10 Video Games With Genuinely Impressive Level Design

A game lives or dies on its level design. When you think about it, most of a game's mechanics revolve around how the player interacts with the environment around them. From ambiance and world building, traversal and exploration, right down to something as seemingly mundane as enemy placement.

At minimum, you hope for levels to look cool, be geographically diverse, offer unique challenges, and fun to explore. Broadly speaking, that makes for good level design and just about any well-received game meets that standard. Because level design only stands out when it's either really bad or really good.

Final Fantasy XIII, for example, presents a unique world full of interesting locations, characters, and lore. But those elements are totally divorced from each other. Without good level design, there's no way to tie them all together, so you're forced to rely on confusing cutscenes and lengthy encyclopedia entries to explain the hallway you're in. Meanwhile, combat takes place on a different screen entirely.

Great level design, however, should be like a tree trunk - strong enough to hold the branches of the game's many elements. A great level can present gameplay challenges, rewards, and story all at the same time. Fortunately, those are exactly the types of levels we're talking about today.

To say that designer Andrew Shouldice's Tunic is a Zelda clone would be simultaneously accurate and incredibly reductive. While obviously inspired by the 2D entries in the landmark Nintendo series - right down to the protagonist's iconic garment - it also presents some of the most innovative design concepts we've seen in a long time, especially in its levels.

Shouldice has cited rock climbing as an inspiration for how the player interacts and progresses through its adorable world. Like rock climbing, the game compels the player to progress steadily, observing your environment from various visual and conceptual perspectives in order to plan or react accordingly while maintaining a level head.

Throughout the game, the environment acts as both a tutorial and a reward mechanic. Observing terrain or various object interactions teaches you to consider new concepts and strategies. And a minor shift in camera perspective reveals secrets and shortcuts.

Instead of rewarding the player with useless loot or collectibles, Tunic rewards the player with discovery, new interactions and new forms of progression. This sort of design philosophy should seriously just be the industry standard from now on.