History Main / SpaceFillingPath

* ''VideoGame/ShadowHearts'' has done this a few times. The Wine Cellar in ''Covenant'', for example, sends you through several rooms where you have to flip a switch to lower a path to flip a switch... The last switch in a room, thankfully, lowers the path back out.

* ''VideoGame/ChronoTrigger [[VideoGameRemake DS]]''. Lost Sanctum. Not only is it a SpaceFillingPath, but you have to go back and forth on it over and over until you die of boredom.

* This is the sole purpose of the genre of web games known as TowerDefense games - you defend a SpaceFillingPath from a stream of oncoming {{Mooks}} by building defense towers to shoot them. In some instances, you must also ''create'' the SFP, which is an added problem/puzzle. Usually, you must create it while the enemies are flowing, which is even more difficult. ''VideoGame/PlantsVsZombies'' ditched this mechanic and instead had the zombies walk towards the player in straight lines.

*** You can see the Safe Room in the Barns chapter of Dark Carnival about halfway through the level (and you can throw [[EscortMission Gnome]] [[HundredPercentCompletion Chompski]] over the fence if you have him). However, to get to it, the Survivors must continue past said fence, turn around and fight through some barns running alongside the area they just navigated, then climb on top of said barns and traverse the roofs to reach the other side of the fence. Then it becomes an Intestinal Tract when you open the gate on the fence, as doing so triggers a Gauntlet Crescendo where Infected just don't stop coming, and the players have to carve their way through the hordes to reach the stadium itself.

* ''VideoGame/{{Wizardry}} V''. Dungeon level 4. It does warn you that a 'Labyrinth of Doom' is ahead, or something to that effect. If you don't listen, expect to have to traverse a wind about, single tile path filling half the dungeon and containing nothing but enemies with all sorts of ''StandardStatusEffects'' including poison, petrification, and instant death. Of course there's a secret door to skip it right at the entrance...

* At a certain point in ''VideoGame/{{Timeshift}}'' you enter a fucking ''enormous'' warehouse, so big it constitutes the entirety of the level. You're standing on a metal gangplank overlooking a deadly drop, and the exit point is... straight to your left. Unfortunately, inbetween you and it sit a few stacked boxes. You look at them and go "ok, there's a small space I should realistically be able to jump on to bypass them", but no, if you try that you fall and die. Then you think "why can't I climb them or push them off?", but no, jumping and the action button have no effect (neither does, of course, shooting them with a rocket). The only possible course of action is to go the other way, and start on a ridiculously long and convoluted path that will take you across the entirety of the warehouse - both on the ground floor and on more gangplanks than can be counted - before ultimately leading you to the exit point.

* This is the sole purpose of the genre of web games known as TowerDefense games - you defend a SpaceFillingPath from a stream of oncoming {{Mooks}} by building defence towers to shoot them. In some instances, you must also ''create'' the SFP, which is an added problem/puzzle. Usually, you must create it while the enemies are flowing, which is even more difficult. ''VideoGame/PlantsVsZombies'' ditched this mechanic and instead had the zombies walk towards the player in straight lines.

* Many cities before urban planning developed in this manner, with complex and densely-packed structures around narrow roads and alleys. Papal Rome in particular developed what had been a fluke of development into a symbol of revelation, pilgrims to the See passing from the darkness of these roads into the brilliant light of Saint Peter's Square and the heart of the Catholic Church. Mussolini then controversially demolished most of the neighbourhood, as well as destroying or relocating many historic buildings and residences, in order to [[DungeonBypass create a straight path]] as part of his general renovation of Rome. The Via della Conciliazione remains disliked even today for this.

* ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry'' 1 and 3 both have examples of this trope. In the first game, there's tentacles trying to get you while in the third game, there literally is an Intestinal Tract.

** Some puzzle rooms in [[VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOracleGames Oracle Of Ages]] feature a pitch black room containing an invisible Space Filling Path over a BottomlessPit. While [[TrialAndErrorGameplay Trial and Error]] could be used to solve these rooms, the intended way is to generate [[BlockPuzzle Blocks]] with the Cane of Somaria. If the block falls into the BottomlessPit, there is no path there, and you should try another direction.

Remember, however, that TropesAreNotBad; there are many legitimate uses for this trope, though like any trope it still requires restraint.

* The final map of the "Suicide Blitz 2" [[GameMod custom campaign]] features a long run through the entryway of a stadium, up the stairs to the top floor, down a level and into the field, then out the other side to the parking lot. All the while a Gauntlet Crescendo is rolling.

