An Initial Exploration of Carto: the World as the Act of Appearing

 

By MrGeckoBiHu(壁虎先生)

(This review was originally published in Traditional Chinese on January 10, 2022 in a printed Taiwanese Newspaper The Affairs(The Affairs 週刊編集) Issue No. 54, and later published on their official website)(You may find the full original texts here)

(This English version of the article you're now reading is translated by myself, on June 8, 2025)

In Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, there is a level in which the Celtic warrior Senua enters the domain of the malevolent spirit Valravn. There, things are not what they seem. Amid the smoky forest, inside the maze of the crumbling stone ruins, are wooden archways on which shamanic totems and skeletons hang. And the player will gradually discover that, passing through these gates in a specific sequence and direction, will cause bridges to materialize out of thin air just as the wooden posts of the archway slice across the screen, and the stone walls previously blocking our way and the shamanic totems previously hung on trees disappearing. It is as if we just step into a "space rupture," as if we have skipped over a portion of reality. You can even step back from the "frame" formed by these archways and, from a different angle, perceive the "discontinuity" and "rupture of the scene" inside and outside of the archway frame, like viewing a scene through a shattered glass pane, or an image that’s been inaccurately reassembled with tapes after being torn apart. However, if you did not pass through or arrive at these archways in a particular sequence, just walk through them spontaneously or randomly, then nothing extraordinary will be registered by our senses about these archways, no different from an ordinary archway. They stop being the "rupture point" of the scenery, even passing through them back and forth continuously, we would not have perceived any discontinuation in space, these become mere man-made objects, and the "rupture" of space that just now appeared, miraculously disappeared.

Now, imagine that we are both Valravn and Senua, and we hold a magical map capable of manipulating the spatial reality around Senua. This is precisely what in Carto, an 2020 indie game made by Taiwanese studio Sunhead Games, our young little girl protagonist Carto was doing. Living aboard an airship high in the sky, Carto's cartographer grandmother possesses a magical map. And through reassembling pieces of this map in a puzzle-like manner, the appearance of the world itself changes in response. One day, in a mischievous mistake, Carto, who lives abroad with her grandma, accidentally causes the ship to be struck by lightning, falling onto the surface world below, and is separated from her grandmother. But she still holds a fragment of that magic map in hand, so she sets out on a journey to find a way to reunite with her grandma.

On our first stop in Carto, a small fishing island, Carto's first mission immediately showcases the game's magical core mechanic in an elegant and concise way: An absentminded old fisherman stands by the shore, describing to Carto his home on the east shore, but he's forgotten where east is and how to get home. When Carto unfolds her map, we see a series of tile pieces within each a certain pattern of natural terrain was drawn, and are randomly pieced together, forming a "seemingly incomplete" landscape (each tile contains up to two types of terrain). The player can see Carto and some other characters' locations on the map, however the player will soon realize that this island does not have an east coastline, in fact the tiles never extend there, that area is "lacking out of bounds" on the map. So, the player selects the tile containing Carto and the fisherman, rotates, moves and connects it to the east side of the map. And when the terrain aligns, a house then "materializes itself out of thin air" on the tile. Closing the map, we find that Carto and the fisherman now "already are" standing next to his seaside home, then the old fisherman thanks you for "guiding" him home.

It is also on this island that Carto meets Shianan, a slightly older girl who later becomes her companion, and is about to undergo her coming-of-age ritual of her tribe, which under the islanders' custom, requires her to leave her homeland and never to return. Shianan tells Carto that she's excited for the journey, while also confessing that she doesn't want to part from her family forever. As Shianan embraces her loving family bidding farewell, we hear composer Eddie Yu's lullaby's different voice part gradiently and gently joining each other, into a magical harmony, and faintly sense the theme of separation anxiety planted in this moment full of scents of newborn, in the soil of the core of the story. And it's about to, through Carto's lively playful kindness and intuition, transform into the radiant of meeting all kinds of friends on their journey. Through prairies, forests, deserts, volcanoes and glaciers, we meet the guardian of the forest and his animal companions, we meet singing and drumming rice planters, water-seekers in the desert, the funny hotelier of the volcano inn and the nomadic descendants of the glaciers. Carto unfolds its children's picture book-like world, a world that's full of whimsicality and deeply rooted in the earth. It shows us how characters vividly face the challenges of survival coexisting with nature. And the vibrant and gentle watercolor visuals, drawn without harsh outlines by art director Kuan Hung Chen, is as if a non-intruding but intimate greeting, like Carto and the great bear's hug. Under Kuan Hung Chen's pen, they dance featherly with Carto's probing steps. And every encounter with a new color, a new tile picked up feels joyous as though meeting a new friend. Playing Carto is a feast—as if we were brought back to a pure, uncluttered world, and are embraced by the constant arising of possibilities. This world is full of hardship, but also full of love.

