in the drain." "I was in some kind of drain for fucking ever. She came close to abandoning her first Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy VIII, thanks to a maze section where the same backdrops are used for different rooms. Getting people to feel comfortable and confident in their navigation of complex digital spaces is already quite difficult." Gramazio herself enjoys thinking about mazes but is less keen on walking them, in real life and otherwise. It's not 'OK, this is very clever, I need to stop and think about the choices I've made'. "When people are stuck and can't find their way out, I think overwhelmingly the response is 'This is bullshit, I can't figure out where I'm going'. "In a digital maze, you cannot separate people's frustration at their inability to find their way out from their frustration with the interface and how the maze is presented," Gramazio explains. But the real problem, perhaps, is that mazes and labyrinths aren't that fun to navigate-at least by the standards of games that define 'fun' as a brisk feedback loop between task and reward with minimal ambiguity or downtime. Maze environments are inherently artificial and arcane, and it's difficult to fit them into many stories and settings.
MAZE SCREENSAVER WINDOWS
"Even going back to the Windows 95 screensaver maze, right? A lot of early 3D, even if it wasn't explicitly labelled a maze, is something that we would now consider maze-like."Įven going back to the Windows 95 screensaver maze, right? A lot of early 3D, even if it wasn't explicitly labelled a maze, is something that we would now consider maze-like Holly Gramazioįor all these precedents and opportunities, however, mazes and labyrinths aren't much celebrated in games today.
"I think a lot of how we understand moving through 3D spaces in videogames today comes from maze-like experiences," notes Holly Gramazio, game designer, curator, and scriptwriter for Dicey Dungeons, who once organised a maze exhibition for London game festival Now Play This. While not the first of its kind, Namco's Pac-Man spawned a wave of 2D arcade maze-chase games in the 1980s. The original first-person shooter was arguably Maze (1974), created by students on Imlac computers at a NASA laboratory. Off the mapįor a time, mazes and labyrinths were central to videogames.
MAZE SCREENSAVER PC
Every month we run exclusive features exploring the world of PC gaming-from behind-the-scenes previews, to incredible community stories, to fascinating interviews, and more. This article first appeared in PC Gamer magazine (opens in new tab) issue 355 in April 2021.
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