Christian Donlan is a features editor for Eurogamer. He is the author of The Unmapped Mind, published as The Inward Empire in the US.
It's hard not to get reflective about a word like that, hard not to even get a little moony. Join me for a sweet second or two! Islands, a kind of cherished space out in the world that offers something that can only truly be internalised. A place found on the mind as well as the map.
This sea as barrier is part of the fun in a lot of games set on a single island, or set on a few closely grouped islands. Animal Crossing, A Short Hike, even the classic Halo level The Silent Cartographer? The sea is employed here a little like the guard rails in a game of bumper cars: it pushes you back and redirects you to the place where the action is.
Those patterns! Repeated, tidal moments of experience and adventure and expectation in a story. Islands give you this. Rituals emerging from the realities of the landscape. Maybe this is why I love games set on archipelagos so much? A game world made up of islands is a game world of endless new beginnings, of starting afresh with each wade up the beach. It's also a game world rich with potential connections between its various spaces.
Islands as repositories of different visual identities or different types of play also crop up in something like Crackdown. One island will be very urban, another will share its cityspace with an eager sprawl of rock and forest. This island is about this, that island is about that: in this way the discrete stages of Super Mario 3D World are islands separated by temporary rules and gimmicks.
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