The expert on finding weird places in Skyrim, GTA 5, and others does it out of love

Most people who play Skyrim aren’t there to study its hydrology. But Any Austin is. He’s also interested in how Fallout 3‘s NPCs get home, how electricity travels through Grand Theft Auto 5‘s Los Santos, and how many people have jobs in Super Mario Sunshine‘s Delfino Plaza.

Any Austin makes videos that hold a magnifying glass up to things that would otherwise go ignored in our favorite games. His most popular videos ask questions nobody else thought to ask and deliver unexpected answers that make you appreciate the effort game developers put in.

This week on Polygon, we’re looking at games that feel like vacations for your brain in a package we’re calling Retreat Week.

These questions come to him because he’s trained himself on finding all the places video games don’t want you to look. The places where no quest will send you, where the world stands still. He calls them “unremarkable and odd places,” and they’re all over for those willing to look.

For Retreat Week, our special issue devoted to visiting cozy places in games, we asked Any Austin what draws him to unremarkable and odd places in games, and how to find them ourselves. He has the answers to those questions, as well as a secret to loving games like you’re a kid again.

Polygon: What’s the definition of an unremarkable or odd place in a game for you?

Any Austin: I think that there’s a good possibility that it doesn’t exist, and that an unremarkable and odd place is a place that you just decided that it is, and then it becomes one. That’s like a conspiracy theory in the back of my head. I’m not sure if you could totally put a perfect criteria on it, necessarily. It’s almost like an unremarkable and odd place is a place that you look at in an unremarkable and odd way. Now, that’s not totally true. There are definitely places that aren’t, but I think really the only criteria is it shouldn’t be a place that has a lot going on in it.

So if you think about a Zelda game, an unremarkable and odd place will usually be the space between spaces, but also not always, because there are spaces in those spaces that aren’t between places that are unremarkable and odd if you look at them in the right way. This is a fun experiment: If you play Super Mario 64 and you walk through that main room, you enter the main castle, and you walk in it. If you come out the other way and spin the camera around and look at that same room just from the other angle, just the change of that angle immediately gives it the unremarkable and odd tingle, you might say.

Because it’s not as authored, or at least wasn’t set up for you to walk through it that way.

Yeah, so that’s part of why I think it’s a matter of perspective to a certain extent. If you just look at a certain place in a different way, you’ll see things about it that you didn’t see before, which I guess makes it more of a mindfulness exercise than specific spaces with specific criteria. But in a general sense, you’re looking for places that are less traveled.

Another really good [example is] places that are always shown to you in a specific way, and then you look at them in a different way. So a really good one is — and maybe one that I would do a video on at some point — boss battle chambers after you’ve defeated the boss. Or here’s a good one: the temples in a Zelda game after you finish them. I was just yesterday walking through shrines in Tears of the Kingdom that I had already completed. And just that, that energetic shift of, This was a place for a particular purpose that was shown to me in a specific way, but now I’m looking at it after that is done. Now I’m looking at it almost in a post-apocalyptic — a micro-post-apocalyptic kind of way. That makes things unremarkable and odd.

Now, those aren’t necessarily cozy. You wouldn’t necessarily want to go on a vacation to the Tears of the Kingdom shrine after it’s empty. But it is a really weird thing, and a fun thing to look at a place in an unintended way.

How do you find these unremarkable and odd places?

Like a pig with truffles, you gotta send them out into the field and just have them start digging, and eventually the pig just knows what a truffle is. Well, I guess a truffle is a very delineated object, so it would be clear to anyone. But it’s that same thing. You’ve just got to go, and you know it when you see it, pretty much.

You have to play the video game before you can find them. This is a problem I have run into. It wouldn’t be easy for me to, say, be given a save file in Elden Ring, because I’ve never played that game. It wouldn’t be easy for me to take that and then immediately go find these places. You have to know what the relationship is between the player and the game first normatively before you know then where these spaces are separate from that. So it would be a little tricky. And again, that’s why I say I think there’s a little bit of a conspiracy or a magic trick to it in that it’s more about what you carry with you than it is about what’s actually in the game.

