What is a video game without levels? Well, it’s an open world game, but an open world is a level, all right? Let’s just regard different areas in a game as levels. A video game is nothing without levels. And today, we’re gonna talk about some of the best. Hi folks, it’s Zaid, and today on Aura Riot, 10 game levels that are legendary for a reason.
Liberty Island – Deus Ex
At number 10 is Liberty Island from Deus Ex, a mission statement in the original Deus Ex, the first game in the cyberpunk-ish conspiracy sci-fi series with a watershed moment in the immersive sim genre. Deus Ex lets you pick your approach at the start and sends you to a sandbox full of enemies. You got your hidden passages, your security systems, you got, oh man, tons of stuff. It’s up to you to solve the case and stop the terrorists, and you can do that with stealth or just going in guns blazing with the world’s most inaccurate gun if you’d like. Every gun is, wow, are they bad in this game, forcing your J.C. Denton to take it slow and learn how to play this revolutionary game.
Liberty Island isn’t just about combat. You will negotiate at the end, you’ll talk to some NPCs, learn more about the island, and explore later. When you return to UNATCO HQ for debriefing, the same location returns in “Deus Ex 2” for the climax, and when a much worse game wants to remind you the best parts of another game, you know that level has to be iconic.
The Great Plateau – Breath of the Wild
At number nine is The Great Plateau from “Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.” I mean, Great Plateau is a game unto itself. It’s an area you can spend hours exploring and quickly zip through, but the rewards for taking your time here are really valuable for the rest of the game. It’s not just a tutorial area, it’s a playground of discovery. You learn about cutting down logs, using campfires for cooking, discovering ways to stay warm in the cold as a physics test with challenges designed to be tackled creatively thanks to your extremely limited early game tool set.
Link has to finish all the shrines on the Great Plateau in order to earn his powers, and each power gives Link more ways to solve problems, like using bombs to harvest apples from trees, moving a big chunk of metal to make a seesaw. I mean, there’s some crazy stuff that you just never saw before in a game, and yet none of it was really out of place either. Like, it all kind of felt, oh, hey, this is just what this is. Like, it’s kind of stripped down in a weird way. There’s no voice like yelling, “Hey, listen,” every five seconds, but it’s also teaching you how to play the game and introducing you to stuff that makes “Breath of the Wild” a revolutionary game.
Surface Tension – Half-Life
At number eight is surface tension in “Half-Life.” This is when the game kicks into high gear. The first “Half-Life” was like playing through an action movie. The tight pacing and constant scripted sequences make it feel very cinematic experience, I guess, but also one you barely survive. It’s insanely linear, but it’s too much fun to care. Like, people who don’t like linear stuff, I don’t think that it would even bother them. It’s just, everything comes together and you reach the sun-baked surface of the Black Mesa Research Facility in Surface Tension, and the soldiers are not there to help you.
This is the level with the helicopter. Oh, the part with the helicopter. I’ve talked to countless people who have said it that way. After fighting through the dam and dodging a giant underwater alien, you’ll have a desert to cross. It’s guarded by blind alien worms. And then you have to sprint over a precarious cliff face. The aliens are deadly, but the humans are the real danger here. The soldiers had really impressive AI for the time and can still kick our asses really fast. The attack chopper that scans the cliffs, that’s the biggest problem. And there’s a real sense of catharsis after ducking and dodging gunfire to reach the awesome laser-guided missile launcher at the end of the road. This level throws everything, everything at you all at once, and it’s one of the best rollercoaster rides in video games. People are still talking about this one more than 25 years later.
The Tanker – Metal Gear Solid 2
At number seven is the Tanker in “Metal Gear Solid 2.” The best part of this game is also one of the best parts of video games, period. The tanker incident is a tiny slice of what makes the “Metal Gear” series so special. The opening cutscene with Solid Snake using his advanced camo to board the tanker, still a great reintroduction to the character.
And then dealing with the mercenary forces that invade it, all the way to the enemy AI that had advanced since the first game. The PS2 pumped out way more graphical prowess and shows how the rain cascades off the interior. Honestly, it looks good now, even when it’s not upscaled to HD. But by the way, when it is, it could easily pass for like a retro-themed modern game. And people might say, “That’s a little bit too advanced for the time.” There’s almost too much to talk about here. Infamous examples of over-engineering the early parts of the game, they’re very, very apparent. The ice that melts in real time and exists for no other purpose other than to look cool. There’s a boss fight that takes advantage of the new first-person perspective. A sneaking sequence where you hilariously walk past entire crowds of soldiers that don’t notice you. It’s absurd, it’s awesome, and detailed in a way only Hideo Kojima games pull off.
Central Yharnam – Bloodborne
At number six is Central Yharnam in “Bloodborne,” one of the most intricately designed locations in any game. Central Yharnam is the starting area of “Bloodborne” and is an incredible introduction to gaming’s spookiest city, unlike other games in the sort of “Souls” series, I guess. It’s not technically a series, but it’s FromSoftware, and we kind of look at it all as “Souls” games. But the city of Yharnam isn’t a medieval hovel. It’s a massive post-industrial city with towering structures that surround the player on all sides, boxing you in and making this expansive location feel especially claustrophobic.
The streets are packed with roaming hunters, humans that have slowly succumbed to the very curse they’re trying to fight, with more frightening things in hidden corners. Central Yharnam is also the most difficult starting location compared to other “Dark Souls” games. Maybe one of the, but I think probably the. It gives you barely a chance to learn the new aggressive combat features before throwing you directly into the deep end. Central Yharnam connects to almost every major location in the game world. You’ll be able to return here through the Cursed Forest or reach the very top of the world. The starting area of the clinic can be accessed from behind much later in the game, and it unlocks a very creepy side quest, revealing one of the first extraterrestrial creatures in the game. Yharnam itself is an incredibly spooky location, but the starting area might as well be considered the best, I think, when it comes to pure atmosphere. The insane voices behind locked doors, the mobs of twisted killers, and the way the world slowly changes as you progress. By night, the voices go silent, and eventually much, much stranger things reveal themselves as eyes inside your mind open themselves to the reality of this world, as if these games are not bleak enough.
