A retrospective on spatial architecture and player agency by Marcus Vance.
There is a moment in Arkane Studios' 2016 masterpiece Dishonored 2 that feels less like playing a video game and more like walking through an impossible piece of Swiss horology.
You step into the grand foyer of the Clockwork Mansion, home to grand inventor Kirin Jindosh. Before you stands a brass lever mounted on a marble pedestal. You pull it.
The floor beneath your boots groans. Massive steam pistons hiss behind the plaster walls. Mahogany floorboards retract into the sub-flooring. Walls slide upward on counterweighted pulleys, bookshelves fold into ceilings, and an entire formal parlor reconstructs itself before your eyes into a sterile laboratory guarded by clockwork soldiers with porcelain faces and rotating razor blades.
Yet the true genius of the Clockwork Mansion is not the transformation itself.
The true genius is that if you shatter a skylight above the foyer before pulling the lever, you can slip into the crawlspace between the moving walls. You can navigate the maintenance walkways behind the brass gears, bypass Jindosh's security network entirely, and assassinate or non-lethally neutralize the inventor without him ever realizing you stepped foot inside his house.
That level is not an anomaly. It is the signature of the immersive sim—a school of level design that prioritized architectural believability, systemic simulation, and unfettered player agency above all else.
And it is a design philosophy that modern big-budget gaming has largely abandoned.
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Believability Over Convenience: The Talos I Masterclass
Consider Prey (2017) and its setting, the research space station Talos I.
In most contemporary action games, levels are built as Hollywood backlots: corridors textured to look like spaceships, but functionally identical to theme park queues. Doors exist only to trigger loading transitions; air ducts exist only when a designer explicitly wants you to crawl into the next scripted firefight.
Arkane Austin designed Talos I as a physically plausible, functional orbital station:
* If you see an executive office on the fourth floor of the arboretum, there is a plumbing pipe beneath the floorboards that leads down to the life support filtration plant on level one.
* If a door is locked by a keycard, you don't have to find the keycard. You can hack the keypad. You can use the GLOO Cannon to freeze a staircase of hardened foam along the exterior wall and climb through a broken second-story window. You can turn yourself into a coffee mug using Mimic Matter and slip through a one-inch gap in the security glass. Or you can fire a foam crossbow dart through a ventilation grate to press the "Open Door" button from the other side.
Every problem possessed three, four, or five physical solutions, and none of them were scripted cutscenes. They were the organic outcome of consistent physical rules interacting with thoughtful spatial geometry.
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Verticality and the Third Dimension
One of the great casualties of the transition to vast open-world maps has been true architectural verticality.
When a game map spans a hundred square kilometers, level design tends to spread horizontally. You walk across rolling hills, clear flat bandit compounds, and enter single-story buildings with identical interior layouts.
In games like Dishonored, Deus Ex, and Thief: The Dark Project, the level design was intensely three-dimensional:
* Street level was for the poor, the diseased, and armed guards.
* Rooftops and wrought-iron balconies were for thieves and assassins.
* Subterranean sewers and drainage ditches were for smugglers.
A single city block in Karnaca offered more mechanical density and tactical variety than entire counties in generic open-world sandboxes. You had to look up. You had to calculate whether blinking to an ornate chandelier gave you line of sight to an open balcony three stories above.
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Why Did the Industry Walk Away?
If immersive sims represent such an exalted peak of game craft, why are major publishers so hesitant to fund them?
The answer is painfully economic: they are extraordinarily difficult to build, and commercially difficult to sell.
1. The Cost of Invisible Craft: Designing a level where 70% of players might never see the secret air duct behind the boiler room feels like "wasted budget" to corporate accounting spreadsheets. Modern production metrics prioritize visible content that every player encounters on their first playthrough.
2. Cognitive Load: Immersive sims require active observation. You must read environmental notes, listen for guard patrol routes, and memorize architectural layouts. In an entertainment landscape increasingly competing with second-screen smartphone distractions, games that demand full cognitive presence face friction with mass-market casual audiences.
3. The Scripted Spectacle Trap: It is vastly easier to choreograph a linear cinematic hallway where explosions trigger right on cue than to construct a systemic sandbox where hundreds of physics objects, AI perception cones, and elemental systems must behave coherently without breaking.
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The Indie Sanctuary
While AAA publishers chase safe, accessible live-service formulas, the spirit of the immersive sim has found refuge in the indie and mid-budget space.
Titles like Gloomwood, Shadows of Doubt, Skin Deep, and Ctrl Alt Ego continue to champion clockwork level design, proof that dedicated players still hunger for spaces that treat them like intelligent problem-solvers rather than passive tourists.
Walking through Talos I or the ruined streets of Dunwall reminds us of what interactive media does better than any book or film:
It invites us into a place that feels physically real, hands us the keys, and trusts us to find our own way out.