Is it easier to find these places in newer games versus older ones?

It’s so funny you say that, because it used to be the case when I did more of the older Nintendo stuff and the older games that people would go, I love these. You could never find these places in newer games. You couldn’t find it. And now that I’ve demonstrated that it is in all these newer games as well, everyone’s like, Yeah, that’s why I like these new games. You can’t find these places in old games. It’s like, you actually can just find them wherever. Again, it helps if there’s some space for non-linearity.

It doesn’t have to be open-world by any means, but you have to have some capability to linger. And if you don’t, then it’s harder to find coziness. And that’s what coziness is. And this is why I think you can take a vacation to Hawaii or you could take a vacation to Akron, Ohio, and probably it would be equally as good if you carry love in your heart, so to speak. 

And the same goes for video games. So much of why we love video games comes from within us and we make the mistake of thinking it’s all coming from the game within some reasonable boundary of quality. You can’t just play anything, but a lot of it comes from us and we make the mistake of thinking it’s coming from the game.

It’s a mixture of both, right?

It constantly shifts. And also just the more of yourself you put into a game, the more it gives back to you. And if you remember that, you’ll have just as much fun playing games now as you ever did as a kid. But people forget that. People start to see [a game] as a piece of media to be judged and the quality of which should be determined, and then sort of set it on a shelf amidst all the other pieces of media to sort of have a sense of the canon of video games, as opposed to remembering that a video game is a playground. It’s a home. It’s a story as much as it is a piece of art.

Is there a series of games out there that consistently has places like these in it?

It probably would be Zelda. [Nintendo doesn’t] put out games very often, so it feels weird to be like “it’s knocking it out of the park” because it’s, like, every eight years they put something out. So it’s not that common, but when I do play Tears of the Kingdom or Breath of the Wild, I’m consistently astonished by how tangible they are.

That world just feels really like a space. And it’s funny because it feels more like a space than Cyberpunk 2077, than Red Dead Redemption 2 — both of which have amazing things about them as well. But when I look at that Zelda game, it really does just feel like a place, and Cyberpunk kind of feels like a picture or a movie that when you get up close to it, you’re kind of in it. But it’s like when you look at distant objects [like] the city skyline in Cyberpunk, you’re like, What a nice sky box that is. But in Zelda, to me, the whole world, no matter where you look at it from, just feels like a real place. I think sound design is probably part of that. But yeah, whoever makes the Zelda games, they did a really good job. They deserve a lot of credit for that world. I think it’s probably overall the most impressive open world in a long time. It’s a really good one.

Are unremarkable or cozy places in games underappreciated?

No, I don’t think people realize how much they appreciate them, but as soon as you give it language, as soon as you call it an unremarkable and odd place, I think everyone immediately realizes that this is what they’ve always loved. This is what they miss about the games they played as a kid. It’s immediate. When you’re a kid and you’re just playing a game and you’re interacting with the space of a game, it is very immediate, your appreciation for these spaces. It is a big part of what makes these games have the effect that they do on you […] because you let them form that relationship. So I think everybody subconsciously loves spaces like this.

Do you ever just enjoy these places for yourself, instead of using them for a video?

One hundred percent. When I played through [Grand Theft Auto 4] originally — and the reason I was playing through it was to follow all the power lines in it so I could make a video about that — I spent so much time walking in that game and standing in alleyways and just really embodying or feeling embodied in that space. Slowing down is a really good way to bring joy or love back to your video gaming experience.

If you just chill the fuck out, you will just have more fun. If you just slow down, stop worrying about it so much, go back, look at things, mess around, engage with it, you will find all of the joy that you thought you lost by becoming an adult. It’s still there. And it’s really fun because video games are really fun.