MapFriend is a horror game that combines the unsettling, creepy feeling of Google Maps with a retro style PC design. It’s a really neat concept, especially considering how much the actual Google Earth creeps everyone out. Searching through the maps, overhead and street view can give you those eerie feelings from time to time.
Now there’s a horror game that makes the most of it! There’s three different maps to explore, and a few different location pins to check out. Most of them seem pretty ordinary, though the bare pixelated landscape still gives me that surreal explorative feeling. It’s the glitched locations that are the spookiest of all. Just like the many real oddities of Google Earth, they keep you thinking about what could possibly be wrong with this place.
MapFriend – That Creepy Unexplained Feeling
From the creator of No Player’s Online, papercookies comes another hit. I would have liked to see some more maps, and maybe some more things to see while clicking around, but the game delivered with what it had. Walking through the endless nothingness with the humming and other old PC sounds was a great horror atmosphere. Especially the desert! You should try looking through some on the actual Google Earth. There is so much nothing in many parts of the world, and it’s neat to see.
*Spoilers* The final area was the most unsettling of any. Though I had trouble making sense of it. It was just one more thing to question the game about. What’s the deal with the glitches? Why were the last places on the other maps so bugged?
We can assume at least the last area of this game is about the missing Malaysia Airlines (MH370) flight. If you search the coordinates that you type into the game on Google Earth, it will bring you to the same place shown.
At this location, it looks like a plane is in the middle of the Cambodian Jungle. It was claimed to be MH370 by supposed experts, however this theory was never proven. There’s was no reason to believe the plane crashed there, considering where other plane parts where found. Also the fact that the plane seems to be intact. The most likely case is that satellites caught a plane in flight.
I’d like to see what other players takes on the game are! Maybe there’s more secrets within the game that haven’t been discovered. No Player’s Online certainly had tons of them, so we’ll have to see. I wonder what was in that final screenshot too, it looks like it might resemble a skeleton, or the inside of the plane?