*** There is also, the ''Hurry, He's Hungry'' Star in the Sea Slide Galaxy as well as the Shrinking Satellite star in the Hurry Scurry Galaxy, which features a planetoid constructed completely out of disappearing tiles with a Black Hole in the center. Mario must grab an item from each tile, at which point the black hole turns into a Star.

*** You can see the Safe Room in the Barns chapter of Dark Carnival about halfway through the level (and you can throw [[EscortMission Gnome]] [[HundredPercentCompletion Chompski]] over the fence if you have him). However, to get to it, the Survivors must continue past said fence, turn around and fight through some barns running alongside the area they just navigated, climb on top of and traverse the roofs of those same barns to reach the other side of the fence, and then fight through a continuous onslaught of zombies.

** Service Games typically require the shortest paths from A to B, to prevent customers from becoming bored and leaving your facility. However in some cases - especially prison-building games - a very long, twisting passageway can be essential to keeping the denizens from leaving _too quickly_.

* As their name suggests, all SpaceManagementGames demand their players to make the absolute most of a limited building area. Most games in this genre encourage players to design their facility so that characters can always take the ''shortest'' path possible between any two points; but there are several notable exceptions to this depending on the exact subgenre in question.

* ''Franchise/DevilMayCry'' 1 and 3 both have examples of this trope. In the first game, there's tentacles trying to get you while in the third game, there literally is an Intestinal Tract.

* ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime'' had short Ping Pong Paths between some rooms to mask the DynamicLoading.
* ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime 2: Echoes'' has a number of rooms where there are two doors, one of which is always blocked by a rotating barrier. To rotate the barrier so you can access the other door, all you have to do is place a Morph Ball Bomb in the slot. Of course, now the barrier is on the first door, so you have to do it AGAIN in order to get back. This gets really, really tedious as the rooms are otherwise completely pointless, and you will generally visit them several times.

* The Q*Bert Floor is used extensively as puzzles in later handheld ''Zelda'' games.
* The 2-D ''Franchise/TheLegendOfZelda'' games usually have at least one dungeon with a Q*Bert Floor room. Some even have ping-pong paths, but usually averted as getting the Roc's Feather allows you to jump quickly across the path. In particular, the overworld of ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaALinkToThePast'' has plenty of tree clusters, fences and one way ledge jump off points, among other things, that limit travel pathway options, forcing roundabout routes to nearby destinations.

*** The Eyeglass Library has books giving directions through the invisible maze to the next book. Until you read the book, there is no path forward, and once you read the book, the path behind you disappears. The final book has nine instructions, which, if you forget them, can be replaced by the Cane of Somaria as above.
* This is one of the reasons [[ThatOneLevel the Water Temple]] from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'' gets a lot of hate. Not only do you have to submerge yourself and run (rather slowly at that) through underwater tunnels and resurface, but you also have to constantly [[StockVideoGamePuzzle switch water levels]] at designated checkpoints, each one corresponding to a particular tier. Much BackTracking abounds, especially if you alter the water level incorrectly for the current situation. ''And'' you have to keep going into the item menu to take the Iron Boots on and off. Fortunately, a lot of the things that made the Water Temple so notorious were fixed in the UsefulNotes/Nintendo3DS remake.

* ''Franchise/SuperMarioBros'' has this with the block trains/snakes in some of the castles in Super Mario World, New Super Mario Bros and quite a few Mario World hacks, which have Mario riding a moving train of blocks that pretty much goes the long way round a huge room past a ton of obstacles. New Super Mario Bros even had one in one of the tower levels which went right, up one block, left, up another block, ad nauseam for a while before moving on upwards.

** The first GBA title, ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaCircleOfTheMoon, was pretty obnoxious as well. In any room that was more than one screen wide or tall, it was virtually guaranteed that you'd move through every possible screen to get from one corner to the other.
** ''VideoGame/CastlevaniaSymphonyOfTheNight'' was notorious for all of this. Thankfully by Aria of Sorrow, IGA and company wisely started consolidating the castle designs and expand the number of warp spots from then on to reduce all of that needless backtracking.
* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'':
** [[ThatOneLevel Luigi's Purple Coins]] becomes a Q*bert Floor, as every platform that it is safe to stand on either disappears or starts rotating and becomes unstable after touching them.
** There is also, the ''Hurry, He's Hungry'' Star in the Sea Slide Galaxy as well as the Shrinking Satellite star in the Hurry Scurry Galaxy, which features a planetoid constructed completely out of disappearing tiles with a Black Hole in the center. Mario must grab an item from each tile, at which point the black hole turns into a Star.
* In ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy2'', the Cosmic Clones are a Q*bert Floor mechanic to an extent, because you to have to run from infinite numbers of Mario clones that copy your every move and crossing your path leads to being hurt via CollisionDamage. This gets applied then to Luigi's Purple Coins from the first game. This time, though, you have Co-Star Luma (if you have friends) to stop the green tiles from disappearing.

