We’ve Been Squeezing Through Cracks In Games Like Uncharted For Longer Than You Think

When I think about squeezing through cracks in games, I think about the PS4 generation. Hot on the heels of The Last of Us‘s blockbuster success at the tail-end of the PS3’s lifespan, this was the generation where cinematic third-person action-adventures fully took over. Squeezing through a narrow gap between walls is a mechanic I fully associate with those games and myriad others that followed in their footsteps.

Many players have assumed that these moments have always been veiled loading screens that allowed the game to set up something gorgeous for you to look at on the other side, making them a perfect microcosm of the state of triple-A game development from that moment on: visually gorgeous yet restrictively narrow.

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Should We Shun The Shimmy? Or Have A Soft Spot For The Squeeze?

Frustration with these stop-and-shimmies bubbled up when Epic first showed off its tech demo for Unreal Engine 5 back in May 2020. Epic was presenting the future potential of games, with polygons out the wazoo, impressive audio, and wild amounts of graphical detail, but the short demo still had a moment where the protagonist needed to squeeze through a crevice. We thought we were done with this! You’re telling us shimmying is the future?

That outcry prompted me to begin actively paying attention to this mechanic and, sure enough, you see it in a whole lot of linear, story-driven games released from the PS4 era onward. The slide-through-the-crack mechanic is still going strong today. It’s in The Callisto Protocol, God of War Ragnarok, A Plague Tale: Requiem, to name a few, but developers used it as recently as last year in Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Silent Hill 2.

But the mechanic still being used isn’t all that surprising, because it’s useful: it’s an in-world way to control pacing, allow for loading, show off graphical tech, and prevent the player from backtracking. And it usually doesn’t bother me. There was an area that you needed to return to repeatedly in Final Fantasy 7 Remake that was hidden on the other side of a shimmy-crack. That’s the only time this mechanic has really annoyed me and that was due to the sheer repetition of it. Otherwise, it’s fine. A means to an end in modern video games that can be used in stylishly creative ways.

The Wall Crack Shuffle Goes Way Back

I was surprised to find it’s been around for longer than I thought. Over Christmas break, I started replaying Uncharted 3: Drake’s Reception, and found that Naughty Dog was making use of the technique all the way back in 2011. Early in the game, Nate, Sully, and their pal Charlie ‘A Jason Statham Type’ Cutter have to shimmy through a narrow opening as they make their way into an underground tunnel.

When Nate is stranded in the desert late in the game, he needs to squeeze through a chasm. But it isn’t a commonly used mechanic throughout. Though some have speculated that these bits are just to hide loading, The Last of Us Part 2’s Kurt Margenau said that Naughty Dog “used squeeze-throughs to valve the player in to prevent them from going backwards.” He also noted that the common need for a companion to boost you up a ledge “are for preventing you from leaving the combat space before everyone is dead. Buddy can’t boost if they’re busy shootin.”

Whatever the design reason for it, I don’t mind boosting, shimmying, or crawling through — at least not in isolation. When a game feels like it’s entirely composed of choke points and corridors, I start to get itchy. But as long as the shimmy knows when to shimmy off stage, I welcome an opportunity to take a look at all the detail devs put into that chasm’s wall.

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