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.
