Games that creatively recycled their overall map during the campaign – March 18, 2023 at 07:38AM

I’m currently playing and being delighted by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in PS4. I know there’s an inverted castle coming, thanks to the extensive web search I had to do occasionally because damn, some of those old games did NOT hold your hand, even in item and powers description and after clearing every available section of the map. I can only imagine how would one 100% these in the 90s without buying an official guide or venturing on the early internet, or something.

So, what I learned about SOTN’s inverted castle is that it is to this day a landmark secret mechanic in gaming that improved SOTN’s story and campaign considerably, with the whole castle map for the first part of the campaign being carefully designed so it would play well upside down as well, in the second part. Apparently, the SOTN team wanted to lengthen the campaign and story without having to waste more time and money on doubling the assets, so they came up with this idea during the game’s conception, and it worked out pretty well. I don’t know if it was budget or deadline constrains, but it definitely feels like a pioneering stroke of genius.

Not so impressively, there’s also one of my favorite games since the PS2 era, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Halfway through the game, you’re forced to kinda go back in time and become this demon called Sand Wraith, who’s existing at the same time that your character when he first arrived on the island. Sand Wraith’s levels consist of pretty much creatively slithering around the islands’s difficult and treacherous interconnected map, which has two stages (past and present), and you’ve already gone through them, but not using some of the hidden places and levels SW has to, due to constant misfortunes, destroyed passages and the unstoppable monster chasing him.

In that way, Ubisoft Montreal added more to the campaign and story while not having the time (thanks to Ubisoft, who pushed to release Warrior Within just one year after the masterpiece Sands of Time, which actually took years to develop), reused a considerable amount of assets while adding a few new ones, introduced a few interesting twists in this mystical time travel story and provided the players with the chance to work on an alternate ending and alternate final boss fight.

TL;DR Anyway, I don’t know if there’s a name for this phenomenon in game developing, but I’d like to know if there’s more games that took the same path during production. Other games like SOTN and WW that due to either time or money constraints, found a creative solution to reusing the map and assets in a new manner during the same campaign.