Map Nerds, Your Moment

Here’s a quiz built for anyone who can’t resist a good fantasy atlas: PC Gamer has a new challenge that asks you to identify 20 games using nothing but screenshots of their world maps—on a 15-minute timer. Or as the post puts it, "This one's for the cartographers." It’s a smart twist on gaming trivia that skips characters and box art and goes straight for what players actually navigated for hours.

PC Gamer frames the prompt as a love letter to maps, calling it a tribute to the "fictional GPS of videogame world maps" and warning you won’t always see an entire continent. Some screens are generous, others a little coy, but that’s the point. As the piece jokes, you don’t need to know your left from your right—you just need to know "Midgard from Ishgard." If that line made you grin, you’re the target audience.

How the Quiz Works

The setup is simple. You’ll scroll through 20 images, each a snapshot of a game’s world map, and type in the title before the 15 minutes run out. Some images give away more than others, so expect slam-dunks mixed with trickier crops and zoom levels. PC Gamer says "gaming cartographers should have it in the bag, easy," but it’s still a brisk test under the clock.

Not every map is presented in full, which keeps pattern recognition honest. You’ll have to rely on flourishes that artists use to distinguish lands: the font on a placename, the way mountains are inked, or how fast-travel icons are arranged. When you’re done, the post invites you to share how you scored in the comments and to shout out the map designs that stuck with you over the years.

Spotting the Clues

Half the fun is catching the tiny tells. If you’re brushing up before hitting start, keep an eye out for these common giveaways that regularly separate one virtual atlas from another:

  • Typography: ornate serif labels hint at high fantasy; blocky, modern fonts suggest shooters or sandboxes.
  • Coastlines: jagged archipelagos versus smooth, storybook shores can be immediate giveaways.
  • Relief style: stippled hills, painterly brushwork, or photoreal elevation each point to different eras and studios.
  • Icon language: unique fast-travel gates, campfires, or quest pins can scream a franchise.
  • Color palette: sepia parchment, icy blues, or neon overlays narrow the guess fast.
  • Grid or compass details: hex overlays or exaggerated wind roses are distinctive signatures.

If you’ve pored over, say, Elden Ring’s tan-and-ink parchment, The Witcher 3’s windswept islands, or the clean tourist-map vibes of Los Santos, you already know how quickly these cues can fire muscle memory. Even a sliver of coastline or a cropped legend can be enough.

The Maps That Live Rent-Free

Ask a room of players and you’ll hear a greatest hits list: the hand-drawn sprawl of Skyrim’s province; the stitched-together regions of Final Fantasy XIV—Ishgard’s frosty edges are hard to forget; the bold, friendly layout of Stardew Valley; the dense tangle of Yharnam’s spiritual cousins across FromSoftware’s catalog; or the clean, bold text across Assassin’s Creed’s historical sandboxes. Fans of older RPGs will call out Baldur’s Gate’s parchment grids, while strategy diehards might picture fantasy cartouches and monster doodles lining the margins.

None of that confirms what’s in the quiz, to be clear; it’s simply the kind of cartographic flavor that lodges in your brain. That’s why a map challenge lands so well. It’s not about a boss fight or a twist ending. It’s about the hours of tracing roads, pinging markers, and realizing a shortcut existed the whole time.

Share Your Score, Then Keep Going

PC Gamer explicitly asks, "Let us know how you did in the comments," and throws in a bonus prompt: which videogame maps stand out, and why? If you’re looking to keep the momentum, the team also teases more trivia, with quizzes on "everything from healthbars to weird currencies to absurd patch notes." It’s a nice sampler if you like your coffee breaks with a side of gaming brainteasers.

There’s also a human touch to the post. The author jokes about having "absolutely zero sense of direction" yet loving world maps because using one feels a bit magical. That squares with why these images endure: a great map is both tool and souvenir, part directions, part daydream.

Set a timer, challenge a friend, and see who in your group is the real studio cartographer. With new RPGs and open worlds on the horizon, your internal atlas is only getting bigger—might as well test it now before the next fast-travel icon takes over your weekend.