What truly sets Carto apart, however, is how remarkably simple and elegant its gameplay is, and within which its narrative is woven into seamlessly. In Carto, there are no absolute positions, only relative ones. And the landscape of the world is continuously reshaped as Carto progresses. Imagine the classic game Pipe Mania, but now the four sides of a square no longer can only be categorised into two properties (as open or blocked) anymore, but every side now constantly remain as a positive side (open side), and instead of being fixed as one space, they now openly travel and belong to all kind of space-time. We heard of a lake surrounded by forest. Open the map to find that there are only some forest-edged tiles. Henceforth we arrange and rotate those forest tiles so that they surround an "empty space." The lake then appears out of thin air! To venture deeper into the forest or desert, all you need are two tiles, repeatedly reattached to each other forward, and winds and footprints will guide your path; we exhaust all dead ends in a cave, then stumble to a sign reading "Don't give up!" And we realize that by simply rotating a tile, the exit block only inches away, can now be aligned right next to your location. Suddenly clarity dawns, the fog disperses and lost companions reunite. They appear in the hidden lack: open plains, cottages align, fertile fields, oases, and towering trees in a forest. Progression henceforth comes through the motion of assembling, breaking apart and reassembling, through the discovery of a new tile and the anew of an old tile, and constantly changing the form of the puzzle. And the true rules of the game are others’ discours. Listening. "You seem like a good listener," listening to NPCs' discours. To the speaking of nature.

Its most beautiful quality lies in the fact that, regardless of the repeated reassembly, the properties of a tile are always constant. They won't dissolve through the game's progression, but simply re-reveal themselves in a new way under a different space-time. a prairie remains a prairie, a glacier remains a glacier, and an NPC's home still stays at the same place. We just continuously viewed them through a different angle, letting them fulfill new roles and relative positions. And they often come from a myth or a memory. When Carto rearranges the lake to resemble different kinds of fish, all the NPCs fishing remain motionless, as if caught in a painting by a gaze. What Carto sees is exactly what Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes in Cézanne's Doubt that Paul Cézanne saw, the world "in the act of appearing:"

"Cézanne did not think he had to choose between feeling and thought, or between order and chaos; nor did he seek to separate the still things seen by the eye from the shifting manner in which it appears. He wanted to depict things as they appear, letting order emerge from spontaneous organization... Most of the time, we only view human-made things from the perspective of their practical use; we assume their existence to be inevitable and unshakable. Cézanne's painting calls these assumptions into question, revealing a nature that's nonhuman, it’s the foundation upon which human life rests... Cézanne said: 'The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness'... The trembling of appearances is the cradle of things being born. This kind of painter has only one emotion: estrangement. Only one lyrical theme: the continuous rebirth of existence." [1]

Is this not exactly what Carto is doing? Is this not what the message Carto so miraculously captures? Through NPCs' discours and Carto's listening, the landscape contemplates itself through the player, and is continuously reborn in the player/ Carto's manipulation on the map. What Carto's ever-shifting map embodies is precisely what is described in phenomenology "Being-in-the-world," a "trembling world," "in the act of appearing in perception." Carto keeps the world in a perpetual suspended state of "appearing." The map, a tool usually associated with utility and scientific precision, and the usual meaning of "cartography," are completely subverted in a playful "recomposition" and "deconstruction." In Carto’s continuous rearrangement, the map is "reverted back" to an ongoing expression of a "primordial world," and this is exactly what Cézanne tried to capture on his canvas. Every Carto/ the player’s rearrangement to the map in response to a NPCs’ description, is henceforth just like every "brushstroke" happened on Cézanne's painting. Her map, henceforth, is like the landscapes and subjects in Cézanne’s painting, trembling with unease (just like Senua's delirium), and in their seemingly "discontinuities" and "ruptures" (a continuously undeciding map, a bowl of apples assembled by multiple perspectives of it), expressing the "totality of a world in the act of emerging." Carto is henceforth, cartographing in a phenomenological sense, and is literally "emerging the world." Carto is our Cézannean eyes.

"The world presents itself from my perspective, so that it might exist independently of me. It exists for me so that it may exist without me, exist as a world... All what visual perceives, though individually distinct, function as a single dimension, because it is as a result of an emerging rupture of the Being... The visible is, strictly speaking, born of the invisible's rupture; the invisible gives rise to the present, still riddled with lacks." [2] 

[1]: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt, translated by Gong, Jow-Jiun, pp. 4–7.

[2]: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: The Final Writings of Merleau-Ponty, Master of Phenomenology of the Body, translated by Gong, Jow-Jiun. October 2007, Taipei: Artco Culture, pp. 134–135.