> and my first thought finding it was basically "am I the first person here?, do the developers know this exists?". A world having that much of a life of its ow

> and my first thought finding it was basically "am I the first person here?, do the developers know this exists?". A world having that much of a life of its own is a hug feat for a work of fiction. My favorite example of this was Ash Lake in Dark Souls 1. In one of the most difficult and miserable places in the game there's a random tree with a chest in it. If you happen to hit the wall behind it, you'll find it's actually illusory, and be rewarded with another chest. At that point you probably think you've already found the secret, but if you move being the second chest, you'll find this wall is illusory as well. You'll walk down a path and find that this tree is actually hollow, and proceeds into the ground for hundreds of feet. You can try to make it down, but it's quite the gauntlet: you have to deal with irritating platforming, and enemies that will curse you and remove half your health. If you have the patience to make it all the way down, you emerge from the tree and are greeted with one of the most spectacular vistas in the game: a seemingly endless lake stretching to the horizon, filled with gigantic trees, each hundreds (if not thousands) of feet tall. If you then make the journey all the way down the beach, you'll encounter an amazingly bizarre (but peaceful) dragon. All of this hidden at the bottom of a miserable swamp behind two unassuming illusory walls. It's so magic the first time you find this, and it reminded me of playing games as a kid, where the possibilities of what might be around the next corner felt endless.