Map Map will Make you Want to Manually Map the Games you Play
I play a very specific role when I am out shopping with my family. I am the one out of the four of us who has enough spatial awareness to know where we are going after leaving a shop. My family will look around bemused, some going left, the others right, while I will be the one who says “this way”.
I thought this superhero ability would put me in good stead for Map Map. It is a game that relies on that spatial awareness, making a virtue out of being in a space and understanding precisely where you are and where you’re heading. But, as it turns out, I’ve become my family. I stare from my map to the real world, real world to the map, and I haven’t got the foggiest.
Building up a Mental Map of the Archipelago
Map Map – A game about Maps is triumphantly unique. It casts you as the cartographer of a ragtag group of children who seem to have sailed right out of Neverland. You arrive at an island with a map. That map has no points of interest on it at all, just a squiggly series of lines that are meant to represent coastline. Then one of the Lost Boys asks you to pinpoint something specific on the map: a flower or tower perhaps. So, you find said point-of-interest in the world, open the map, and try to stick a big red pin in the area where it should be.
I love what happens next. A sodding great arrow falls from the sky, and a distance-from-marker score appears at the bottom of the screen. Initially, that score is high – your marker is in the air, after all – but it dials down as the arrow falls. Eventually, the arrow lands and you get to see whether you were close after all (even bouncing on your head if you get the marker smack-on), and a star-ranking appears. Map Map handles this reveal so well.
Initially, you can get by with a bit of squinting and guesswork. You might identify a bit of coastline and guess a distance from it, chucking a map marker down and submitting a position to the big, bouncing arrow in the sky. But this will only get you so far in Map Map. Your better bet is to use the game’s tools, increasingly unlocked through progress, to be a touch more precise.
Building up a Cartographer’s Toolbelt
You can hold the left mouse button to start counting steps from one location to another, which is useful when the map has a scale that is in step-based increments. But even that becomes unreliable, as walls get in the way of your steps, and you’re often without a compass or having to travel round a corner. So, you’re turning to tools like callipers, which allow you to triangulate positions. If the location is nine-steps from this coastline, and five steps from this coastline, where do they intersect?
In the first three quarters of Map Map, I was in love. This is such a fantastic basis for a game, and it’s a minor miracle that I haven’t encountered it in a game before. Expect Nintendo to nab it for the next Zelda game – I can see it happening. It’s a puzzle without parameters: you can solve each objective in a multitude of ways. You can also treat it as seriously as you want. I am a bit laissez faire and will accept a one- or two-star rating. My daughter, though, will ONLY accept three-stars, and will complete a map with every last location drawn on, thanks to Map Map’s handy pencils, crayons and erasers.
Other tools start layering onto Map Map until, about three-quarters of the way through, I felt it got a little over-burdened. The wonderful joys of arriving at an island, getting my bearings, then ticking off quests was disrupted. Suddenly, there were Floor is Lava obstacle courses, some LEGO-like building mechanics, and maps that were basically empty, requiring you to create them from scratch. Some of the sparkle was gone: Map Map wanted me to do things that a) I didn’t care for, and b) were done better in plenty of other games. Map Map was making a game for my daughter, who was fine painstakingly finishing every map, rather than me, who just wanted to dive into some missions and then move on.
Rewarding you for how Much Effort you put in
I prefer to think about the Map Map as it was in the first three quarters of the game. I haven’t even mentioned how much I adored the optional side quests. In each location there are maps hidden in the world – spray painted onto walls, scratched into rock – that hide a chest. With a shovel in hand, you can uncover them and get your just rewards. They don’t give you anything meaningful (I would have loved to customise aspects of the world or tools) but they make for cracking collectibles.
Plus the world is so inviting. Your ragtag group has an appealing character, and they each want something specific from the mission, whether that’s a rare flower or historical records. Map Map is best when it takes you to a place that feels like it’s got stories to tell. I loved a ruined village where you got a sense of the lives that have passed into history, using a city map to supplement your own map. Another location seems to be a temple to raven-like gods. I wanted more levels and islands like these, rather than anonymous swamp areas and islands.
Regardless, even with an uneven ending, Map Map is a recommendation that I would be proud to make. It taps into something that I have rarely, if ever, done in a video game: making maps of the locations I visit. It forced me to fully visualise a space and correspond it to a map, stretching muscles that I haven’t ever had to stretch. I’m a little shocked at how bad I was at it. I don’t quite have the spatial awareness that I thought I had.
If that sounds dry, it’s not. Map Map – A game about Maps is also abundant with colour, story and character. It’s a world you will want to explore and map exhaustively. Who knew that a cartography game would be so damn endearing?
Important Links
Buy from Steam – https://store.steampowered.com/app/2702260/Map_Map__A_Game_About_Maps/
