The best locations in games are full of landmarks,
scenic views, houses and shops, twisty passages, and secret chambers, with layers of unique
people, items, quest lines, and dialogue that connect it to the rest of the game. It’d save a lot of dev time if we could
reuse it. Just make a player backtrack through town
again. And again. No one will mind… right? Careful! You might be about to make a terrible mistake. Shoving in mindless backtracking can bore
your players until they have died. From boredom. The threat is real. Great locations can decay. Just because an area was great to visit the
first time through doesn’t mean it’s as good on the second, fifth, or twentieth run. You CAN make backtracking work, it’ll just
take some planning. Let’s retrace our steps and figure out how
to make backtracking fun. OK, I’ve figured out the perfect ad segue
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anyway? I think a lot of it is an issue of perception. For most people, when you say ‘backtracking,’
they might think of things like being sent on a fetch quest to get something in a town
from three chapters ago. You’re passing through screen after screen,
talking to no one, seeing places you’ve already seen, hitting X to grab a thing, and
then walking all the way back. Backtracking on its surface sounds like a
problem of geography, but really it’s more a problem of quest design. Being sent on a long fetch quest without anything
new along the way is the problem, not the fact that you’ve already been in that town. The backtracking that is blatant enough to
be stuck with that label most likely has a problem with the underlying things the game
is asking you to do. How about we start with the most common type:
really bad fetch quests. Dull fetch quests can add a touch of backtracking
into even the best story-driven games. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is an
amazing game, but its biggest problem is how it handles backtracking. Over half of its chapters involve players
running sprints between key locations without adding things in between the endpoints. Some NPC will tell you to go somewhere to
do a thing, so you go somewhere, do a thing, then retrace your steps to where you came
from. Talk to the same NPC to progress the story,
and then retrace your steps again for the next bit. Most of the level design in Thousand-Year
Door is linear hallways peppered with respawning and hard-to-avoid enemies. As you run errands, the things you run into
lose their novelty, and they degrade. The repeated trash mob fights go from being
breaks in the action to being the things keeping you away from the next chunk of action. Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are all very, very guilty
of this design approach, but the very, very guiltiest of them all is Chapter 7. First, you’re told to find two bob-ombs,
Gold Bob and General White, so you can gain permission to use a cannon to get to the moon. Y’know, fun. Gold Bob is right here. Great! Already halfway done. But General White takes you on an infamous
goose chase. The hunt for the General makes you go back
to almost every major area you’ve visited before in the game, and in each you’ll be
told that you JUST missed him, and be told to go to another major area. You do this in Petalburg, then to Keelhaul
Key, then to Glitzville, then to Boggly Woods, then to Twilight Town and then back to where
you started in Fahr Outpost. And it turns out he was sleeping in this house
by where you started this whole time. Haha, isn’t that funny. Why aren’t you laughing. The framing is meant to be a joke, but it
doesn’t quite land right. Pointing out annoyances doesn’t automatically
give a free pass to leave in the annoyances. A brisk 25-hour game is better than a 25-hour
game with 5 hours of chores mixed in. Some of the worst story-driven backtracking
can pop up when a game uses missable key items. It’s very rare nowadays for this to crop
up, but that’s a hard-fought game design fix. In almost every modern game, if you need a
story-critical key item, you won’t be able to leave the area without grabbing it, or
at least you can’t get very far without it. Not so with the Sierra adventure games of
the ‘80s and '90s. They were notorious for having puzzles designed
with solutions involving items that could be missed, and you’d have to backtrack to
a table or cupboard from way earlier in the game to grab it, or at its worst, missing
an item that you simply CAN’T go back and get. King’s Quest 3 - Don’t use these coins
to buy a drink, you need all of this money hours from now. King’s Quest 4 - Hope you grab this fish. You can’t come back here and you need it
hours from now. King’s Quest 5 - Now Graham, dont-you-eat-this-pie! Also don’t feed it to this starving eagle. You need to THROW IT IN THE FACE OF A YETI
HOURS FROM NOW OR YOU WILL LOSE. Space Quest 2 - If you wander into the wrong
screen, you get an Alien parody scene where a Xenomorph kisses you. Haha, ya got me. And back on the adventure you go. Little do you know that you now have 15 in-game
minutes to live before a chestburster makes an appearance. Unless you’re playing the much better looking
remake where they thankfully changed it to kill you a lot quicker. They know what they did wrong. Gold Rush - If the RNG doesn’t like you,
partway through the game you can just… die of cholera! Through no fault of your own! You just fall over! I could go on like this. For some reason, Sierra built in a bunch of
very slow-rolling soft locks. In that case, the backtracking is ‘load
an old save.’ You DO have an old save… … right? Story-driven backtracking can do a lot more