* ''VideoGame/{{ZZT}}'' games from the earlier years of the program made by first-time designers suffered from the presence of Ping Pong Paths so often that they have appeared in "help" games describing and depicting what not to do in a ''ZZT'' game.
** ''ZZT Syndromes'' did it particularly memorably, effectively forcing the player to step on most of the tiles on the screen - [[spoiler: or it would have if the narrator didn't let you off the hook by carving a tunnel while you were doing it.]]

* This is the sole purpose of the genre of web games known as TowerDefense games - you defend a SpaceFillingPath from a stream of oncoming {{Mooks}} by building defence towers to shoot them. In some instances, you must also ''create'' the SFP, which is an added problem/puzzle. Usually, you must create it while the enemies are flowing, which is even more difficult.
** There seems to have been a trend away from this in recent years, possibly brought on by the hugely successful ''VideoGame/PlantsVsZombies'', which ditched this mechanic and instead had the zombies walk towards the player in straight lines.

* Some cathedrals have a space-filling path marked on the floor, apparently so that pilgrims can walk a long distance inside the cathedral without retracing their steps.
** "Walking the Labyrinth" is part of Lenten devotionals in many denominations, sometimes associated with the Stations of the Cross.

** A few streets in especially hilly cities do the same thing for the same reason, such as one block of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Street_(San_Francisco) Lombard Street in San Francisco]].

* IKEA stores are structured like this, as a single winding path with helpfully placed arrows that take visitors through the furniture showroom, house appliances store, warehouse and cash registers, in that order. It serves two purposes: making the store appear larger than it actually is, and forcing visitors to walk past goods that they wouldn't have otherwise considered, in the hope that they'd be interested in something beyond what they came for.
** Fortunately, there are also shortcuts tucked away that allow knowledgeable patrons, and employees, to quickly jump from one part of the path to another "distant" part.

* Many ''VideoGame/{{Starcraft}}'' and ''VideoGame/StarcraftII'' multiplayer maps feature a long, twisty route from one end of the battlefield. Generally, air-heavy strategies are more practical on these maps, since the greater mobility of aircraft helps cancel out the increased time to get to them in the TechTree. On map from [=SC2=] in particular is the epitome of this trope in [=RTSes=] - the players' starting locations are on separate plateaus arranged in a circle, with ramps down to a ring around the exterior of the map - the only ground route available.

* ''VideoGame/BaldursGate'': The third-to-last area is basically nothing more than a large room, with flimsy wooden walls set up to create a labyrinth. There are also several nasty monsters who will shoot at you with flaming arrows. Oh, and there are traps set right in front of the monsters, too. And said monsters are resistant to most ranged weapons. [[ThatOneLevel Yeah.]]

** In the 8th gym the floor is made of ice and to open the door to the next room you need to crack all the tiles in the current one, but if you step on the same tile twice, you fall through the floor to the lower level, full of trainers. And the further you got onto the upper floor, the more trainers you had to fight on your way out.
** Another example is in the Sky Pillar, this time you need to use the Mach Bike to go over the cracked tiles before they break completely. The bike is pretty fast but hard to steer and if you stop (such as from a collision), you fall down.

* '''Intestinal Tract:''' A Ping Pong or Velvet Rope path with a twist: Instead of just making you walk farther, it also hurts you in some way. How about the occasional RandomEncounter as you're trekking through the path? Or perhaps the floor damages you with every step? Sounds fun, doesn't it?

*** The Crescendo event in the the "Park" map of "The Parish" has the players running through what used to be a waiting queue; as such, it is a little less subtle.
*** In "Quarter", the following part, you can very often see areas you've been before or have to pass through from behind a fance or a gate. The map itself is surprisingly compact regarding dimensions.

* ROM hacks (especially of ''[[SuperMarioBros Super Mario World]]'') and NintendoHard platform games are the kings of this, utilizing both the ping pong path and the velvet rope path to near ridiculous degrees to make sure every possible part of each room is filled with more and more narrow jumps and instant death spikes. And in some even worse cases, you have to go right back through said maze with an item or after an action is taken the other side.
* ''SuperMarioBros'' has this with the block trains/snakes in some of the castles in Super Mario World, New Super Mario Bros and quite a few Mario World hacks, which have Mario riding a moving train of blocks that pretty much goes the long way round a huge room past a ton of obstacles. New Super Mario Bros even had one in one of the tower levels which went right, up one block, left, up another block, ad nauseum for a while before moving on upwards.

