I hope you don't mind a few Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild posts. The game came out in 2017. At a distance, I watched a 13 year old play it. But I was too focused on the TV/Film Industry to have time to play any games myself, apart from a few Mario Kart 8 races.

But recently, I've felt compelled to play BOTW. To wander. To sink into the experience. I started yesterday, and already I'm finding it has a lot to teach me, especially about game design and how we use landmarks and maps to make sense of our place in the world.

In 2017, I remember watching Link move through a giant geometric maze with extremely high walls. "In a Zelda game," I thought, "this is weird". Now seven years later, I loaded Breath of the Wild to play it myself for the first time, determined to immediately go to the giant maze of my memories.

To speed up my search, I found a complete map of Hyrule and scoured it until I spotted a strange, perfectly square structure in the north-central region. "That's the place!" As I started a new game, it took me a while to realize I was in the south-central region, so I thought, "I'll ignore everything and head north. I'll hide from powerful enemies and make it to this maze-like place."

That's when I encountered a recurring problem. There's no way off the plateau I was on. Any attempt led to me falling to foggy depths below. The game not only sneakily suggested paths for me to take, in this case, they forced me.

That's okay. I understand they have to have an "onboarding sequence" for the player, so I started mine, temporarily pausing my fixation on heading north to "the maze" and replacing it with a meandering path along the game's intended onboarding route.

I gathered mushrooms and apples and acorns. I leapt off an enticing ledge into water and discovered a secret korok leaf. Eventually I acquired a bow and arrow, and could take down enemies from a distance. As part of the onboarding, I went to the marker on my map, and that caused the game's many transportation towers to emerge from the ground, high up into the sky.

At the top of the first tower, I learned that all of the towers and all the shrines in the game acted as teleportation nodes, where I could transport from one node to another. Nice! This would save hours—days—on retreading the same ground by foot countless times.

I'm marveling at how this game was designed. Each new point of interest has a strong, motivational interest for the player to be enticed by. For example, from the first tower, a mysterious old man encouraged me to go to the shrine nearby. I reluctantly went, but when I completed the puzzle within, I left with new powers (the ability to manipulate magnetic objects) along with a new transportation node. That's a significant reward, enough to encourage me to do what the game required me to do next: go to the three more shrines—because only then would the old man give me his paraglider, giving me a way off of this giant plateau, so I could travel north to the geometric maze of my distant memories.

More impression may be added here over time.