Function of traversal actions in level design

While playing through a typical action-adventure video game, you might have come across interacts like squeeze-throughs, cave crawls, duck unders, etc, while traversing a game level. I’ll call them traversal actions for the purpose of this article.

Characters typically travel slower (compared to their normal movement speed) when moving through one of these traversal actions. I have heard a lot of players complain about how games overuse them and how they slow down the feel and speed of gameplay. Let us take a look at why these traversal actions exist in level design.

1. Gating

Gating means blocking off a future gameplay space. Traversal actions are used as soft gates so that players cannot escape the current gameplay space without completing the task at hand, for example: getting rid of enemies in the current combat area. Traversal actions are great for gating since they require an interact (a button press) to activate them.

Using traversal actions for gating has another advantage- they act as punctuations or transitions between different types of spaces. For example: a traversal section that might be long and narrow (like a corridor) can be connected to a wide-open combat space with a wall squeeze or a duck under. This transition tells the player that they are entering a different space now.

Final Fantasy 7 remake and God of War 2018 make good use of this technique to enter the player into an encounter and to stop the player…