introduction of a maze [...] to cheat the
player in a helpful and discreet
manner”. During Rebirth Let’s Plays, he
observes, many YouTubers don’t realise
that they’re making progress till they
burst through the exit door. “[It] might
feel like the design was extremely
confusing and that they were just lucky.
But [this is] actually a result of some
subtle cheats that, at the right moment,
simply open a way forward for the
player, without them noticing.”
PROBLEMS OF INFLUENCE
There are less obvious reasons to be
appalled by Rebirth’s maze. The
pillared layout takes limited inspiration
from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin,
a 19,000 square metre landscape of
regularly arranged concrete slabs. The
association, which I didn’t notice
during my playthrough, risks reducing
real suffering to an aesthetic prop,
is a kind of energy resource. As you’ll
learn if you read story artefacts in a
control room just before the entrance,
the maze was explicitly built to
maximise the dread of the unlucky
wanderer before ‘harvesting’. The
space explicitly objectifies you, in other
words: it disregards your personhood
and reduces you to your capacity for
fear. The control room also contains a
broken maze model that once allowed
the layout to be changed for optimal
effect. Peering down at it helps you
imagine both the frenzy of those caught
inside and the indifference of those
pulling the levers.LAB TECHNICIANS
It’s a far cry from the mentalities of
amateur maze-builders online, many of
whom do their finest work in sandbox
editors such as Minecraft. These
players try for more uplifting
experiences: perplexity, yes, but also
mystery, wonder, and the satisfaction
of reaching the exit square. Indie
designer and Sony/Kuju Entertainment
alumnus Robert Swan has been
exploring mazes since the days of
MIDI Maze on the Atari ST (the
latter’s splitscreen PVP mode allows
you to spy on your opponent – when
playing with his brother, Swan used
cardboard to block the view). He cut
his teeth as a designer making games
with Sony’s Net Yaroze console at
university, later gravitating to map
creation in shooters like Quake and
Counter-Strike. He also occasionally
creates mazes from illustrations drawn
by his partner Jodie Azhar, Teazelcat
Ltd CEO and a former technical art
director at Creative Assembly.
“I was an avid builder in Minecraft
for many years along with my brother,PULL QUOTE X XXXX XX XX XX XX
XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX
XX XXthough this claim obviously relies on
you knowing about the game’s creation.
It’s also a bit of a judgement upon the
original monument – often described
by journalists as a maze or labyrinth –
which has been criticised for
portraying the dead as a mass of
interchangeable objects, burying their
names in an exhibition beneath the
monument. It’s disturbingly easy to
read as ‘pure’ architecture that can be
readily transplanted into a different
context. Olsson’s insistence that the
memorial doesn’t have “any actual
connection” to Rebirth’s events feels
like a testament to this process of
abstraction. “It was inspiration purely
related to the spatial structure.”
If there’s no literal connection
between the Holocaust and Rebirth’s
events, themes of dehumanisation and
genocide abound in the game’s
narrative. In Amnesia’s universe, terrorGamenamexxxx
FE ATURE
Control’s brilliant
shape-shifting
Ashtray Maze,
best combined
with heavy metal.An island maze
built by Fortnite
players Zesv,
Noble and Alarm.