Map of Solstice

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Solstice is a little-known game that was released in 1990 on the NES. It is a non-linear platform/puzzle/adventure game with an isometric perspective. To give credit where it's due, it's one of the finest games in its genre, and the genre itself ended up being one of the main inspirations for the very influential Super Mario RPG.

Being a maze, a map of Solstice can be essential. Although, part of the fun comes from discovering the layout by oneself, I would definitely recommend trying the game before looking at the map. Or at least, definitely watch its outstanding intro.

Back then, players were expected to draw their own maps on graph-paper. Some gaming magazines published crude maps as well. However, what's better than having a photographic map that also shows the entire content of all the rooms?

And it took 22 years after the release of the game for someone to finally succeed in making a seamless photographic map of Solstice. Why? Because the rooms can only fit together in 2D on graph-paper. The designers neglected to keep track of altitude across multiple rooms. That fact makes the in-game topography spatially impossible across groups of looping rooms.

Penrose stairs
Penrose stairs

The solution was to make every impossible loop an optical illusion à la Penrose stairs. Thus, by carefully placing these optical illusions everywhere, it was possible to illustrate the map as an “exploded-view drawing” that looks possible. It's a technical feat that took about 300 hours of work.

In part due to this, it won the December 2014 "Map of the Month" on VGMaps.com.
In addition, it has been featured (with permission) in Video Game Maps: NES & Famicom, a celebratory book by Brian Riggsbee released in April 2022.