than bad fetch quests and items you forgot about. There are ways to incorporate it in a more
natural way. What if the story changes drastically in the
same place, depending on… WHEN you are? Heck, if it makes sense in the story you’re
telling, you could pick the times yourself. Radiant Historia is an RPG about traveling
between different timelines to set things right and save the world from a slow end. You play as Stocke who can jump through history
thanks to his magic book, the White Chronicle. There are two major timelines you’ll need
to jump between to find the right path forward and prevent disasters. Radiant Historia isn’t so much about carefully
making choices as it is about exploring all of the different options at your disposal. No matter what you choose, you eventually
run into a dead end that requires you to jump to another timeline to do something that will
help unblock you in this one, either through new skills, items, or new information. The nature of the game makes you travel through
the same points over and over, but the locations aren’t going to feel the same depending
on when you are. Different NPCs and areas are available or
locked away at different times. There will be different types of enemies on
each timeline. It’s often the same location geometry, but
what’s stacked on top of it is totally different. Radiant Historia’s sidequests take full
advantage of the timeline structure, where you often get a quest that’s literally impossible
to do without time-hopping. An early one starts when you find a fallen
soldier trapped in a cave. You can save him, as long as you head back
to an earlier era. You might receive a request in an early chapter
to grab an item from a place you won’t even visit until much later in the timeline. The game forces you to think on an extra dimension
to puzzle your way through the solutions to the problems it gives you, and your familiarity
with the locations thanks to all the times you’ve visited them becomes an asset to
help you figure out where and when you need to be, and makes doing the quests feel different
than most JRPGs of this style. It’s not perfect. It can get a little annoying to travel to
a time and find out you misremembered when a particular NPC was available, and there
are some annoying repeated battles, but the timeline structure in the game feels different
enough to carry it, even now a decade after its initial release. It leans into its backtracking and gives the
world enough layers to make the same locations feel different every time you visit. Not every case of clunky backtracking is done
by choice. Sometimes it’s borne from necessity. It’s definitely less work to reuse an old
location than to create a whole new one. For a game running behind schedule, it can
be a way to cut a few corners, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re going to cut corners though, you
at least want to hide the jagged edges. Excessive backtracking can sometimes be a
sign of a rushed or troubled development cycle. Retreading the same ground can be thought
of as a bit of a shortcut if you need to fill out a game’s content with just… SOMETHING. Devil May Cry 4’s campaign is one of the
most infamous uses of backtracking as padding. After fighting your way through level after
level with Nero, some stuff goes down, Nero’s taken out of commission, and control shifts
to fan favorite Dante for the second half of the game. He’s great to play as in this one, with
a high skill ceiling and lots of moves to work with, but you aren’t going anywhere
new with him. His campaign is just another lap in the same
areas, but in reverse order. The level designs are a touch different, but
you’re still fighting the same enemies and the same bosses. It could’ve been worse without Dante’s
new moves, but they can only carry this one so far. There are signs throughout the game that there
was supposed to be more to the Dante sections, with more unique bosses designed around him
specifically. In the series, usually when you beat a boss,
the loot is a weapon named after and themed around that boss. Except here. When you defeat Echidna, this plant snake
demon that attacks with vines and seeds, you, of course, get a gauntlet weapon called ‘Gilgamesh.’ When you beat this icy angler fish/frog hybrid
thing named Bael, you get ‘Pandora,’ which is a briefcase. If your game has to make deep content cuts,
to things as core to the experience as DMC’s bosses, then it makes sense that some planned
locations might get cut as well, and adding in more backtracking seems like an acceptable
idea to just help get the game out the door. Backtracking isn’t just an unfortunate side
effect to work around, though. There are plenty of ways that games can use
backtracking to make a game better, or even to make whole new kinds of games. If you want to use it, though, you have to
fully understand what people don’t like about it. Player complaints about backtracking are largely
just griping about the game’s current actions not being interesting. The General White quest isn’t Petalburg’s
fault, it’s the fault of the feeling of being railroaded, with nothing else to do
besides the fetch quest. You can reuse a location all you want, as
long as you keep providing SOMETHING new. If you’ve designed an area a little too
big to see in one visit, a backtracking sequence can be a great excuse to get players to explore
it some more. Each area of Bomb Rush Cyberfunk has a lot
of optional stuff just off of the beaten path. Graffiti, songs, cosmetics for your bikes,
boards, and skates, and even additional characters to recruit can pop up in optional parts of
