Get ready to test your navigation skills in gentle treasure-finding game Map Map

Megan Bidmead, 26 March 2026

I opened up Map Map - A Game About Maps with some trepidation. I have notoriously awful map-reading skills. I can get around, of course, but I tend to rely on landmarks and, I don't know, vibes. If you handed me a map, I'd immediately start overthinking where I am in relation to it. And therefore, Map Map presented me with a big challenge: can I find my way around an island, using a completely blank map, marking my findings as I go?

In Map Map, you play as a cartographer for Billie's Bunch, a ragtag crew of explorers made up of everything from robots to foxes, searching for treasure hidden by the mysterious Raven King. Your job is to explore a series of islands, rummaging among ruins and looking for treasure. To begin, you sail to a very plain island with a very basic objective (find and mark the sandcastle on the map). Even I can nail this challenge. I choose a spot, and a giant location icon appears from the sky, slamming down and bouncing right next to me. Billie, the leader of the crew, responds so enthusiastically that I can't help but think I have what it takes after all.

You are given tools to help your quest. For starters, you can click and hold to count how many steps it takes to get from one landmark to another. These steps then correlate to measurements on the map, letting you pinpoint with more accuracy. You also get a compass, which obviously makes figuring out which way you're going much easier. Later, you're given dividers, which let you get more specific when measuring distances between places.

Map-marking is a crucial part of the game. You're given basic tools (a pencil, crayon, and an eraser), allowing you to scribble down notes and markings. Stickers help you to place specific landmarks: treasure, towers, and bumblebees. All of this begins to build a picture, so when your crew asks you to find something specific, you're able to get your bearings much more quickly.

I enjoyed switching between the map-marking part of the game and the gentle exploration on foot. The islands are interesting to traverse, and I felt quite nimble, scrambling up cliffs and jumping over streams to get my bearings. The story feels a little like stepping into a childhood game: of following a roughly scribbled treasure map your parents made to keep you busy on a rainy afternoon. There's a lovely, peaceful little world here to look at, and I can see it being quite a calming experience for cozy gamers.

If you are a bit lacking in that department, you do get the opportunity to correct yourself. If someone asks you to find a pile of logs on the beach, for example, and you accidentally pin the wrong spot on the map, it's no biggie, and you can just try again. Your former guesses will appear on the map as little red marks, increasingly paler as you keep guessing, so you can feel your way through each goal if you're not 100% sure. And the star system allows you to make a fairly rubbish guess and still move on - you're given a 1, 2, or 3 star-rating on your map-pinning skills, and you can replay until you pin with greater accuracy.

While Map Map is a great puzzle game to play solo, there's a Twitch option: this opens up combined chat play, with up to 500 guesses shown on the map. This is a fun way to play cooperatively with your followers and opens up a little bit of gentle competition as well as collaboration.

There were moments in Map Map when I felt a bit overwhelmed. Each island has a kind of stone compass on the floor with varying levels of visibility under the sand; I heaved a sigh of relief when I found it every time. Faced with a completely blank map gives me a similar feeling to when I sit down to write on a blank document: temporarily unable to understand how I'll get from point A to point B.

But, despite my lack of skills, there's something innocently wonderful about exploring these little islands. It feels like a very gentle adventure, and I like that there's a bit of creativity involved in finding the solution. You can mark your surroundings in a way that makes sense to you, even if it is quite unhelpful as a traditional map. I quite liked anchoring myself to strange little dips on the coastline, to patches of flowers or clusters of bees in a tree. It's calming and brain-stretching at the same time. And who knows? Maybe by the time I've finished the full game, I'll be less prone to getting lost (in both open-world games and the actual open world around me). Only one way to find out!