* ''VideoGame/BaldursGate'': The third-to-last area is basically nothing more than a large room, with flimsy wooden walls set up to create a labyrinth. There are also several nasty monters who will shoot at you with flaming arrows. Oh, and there are traps set right in front of the monsters, too. And said monsters are resistant to most ranged weapons. [[ScrappyLevel Yeah.]]

* In ''VideoGame/SwordOfVermilion'', the paths towards both the last town and TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon are examples of this trope, the first being a long spiral and the second a long back and forth winding path. One villager even [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] it, saying that the BigBad made it that way to "discourage you".

* ''VideoGame/BreathOfFireI'' has a major one. The path ''appears'' to be simple--just a bridge with a few extra paths veering off of it... until you step on the button that spins the screen and the characters until you don't know which way is up. And since its nothing but blackness all around, you can't even use landmarks. Even on the straight stretches you can find yourself turned around and going back the way you came.
* While most of ''VideoGAme/DragonAgeOrigins'' is railroading at its finest, the most annoying part is the Gauntlet, where you have to keep moving characters in a certain sequence in order to unlock the next part of the puzzle to get [[spoiler: The Sacred Ashes of Andraste.]]

* Many outdoor locations in ''VideoGame/NeverwinterNights2'' are like this -- see [[http://gamebanshee.com/neverwinternights2/walkthrough/mountgalardrym.php this map]] for an {{egregious}} example.

* A pet peeve of many ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork'' players is long, twisty paths in areas of cyberspace where there's no reason for it. Or rather, there ''is'' a reason -- the designers are forcing more random encounters. It's especially annoying the way each game's final boss has a long enough runup that you'll get attacked at least once, and this is after the no-save point. In the sixth game, Green Area is an {{egregious}} form of intestinal tract. The stage of the Green Town boss, Judgeman, is also a good example of the Q-Bert Floor.

* Unlike many areas in the base game, in the ''Heavensward'' expansion (and some parts of Stormblood) for ''FinalFantasyXIV'', most of the areas past Foundation will have a velvet-rope series of paths, requiring a player go to ''way'' out of their way in order to reach their destinations. Once a player has all of the Aetheryte points in an area unlocked, however (something which, naturally, requires the completion of most of the area), they can simply fly everywhere.

** In ''VideoGame/{{Half-Life 2}}'', [[ZombieApocalypse Ravenholm]] seems a lot larger than it really is, as the player must traverse the streets, building interiors AND roofs.

* This is one of the reasons [[ThatOneLevel the Water Temple]] from ''VideoGame/TheLegendOfZeldaOcarinaOfTime'' gets a lot of hate. Not only do you have to submerge yourself and run (rather slowly at that) through underwater tunnels and resurface, but you also have to constantly [[StockVideoGamePuzzle switch water levels]] at designated checkpoints, each one corresponding to a particular tier. Much BackTracking abounds, especially if you alter the water level incorrectly for the current situation. ''And'' you have to keep going into the item menu to take the Iron Boots on and off. Fortunately, a lot of the things that made the Water Temple so notorious were fixed in the Nintendo3DS remake.

* '''Velvet Rope:''' A cousin of the Ping Pong Path, except much longer and more complex. It relies on the same back-and-forth pattern, but starts to add corners, spirals, and other shapes to better [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-filling_curve utilize space]]. It can't really be called a ''maze'', since it usually only contains one path that never branches off, in which case it is technically a ''labyrinth''. Anyone with eyes can see how to get through it, but the question is, who has the patience to walk over nearly every tile in the room to get to the exit?

When combined with NothingIsScarier or EmptyRoomPsych a short space filling path can be an effective horror tool, building suspense without exerting player resources. Though as those tropes note, doing this too much or too often will dampen the effect.

See Also: OnlyIdiotsMayPass

* Many levels in the ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' series follow a ping-pong or velvet rope space-filling path, sometimes enforcing this with instant-death [[GravityBarrier fall barriers]]. Examples include ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved''[='s=] "Pillar of Autumn", "Truth and Reconciliation", "Assault on the Control Room", Keyes"; ''VideoGame/{{Halo 2}}''[='s=] "Delta Halo" and "Uprising"/"Great Journey"; and ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}''[='s=] "Sierra 117" and "Tsavo Highway". Often, these are used to facilitate DynamicLoading. ''Combat Evolved''[='s=] "The Library" and its descendants are Intestinal Tract levels with constant Flood ambushes and other hazards. And ''3''[='s=] infamous "Cortana" mission is a near-literal intestinal tract, complete with "sphincdoors".