How often do you find yourself getting lost in a video game world? Are you the type to commit a whole map to memory? Recall it as though it were a real place?
Take a seat, this one’s for you.
A moment to set the table, if you’ll allow.
Trevor Rainbolt is a creator that exists in one of my favourite Weird Corners of TikTok. He’s a master at Geoguessr, a game that uses the Google Maps API to show a street view image of a randomly selected location somewhere in the world. The player then takes a guess about where that image was taken by dropping a pin on the map. The game tells them if they were right or wrong, and awards points based on how close they got. Rainbolt has built a following for being able to identify every country in the world from a single still image in an instant, often picking out details like soil colour, road texture, or foliage to confirm his appraisal.
@georainbolt this is borneo island malayisa #geo #geography #geoguessr #geowizard #SephoraConcealers ♬ Richter: Winter 1 – 2012 – Max Richter & Daniel Hope & Raphael Alpermann & Konzerthaus Kammerorchester Berlin & André de Ridder
Geoguessr is free. You can play it here if you want to give it a go.
But maybe you, like me, aren’t as intimately familiar with the real world as you are with the many digital worlds you inhabit on a weekly basis. I’ve said before that, despite living here for over a decade, I know my way around certain Halo maps better than I know my way around the Melbourne CBD. That’s where the Elden Ring version of Geoguessr comes in.
LostGamer.io is a platform specifically for getting lost in the maps from your favourite games. It takes the maps for popular video games and turns them into a Geoguessr-like, complete with Google Maps-style interface. There’s a Breath of the Wild version, a Genshin Impact version, Skyrim, World of Warcraft and Fortnite, with titles like Final Fantasy XIV and Red Dead Redemption 2 still to come. Some, like the Fortnite guesser, are fairly easy if you play regularly — the maps just aren’t that big, and you get to know them as a shorthand.
But Elden Ring is a special case, both home to a huge map that dwarfs anything From Software has ever created before and the kind of game that carves every hill and stone into the player’s memory.
You can play LostGamer in your browser on your phone, tablet or desktop. You can set your game of Elden Ring Geoguessr up according to how many rounds you want, if there’s a time limit. You can set how much the player can interact with the image they’re given — can they zoom or pan the camera? You can even opt to play multiplayer by passing the controls (or phone/tablet) around. It makes you realise just how much information you can pull from just one image, even with the little guides the game gives you. Can I see snowy mountains in the background? Am I overlooking the ocean? What direction are we facing? What do the trees look like? How far are we from the Erdtree? Can we see it at all? Make a guess. See how close you got.
It’s such a simple idea, and yet I could absolutely lose hours to it. I played five rounds while I was writing this piece. There’s a strange feeling of accomplishment when you get it right.
Anyway, get around it. You can play the Elden Ring LostGamer.io map guesser right here.
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