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by nayuki 12 days ago
This is an excellent visualization! I would love to see someone adapt this data into a first-person navigation game. The game should put you at some location in the station complex and ask you to navigate to some location. This would be excellent training for people visiting the real-life Shinjuku station for the first time.
2 comments

I thought the horror game "Exit 8" was going to be like that when I bought it: having to navigate through a labyrinthine nightmare version of Shinjuku or Shibuya station, trying to remember the passageways and —hey wait... was that escalator there before?

Turns out is was the opposite since the whole game takes place in a single hallway. It was still a lot of fun though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exit_8

I wasn't aware of this game until AFTER I saw the movie. Made a lot more sense after that. Watching a guy solve the same puzzle over and over felt like an odd narrative choice.

A labyrinthine Shinjuku would still be way cooler. Shibuya station doesn't have quite the same disorienting featureless repetition to it, but offers a more overwhelming MC Escher-like experience where you can often SEE exactly where you want to go in the near-distance, but every path and every turn brings you into a completely different space, and rarely any closer to your destination.

> offers a more overwhelming MC Escher-like experience

That reminds me of one of my favourite games of all time, Knossu [1]. It's a short game from the peak of the indie era, written by Jonathan Whiting (whose post "Why I write games in C" made the rounds a few times here [2]). It's not anything like a train station, but it's non-Euclidean, labyrinthine, and surreal. My favourite part is that despite it being extremely simple (WASD only), and despite having beat it, I still don't really understand the core mechanic. It feels like a dream.

Actually, hell, that reminder reminds me of another similar looking game, LSD: Dream Emulator [3]. One of the many surreal Platstation 1 & 2 "games" from Japan. I haven't played it, but I've been thinking about it lately as it's the cover art for Alt-J's album Relaxer [4].

Which reminds me of another *--STACK OVERFLOW--*

1. https://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/press.html

2. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Why+I+Write+Games+in+C

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD:_Dream_Emulator

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxer_(album)

As far as I remember Tokyo stations are all easy to navigate if you use Google maps. You get a letter for the exit, and you just follow the signs