PAPER TRAILS

How developers and fan cartographers alike are charting new horizons in videogame maps

- NIALL O'DONOGHUE

From the moment you pick up the controller, waking I up your diminutive vulpine protagonist on a quiet shoreline, you're entirely on your own. For all its soft-edged charm, the world of Tunic is hostile signposted in an unintelligible language, with only disordered pages torn from a manual to fill you in on the basics. Eventually one of those pages grants you a scrap of map, and the world unfurls before you. A world with such ominously named locales as Dark Tomb and Forbidden Pass, dotted with question mark icons and, most curious of all, a handwritten squiggle that points towards a building called the Old House.

The shadow of the original Legend Of Zelda falls heavily on Tunic. Two titles separated by over 36 years and six console generations, yet both drawing from a shared source of inspiration: the joy of childhood exploration. Growing up, Tunic developer Andrew Shouldice would map the woods near his grandmother's house, drawing everything from a hill of fire ants to a secret entrance to a waterfall. "It wasn't about being accurate, it was about understanding how the spaces were spatially related," he explains. "A map is a cool artefact to have."

Maps have long been an intrinsic part of video games, from old-school dungeon crawlers which forced players to draw their own by hand to strategy guides published in the likes of Nintendo Power. We primarily think of them as navigational tools, something to ensure the player doesn't stray too far from the beaten path. Yet our relationship with in-game maps is evolving, perhaps best illustrated by the heavily stylised maps of open-world luminaries Breath Of The Wild and Elden Ring, departing from traditions long established by their genre stablemates. Developers and fans alike are taking notes, exploring both how maps can be used to increase our immersion within a virtual world, and remind us of treasured journeys.