MAPS THAT REALLY MAKE YOU WORK

Because navigating a big, wide world shouldn't always be a walk in the park

- James Nouch

Sometimes, when Silksong has punched me hard in the face, I'll disengage from the boss battle I'm trying to overcome and just explore for a while. I'll hunt for walls that look smashable, revisit dead ends, and rummage around early-game areas to uncover new pathways.

So if I'm lucky, when I next sit down to rest at a bench, my pathfinding labours will mean that Hornet has a small section of new map to jot down - a fresh scrap of paper to glue to the larger whole. Over time, this repeated bench-side ritual transforms your understanding of the world you're exploring, as the boundaries of Pharloom shift over and over again. Five hours in, you think you have the measure of the place. 35 hours in, you can see that you were totally geographically clueless.

Part of the pleasure of all this, of course, is that it tickles the completionist tendency that so many of us have. It is satisfying to fill in this map in the same way that it's satisfying to turn the final page of a hefty novel, to slot the last piece into a 1,000-piece jigsaw, or to apply the finishing touches to a painting.

Of course, open-world games have been tinkering with the ways their maps work for decades.