A Road to Awe is an exploration game featuring hundreds of M.C. Escher-inspired digital worlds. Developer lectronice added a new location every day throughout 2017, creating a gorgeous series of mazes, monuments, and museums. It’s this week’s indie pick.
Space in A Road to Awe shifts and contorts to form winding pathways. Each new map is a series of suspended platforms and staircases that combine into a variety of shapes and heights. Navigation is as simple as a mouse click; right clicking on a portion of the world will automatically make the player walk towards that point. It is possible to use keyboard controls to wander around, but A Road To Awe is mostly a sensory experience meant to showcase level design. It’s a digital hiking trip that’s all about spectacular views.
lectronice meticulously documented the development process on a blog, painting the journey as a sort of travelogue and explaining the challenges of designing one world per day.
“I guess yes, this game, from my point of view as a developer, is a journey through daily monotony and the means to transcend it,” they said. “It’s a Sisyphean project.”
Unlike Sisyphus, however, lectronice completed their task. The end result is a calm and memorable tour through imaginative space. You can play A Road to Awe on PC, Mac, and Linux.