Clockwork Mansion – Dishonored 2
At number five is the Clockwork Mansion from “Dishonored 2.” Remember I said we struggled not putting the time travel level in here? Yeah, the Clockwork Mansion, we just had to go with that one, right? So it’s not only the best level in the game, it is a marvel in-game design. It’s a seemingly boring mansion when you enter at the start of the level, and it reveals itself in layers, peeling away rooms until you’ve learned the entire structure is an automated maze. Entire rooms reconfigure and appear out of the floor. You don’t even need to follow the most straightforward path to the end. You’ll eventually get the chance to sneak into the inner workings of the mansion and slip between all the gears, revealing how everything works, and it all actually works. You can watch the mansion rooms assemble themselves in real time and slot themselves away after flipping switches.
You have to navigate to the hidden employee-only areas of the mansion to rescue your target, and you’ll quickly discover the giant mechanical guardians that protect the owner of the mansion and your assassination target. It’s a mind-blowing mission that deserves all of the accolades it gets. I don’t think we’ve ever seen another level that’s this intricate before in video games, and we might not see another for a long time.
New Donk City – Mario Odyssey
At number four is New Donk City in “Mario Odyssey.” New Donk City is where “Mario Odyssey” just gets weird. Nintendo’s absurdly protective of the Mario IP. Even the famously tight-lipped designers of these games have expressed frustration that they’re not allowed to do anything creative when making new Mario games. For once, the developers were given a little license to be weird, though.
With the totally normal-looking humans of New Donk City, a strangely photorealistic world that looks a whole lot like a platformer version of New York City, you can jump rope with oddly formal businessmen or bounce off the top of taxis to reach the top of skyscrapers. Climbing the Capitol Building is the biggest challenge of the stage. It’s just a silly, weird place. It’s not necessarily correct feeling, and that really aids the weirdness of it. I mean, it’s just one of those places where there’s nothing else like it in a Mario game, and for whatever reason, despite the fact that it’s kind of uncomfortable for some reason, it also feels awesome to play and play around in.
City Escape – Sonic Adventure 2
At number three is City Escape from “Sonic Adventure 2.” The first level of “Sonic Adventure 2” is the rush of adrenaline we wanted from a Sonic game. The bright, sunny fun with a rampaging giant truck plowing through the whole city, stopping a fugitive hedgehog from escaping. Well, not actually stopping, but trying to, trying to.
“Sonic Adventure 2” was frankly a bonkers storyline that doesn’t matter at all because the opening slaps us in the face and forces us to start snowboarding down the streets of a fake San Francisco while frickin’ Crush 40 does their weird facsimile of like pop punk and butt rock.
I don’t know, it’s still an adrenaline rush today. The level’s been recreated over and over as Sonic gets more nostalgic in recent games. There’s a good reason for it. It’s just a really memorable level. The giant truck is what we want from Sonic games, absurdity and speed to the max.
The Clock Tower – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
At number two is the clock tower from “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.” The most difficult area in this game is also the most nostalgic, even if it gives us nostalgia from having nightmares about floating Medusa heads knocking us off platform. The clock tower is the biggest roadblock you encounter in this game. It’s technically the area before the last. The difficulty spike keeps you out of the castle keep where Dracula is waiting for a final boss fight.
Everyone already knows there’s an inverted castle now, but back on the first playthrough, we thought we were going to the end. And for good reason, because the clock tower is a nightmare. The level blocks progress completely. You need to double jump across the incredibly annoying opening bridge and you’ll need way better equipment to survive the frankly obnoxious number of enemies that spawn from both sides of the screen ready to knock Alucard out like a rag doll.
At least the music’s one of the best tracks in the game and the boss is absurdly easy. Normally, we’d expect a mummy at the end of the clock tower like in the classic games, but you have to fight a weird bird person that doesn’t live up to the level that was just there. It’s still one of the most memorable locations in a game. It’s all iconic levels.
E1M1 – Doom
And finally, at number one, it’s E1M1, the hangar from “Doom.” The most infamous level in video games, E1M1 has to be the most iconic video game level along with level 1-1 of “Super Mario Bros” on NES. I would say this level is arguably more memorable than that.
“Doom” isn’t the first FPS, but it’s the inflection point for the genre of the first-person shooter. It’s the game everyone wanted to copy ’cause it’s just that good. The first level looks pretty crude compared to the modern games, obviously, but it has this unique charm to it. It’s a recognizable place, even if it doesn’t really look like anything or make any sense. It’s not a barren, empty room. There’s computer screens and windows and a pool to greet you. The iconic stairs to the left are seared into our brain.
What really pushes this level over the edge are the secrets, though. The biggest one is the ability to go into that big area outside the windows by flipping a secret button or opening a door that doesn’t match the rest of the walls to collect some extra gear. It’s a trick none of the other levels really do, and it’s a level that built the legendary status of the “Doom” series. It doesn’t look like much now, and it’s pretty simple, but it’s actually burned into the memory of anybody who experienced it after not realizing what was possible, so to speak. Give us some cardboard. We could rebuild this level from scratch.
And that’s 10 levels that we think earned legendary status. It’s only a tiny cross-section of our favorites, so let us know what you think belongs on this list for when we make another. We could easily rattle off 10 more. Just remember, they gotta be legendary.
And that’s all for today. Leave us a comment. Let us know what you think. And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I’m Zaid. We’ll see you next time right here on Aura Riot.