The Lines You Walked

Illusion of Gaia is a 1993 Super Nintendo action-RPG by Quintet — the studio also behind Soul Blazer and Terranigma — that sends its young hero Will on a circuit of the real world’s most inexplicable ruins in search of ancient relics. The itinerary reads like a shortlist of this site’s own subjects: Incan ruins, Angkor Wat, the Great Wall of China, the Egyptian pyramids, and, named outright, the Nazca Desert.

Getting there isn’t a cutscene. The Nazca chapter drops the party directly onto the pampa, and the puzzle it hands you is a small, odd echo of the real mystery: a giant figure is scraped into the ground beneath your feet, and you can’t see its shape from where you’re standing, only feel your way across it. The party has to work out, by process of elimination among themselves, which part of the figure they’ve stopped on — the answer turns out to be its Left Foot — before striking the ground there brings the flying Sky Garden down out of the sky to meet them.

It’s a strange thing for a cartridge game to have gotten right by accident: the actual Nazca lines were drawn by people who never saw their own finished shapes either, working outward from stakes and cords across ground too vast to take in at a glance. Three decades before anyone could pull up a satellite photo on their phone, a 16-bit adventure put players in that same blind spot — asking them to trust their footing on a picture they’d never get to see whole.