the stage after you get through some of the main story sequences. The branches off of the critical path are
easy to miss, and backtracking can help spotlight some of that extra optional stuff. At the start of chapter 4, after you’ve
gone through and competed against other crews for the title of ‘All City King,’ some
stuff goes down and you need a doctor. Time for a bit of a fetch quest. You’ll have to go back through several of
the major areas you’ve seen already to find him. It sounds a lot like the Paper Mario quest,
but the difference is in the details. In Paper Mario, there’s hardly anything
new to do in an area after you clear its respective chapter. That’s not the case in Bomb Rush. If you hadn’t already gone out and wandered
the city streets, now’s a great time to do that and set the main story aside for a
moment to find a cool bike skin or a song. And even if you did all of that already, you
can blaze through this sequence pretty quick and get back on track in no time. The backtracking quest design is more there
to remind you of all the extra stuff you might have missed, rather than tacking something
on to pad out the game. You can go overboard, of course. If you take a specifically awful approach
to backtracking, you can make a really heinous structure. Donkey Kong 64 set a world record. A Guinness World Record! For ‘Most Collectibles.’ 3821 things. Donkey Kong 64 is legendary for the degree
at which it uses backtracking. Most collectibles in the game are color-coded,
where only one of the five playable Kongs can collect them. Everyone has their own exclusive set of Golden
Bananas, color coded Bananas, Banana Coins, and special Blueprints to collect, among other
things. But you can still see all the stuff you can’t
collect yet! Did you see a blue item while you’re playing
as Tiny? Too bad, you’ve gotta go back to the special
barrel but that lets you swap characters, then work your way all the way back to where
you were and grab it. The collectibles don’t really do anything
special either, you now just HAVE the things. Donkey Kong 64 levels need at least 5 separate
run-throughs to collect everything, and most of it is just taking yet another lap around
the level geometry you’ve already walked to several times before. You can’t always even cleanly get through
and collect everything on a single run. Sometimes you have to unlock a pathway as
one character before you can even get there with another. The levels have a Water Temple problem as
well, where there aren’t a lot of great landmarks to orient yourself, so it’s very
possible to get lost on your way back to find a stray collectible you saw while playing
as someone else. The game becomes a flood of faded out collectibles
that constantly remind you that you’ve got to come back later. For completionists, it can be hell. For some, it can be trance-like and soothing,
I’ve heard. But for me, the extremes that Donkey Kong
64 goes to in its collectible-focused backtracking makes the game feel exhausting. Oh, and Banjo-Tooie - same problem, but swap
out characters with ridiculous scale. Loot and collectibles are cool and all, but
they’re a pretty blunt tool. Let’s make something a little more subtle. Maybe drill down more on making the gameplay
of backtracking more interesting. Oh, wait, there’s a whole genre in here. Metroidvanias are all about designing backtracking
to be an essential part of gameplay. Let’s focus on Metroid. At its best, the world in a Metroid game is
like one flowing dungeon, divided into interconnected sections and filled with tons of elaborate
locks and keys. You explore what’s available, stumble into
unique roadblocks, and steadily gain new abilities that expand your movement and combat options. Those abilities also let you blast through
those roadblocks to open up even more branches of the world to explore, which have their
own roadblocks and powerups, and the cycle repeats. The typical Metroid gameplay loop is built
around a semi-linear progression. It wants you to become familiar with the locations
of the world and how your abilities can interact with those locations to turn a dead end into
a path forward. Sometimes the path is obvious and in front
of your face, and sometimes it’s twenty rooms back, only accessible when you’ve
learned how to Tony Hawk, er, Tony… Chozo your way up there. When you pass by a door or a glyph or something
that you know is important but you can’t do anything with yet, the game plants a nagging
seed in your mind. What’s the deal with that thing? What’s hiding behind the door? What’s gonna be the power-up that gets me
in there? That’s probably gonna be pretty cool. The game lets these questions hang around
for a while without immediately solving them. The open questions stay with you, maybe for
hours, as you progress through the game and resolve them one by one. The world is an unfolding puzzle box that
you unlock piece by piece, and you have to crisscross all of it to get the job done. That’s not to say there aren’t backtracking
problems in these games. Some are very backloaded. Fusion, Zero Mission, and Other M all have
a big ‘endgame item hunt’ that doesn’t take advantage of the structure that backtracking
can provide. Most often they restrict your ability to backtrack
for story reasons, or by locking away tons of optional powerups behind barriers that
only come down after you acquire the FINAL piece of your full kit. Zero Mission is easily the worst version of
this problem. You get 4 major powerups almost at the same
time, and all within about 20 minutes before the door holding the final boss. The game wants you to basically do a full
