Looking back on Sonic Mania’s Secret Weapon

When I saw the trailer for Sonic Mania in 2016, I was overjoyed. If you weren’t a Sonic fan at that time, you should know that Sonic Mania is exactly what almost everyone in the Sonic community wanted to see. When it was released the next year, I started a playthrough of the game on a YouTube channel that no longer exists. (don’t ask.) Due to various reasons, I never finished the game. That changed in 2021: four years after the game’s release, I have beaten Sonic Mania with Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and the Knuckles and Knuckles mode all with all seven Chaos Emeralds.

If you know absolutely nothing about this game, allow me to fill you in. When Sonic first made his transition into 3D with Sonic Adventure, it went reasonably well and stayed that way for a little bit. However, after a couple of mediocre games that eventually dropped to terrible, many Sonic fans including myself wanted to go back to a 2D Sonic game, also known as a Classic Sonic game, that would have the same physics and gameplay aspects of the original Genisis games. For a while, this didn’t exactly happen. Although they did bring back Classic Sonic for Sonic Generations, it wasn’t the game we had in mind. And while Sonic fans were cooking up some amazing content, Sonic Team or Sega wasn’t as satisfying.

But then Sega made the best decision they possibly could have: Sega hired those same people who were making all this cool Sonic fan content to develop a brand new 2D Classic Sonic game. And Sonic Mania was born! Now, Sonic Mania got enormous amounts of praise back when it was released, but now that all of this hype and excitement has had four years to die down, I want to take a closer look and see what made it so special.

After beating Sonic Mania four times, there was something that I realized that I had never noticed before about the game. You see, past attempts at creating 2D Sonic games (save for the Genesis titles) had this problem with their level design that made everything feel way too big and cluttered. And I noticed that I was looking and finding all sorts of secrets in Sonic Mania, meaning that the zones felt big but there wasn’t all that clutter. This brought me to the concept that I like to call “Directional Game Design”. The way that Directional Game Design works (when it’s at its best) is the game uses subtle cues to nudge the player where they need to go. This could be something like a scream far away in a horror game or a piece of subtle dialogue in an immersive RPG. Directional Game Design is most iconically used in the title screen of a game. That text at that start telling you to “Press Start” or “Push any button” is one of the simpler uses of Directional Game Design. However, when you implement this directly into the level, you get Directional Level Design, and Sonic Mania uses this a lot. Basically, Directional Level Design uses the level itself to push the player in the right direction. This is perfect for Sonic because of all the springs and boingers he’s always hitting. Every single spring or level gimmick in Sonic Mania is using Directional Level Design, nudging you to where you need to be, which creates an amazing sense of speed and agility.

It is extremely difficult to pinpoint what goes into a good Sonic game. I’ve tried to isolate these characteristics so many times! But Directional Game Design is something that I think is very important in making a quality Sonic game, and also something no one else has really brought up to my knowledge. If you’d like to share a particularly good example of Directional Game or Level Design, leave a comment! I’d love to hear your favorites.