Focus

Two games came out recently that are both narratively focused, environment focused and handle order with different levels of success. That’s Tacoma and Hellblade. Before I start any critique here let me be clear, these are both great games and my points don’t make either bad or good its just simply how they’ve handled one small aspect of their world structure.

In my opinion Tacoma has much better level design, which is effectively what Order is when it relates to interior design and environment design. In Tacoma you often can just walk and find you way to the place you want to be, each path is unique and its pretty easy to understand the structure of a set of rooms very quickly. There are nearly zero repeat rooms or hallways, the structure is always just different enough to help you memorize the structure of the room and adjacent hallways. Visually the walls are simple and non distracting and the set dressing is what stands out making it again easy to remember each room in your mind with little effort, which means you can visualize a set of spaces very easily.

Whereas Hellblade’s scenes can be full of visual information which can sometimes to the game’s benefit as it’s meant to be disorienting. However there are times in the game where you get lost because the area is so large and objects and materials are so similar the whole way through that it’s hard to remember the structure of a space you were meant to puzzle through. In this case I went through one area where there was pouring rain, bright lights hanging from trees, intense chomatic aboration, thin spiky trees, thin spiky ground blocking objects, and more taking up my visual field. I got lost multiple times trying to solve one puzzle and only really solved it through stumbling into it which was my experience with a number of puzzles. Chaos in the visual field fits the game’s narrative 100% but it starts to hurt a player’s ability to reliably solve a puzzle. Keep in mind too that Order and visual chaos can still exist hand in hand but that’s an incredibly tight rope to walk.