lap right before the end to unlock ALL the doors you’ve been passing by the whole game. It’s too condensed, and jamming it all at
the last second is too much all at once. What is there to differentiate all these powerups
if I’m getting them all at the same time? Why do I even need these powerups if I’m
right at the final boss anyway? Getting essentially a skeleton key and doing
a lap of the world dampens some of the satisfaction you would get if you were being drip-fed mystery
solutions slowly over the hours and backtracking to resolve them one at a time. If you really want players to revisit the
same area, you could do the hard work and actually change the area when they see it
again. Hollow Knight’s Forgotten Crossroad is a
hub. You’ll be traveling through here a lot as
you head to other areas. Throughout the game, there’s a looming threat
called ‘The Infection’ - this orange goop. The deeper you explore the world, the more
enemies and areas you’ll see that have it. Some NPCs even succumb to it over time and
become hostile. The full gravity of The Infection hits you
when the Forgotten Crossroads turn into the Infected Crossroads. The atmosphere is totally changed. Some old routes are blocked off. Once simple enemies are now ramped up to a
much greater threat. These quiet caverns you’ve gotten to know
are transformed into a late game challenge. It’s great environmental storytelling, elevated
by the familiarity you had with the old location. Everything old becomes new again, in the worst
way possible for its inhabitants, and the process underscores the threat you’ve been
fighting against. A Metroidvania-like structure isn't the only
way to use backtracking in the core of your gameplay loop. Some platformer styles adopt it into their
general level design. The later Wario Land games and spiritual successors
like Pizza Tower have a sort of out-and-back design goal. You venture through a level, get to the end,
trigger a timer, and it's a mad dash to retrace your steps back to the start before the whole
level collapses on you. It’s the Legends of the Hidden Temple game
I’ve been waiting for. The first run-through is a crash course training
exercise for the second run-through in reverse. Levels can be designed to be harder to go
one way than the other. The same geometry can pose different challenges
depending on your approach. One-way exits, new platforms, and even whole
new routes might open up to spice things up a little. The timer ticking away ups the pressure even
more, turning the platforming challenge into a mix of a speedrun and a pop quiz that you're
barely prepared for. It doesn't feel like you're backtracking as
much as you're escaping, which makes even the stages with minimal differences on the
way back still pretty exciting to go through. If you want something less frantic, games
focused on mystery can be great friends with a backtracking-heavy design. It’s a powerful motivator to retrace your
steps, not because the game is letting you do something new, but because you just thought
of something. Tunic doesn’t explicitly tell you what your
new powers can do, or all of the things even your basic moveset lets you do in the world. It’s all a mystery, wrapped in an instruction
book written in a language you don’t understand. You can figure it out on your own, though,
and once you do, there are all kinds of places that you can backtrack to to find things hidden
just under your nose. Players love feeling like they’re the ones
who solve the mystery. This style of game is not without risk, though. There’s no guarantee that every, or even
most players will be able to work it out themselves, so you have to be careful. But when it hits, it HITS. Outer Wilds is a game about figuring out why
your sun is exploding every 22 minutes. What a mystery! You have limited time to get anywhere and
do anything before that happens, so you need to quickly find out what you need. The nature of the game involves restarting
over and over, which means you’ll be walking through the same areas a LOT. But even though the areas might be the same,
you won’t be. As you find more clues, you’ll start to
see the same locations you’ve been to in a new light. Things that weren’t all that important a
couple of hours ago all of a sudden become way more intriguing. It’s sort of like an intrinsic version of
a Metroidvania. Instead of extrinsic abilities that give you
access to blocked areas, like in Hollow Knight, in Outer Wilds you’re gaining access to
areas thanks to the knowledge you’ve gained since the last time you were there. The path was always open, you just had to
know how to see it. And once you find one of these, who knows
what other paths are lying just under your nose? Better find some more clues. The locations in Outer Wilds aren’t full
of NPCs changing their story, but that doesn’t keep them from changing over time. And there it is! One more video done, and one more milestone
reached. I want to thank you all for getting us to
300,000 subscribers. I’m pretty much permanently shocked at how
big the channel has grown over the years, and I’m grateful to have you all around
to watch it. By the way, we’ve got our behind-the-scenes
podcast, our newsletter, and some extra perks up now for patrons over at our Patreon, so
check those out at the link in the description. Backtracking is a structural problem that
can pop up almost by default, but it’s very fixable. Plan out how you’re going to freshen up
old locations, and you can make the same place work for you for all time. *chill vibes from Tunic*
