This article was essentially inspired by… quirks in game design you can observe here and there. None of the games were intentionally badly designed, but having played them these days I had some problems leading me to weird, and yet fun conclusions.
About what? Maze games!
Not sure how do you call that kind of game, or if there even is a genre.
But the point is to make the player get lost in a labyrinth and then force him to find his way out. Or maybe deep. You can’t finish the game without getting to the heart but you have to learn the maze to leave it. Part survival, part puzzle, part Breath of the Wild-like exploration.
How to achieve that?
Limit what they can see
Fog of War in RTS or simple darkness hiding the range of your view. Or not show much.
Like in Septerra Core, a very old J-RPG wannabe I play these days. It has some convoluted mazes, where the entire riddle is because they don’t show you much:
And yes, this is pretty much all you see when presenting a corridor with much bigger mazes inside the game. But you can limit the player’s vision in a different, yet much better way.
The Wolfenstein Paradox
This is not something I managed to experience by myself, I only heard about it. Supposedly, some gamers who played Wolfenstein 3D (or was it Doom) got lost in the levels, because they never experienced it from a first-person perspective.
I guess that would be the best limitation of what the player can see!
Make it vertical
I played a lot of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 recently, and I have to say - that’s a great game! One thing it does particularly well is location design. Not only does it have an interesting world. It also gives you locations with non-obvious vertical designs.
You are given a typical go-there quest every now and then, but when you go to the exact spot on the map, you realize there’s nothing of interest there. And the map gives you a hint - you should be higher or lower. The point is - that there’s no ladder nor staircase - because the room below is accessible by a tunnel that starts elsewhere.
If you’re going 3D, make sure your maze (or even level design) is vertical as well as horizontal.
Turn off the map
Seriously, no help. Make them draw it on a piece of paper.
Something I find very frustrating when entering another maze in Septerra Core. They never give you a map. And they limit how far you can see. You get lost pretty easily.
Or maybe, give the player a ball of thread (make it limited length for more difficulty fun).
Also, put a Minotaur there. Or maybe not, because it sounded like a survival horror now.
What do you think would make a game aMAZEing? 😉
I just got a flashback from playing the first Doom where I managed to get lost more times than I could count 🥲
Also, another example that comes to mind is hiding the objective markers off the map until you visibly reach it. E.g. Diablo 2 managed to do it spectacularly. You don't have any markers on the map showing you where to go until you are almost at that spot. I've spent hours upon hours on some locations trying to track down four relics of Khalim, a way to the next section of the desert or any of these cursed waypoints scattered around the map. But it's so satisfying to finally find them.
I think some of the old Doom levels have a maze-like quality, especially when you navigated a bunch of twisting corridors, find a button and press it to hear a door open somewhere. Part of the fun was retracing your steps to figure out what had changed, because sometimes the doors were hidden as part of the walls.
And who can forget the Monkey Island woods on Melee island that you couldn't navigate without the cryptic dance moves map?