It’s been a year of ups and downs—quite literally if you’ve been playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (TotK) like we have. The long-awaited sequel to Breath of the Wild (BotW) was one of the top-rated games to release in 2023 and surpassed the seemingly impossible standard set by its predecessor. Last...
If you’ve been following some of our recent posts about maps and gaming, perhaps you’re wondering, what lessons on spatial navigation can we take from game design and apply to navigation in the real world? The answer is that the visuals that accompany the driving directions you get from Google, Apple, Waze or most other...
At Stamen, our appreciation and opinions of maps go beyond just our professional work here and often bleed over into our personal interests as well. Our eye for interactivity, color palettes, contour lines, and labels doesn’t stop once we log off at the end of the day. As we covered in a previous post by...
Elden Ring has been the buzz of the gaming world since its release in late February. As the latest title by From Software, it’s the studio’s first foray into an open-world role-playing concept for their extremely popular and infamously difficult games (typically referred to as Souls or Soulsborne games from two notable games in their catalog, Dark Souls and Bloodborne). It’s also the first of these games to include a map, which really excites us at a cartographer studio with some avid gamers.