Is there a more beautiful word than island?
Join me for a sweet second or two!
A place found on the mind as well as the map.
It doesn’t have to be.
Perception or misperception, it’s a glittering idea, a thing forever glimpsed on the horizon.
Located somewhere between the real and the entirely imaginary are video game islands.
These are places I’ve passed a lot of time in over the years.
Let’s dig in.
What’s going on here?
Probably the latter, but who can tell.
Animal Crossing,A Short Hike, even the classic Halo level The Silent Cartographer?
The boundary here, the shoreline, was a display of limitations that somehow felt like freedom.
That’s islands in the isolated sense.
But what about genuine video game archipelagos and island chains?
Archipelagos do something very specific to the imagination, I think.
They give you an Odyssey to go along with your Iliad.
Stories become mobile, their eyes drawn to the horizon.
You don’t always need actual islands for this.
A planet can be a kind of island.
A discrete level is a kind of island.
Yes, all great, but what about when games stick to actual archipelagos?
And that’s because you’ve got the option to see these elsewheres.
It lights fires around the imagination.
And there’s that sense of possibility as well as melancholy to this, I think.
On an island, this phase space is enormous, and enormously varied.
Because of this, on an island I’m constantly drawn to thoughts of detail and scale.
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?
It’s also a game world rich with potential connections between its various spaces.
Saltsea in particular understands this.
The sea in this game works like a powers-of-10 shot in cinema.
You reach the ocean and you suddenly understand the relative tinyness of what you’ve experienced so far.
Why shouldn’t this place be vast?
Greece is a country but also a dizzying collection of islands.
It’s endlessly changing, endlessly repeating, reworking, reinventing, re-evaluating itself.
Wind Waker’s islands come across as a bunch of puzzle-boxes.
Even the ones that don’t hold dungeons are studies in specifics and differentiation.
They have their own cheeses and sausage, and a kind of parsley salad they serve with everything.
Islands as repositories of different visual identities or different types of play also crop up in something like Crackdown.
An island just of tube puzzles!
Throw in something like A Monster’s Expedition and this use of islands becomes even clearer.
And that sense of separation again.
This can be great, actually.
I remember wading ashore in Wind Waker and finding an island graced with a single cabana.
Purpose and intent seemed visible everywhere, but what purpose, what intent?
To be there and then not there.
This is islands, too.
And you do this knowing that it’s possible for you to never return.
It’s a wrench.
“Paradise is an island.
So is hell.”
Islands can be fought over, stolen, or simply compromised by the wearing tread of tourists like me.
Islands are many things.
“The day of landing” is the phrase that settles in the head.
The spray of the sea gives way but never relents entirely.
