Since its release last Friday, thousands of players have struggled to untangle the knotty thicket of puzzles hidden deep within Xbox 360 indie title Fez, the 2D-meets-3D puzzle platformer that drove us batty with its obscure stumpers. Since then, only a few hundred have managed to complete enough of the game’s challenges to reach the 200 percent (yes, 200 percent) completion threshold. That’s an achievement in itself, but until Wednesday, none of those players had actually been able to complete the game’s most difficult puzzle, which involves a black monolith floating inside a hidden underground chamber.

Actually, that’s not strictly true—a small handful of people had unlocked the monolith’s secrets. But those solvers had either stumbled onto the solution without knowing how they had done so, or else a source close toFez developer Polytron had provided the answer. For the rest of the Fez-playing public, unlocking the secrets of the monolith became a project that took a concerted collaborative effort and nearly a full week of focused attention.

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The majority of Sine Mora was developed in Budapest by Digital Reality, but eccentric Japanese developer Grasshopper Manufacture provided concept art and sound design. You can tell, too, as there’s a Suda51 tinge of the bizarre floating around here, with the classically vivid shoot-em-up contrasting against the dark, warped themes of the underlying plot. Meanwhile, the aesthetics bound disconcertingly from Dieselpunk armies into Steampunk boss fights and back again. It is to Digital Reality’s credit, then, that this madness is properly contained.

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The larger gaming worlds become, the more I invest myself in them. The more time I sink into places like Skyrim, Liberty City, and Azeroth the more their geography becomes familiar, and I soon learn how to navigate them like I do the streets of my own city. The settings may be fantastical but the hours upon hours I invest into videogames can make traversing them feel as everyday as my journey to work.

Psychogeography considers the impact of urban geography upon everyday behavior. The term was first defined in 1955 but traces its roots through a history of city-based wanderers, particularly in London. Many of London’s leading authors have drawn inspiration from shunning the main streets and losing themselves in the city’s back alleys and dark corners, there finding new perspectives on the capital and new ways of visualizing its underlying psychology.

We, too, can gain fresh perspective by looking at how we navigate our virtual worlds, and by considering how the experience can be enhanced by taking lesser-travelled routes. In return, games can give us new ways to explore and interact with real-life cities, but before exploring that we should first revisit Tale of Tales’ 2009 psychological horror The Path.

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In 1995 Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka had two passions: medicine and role-playing games. If the two young doctors weren’t tending to Alberta’s sick they were playing table-top adventures or talking about translating them into video games. When they co-founded BioWare with fellow doctor Augustine Yip, medicine still represented Muzyka and Zeschuk’s day jobs as they tried to balance their passions.

Four years later, with the aid of publisher Interplay’s D&D license, the doctors made the second best-selling PC game of 1998 – Baldur’s Gate, universally hailed as a seamless marriage of D&D mechanics and interactive storytelling. BioWare was now a close-knit 65-man studio, its halls lined with prototype sketches of fantasy worlds to come. For all the success, Muzyka and Zeschuk remained humble. They still practised medicine when they could. Neither saw BioWare ever completely taking over their lives.

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