There are a few staples when it comes to video game level theming, basic ideas that have always been around yet never manage to get old. Grass levels, water levels, ice levels, fire levels — these familiar tropes can be great jumping off points for devs when designing a level or world. You know what you’re going to get when you see these, and it’s rare to see them shaken up all too much.
And then there’s the desert levels. While that should be quite a consistent theme, ‘desert’ can be interpreted in several interesting ways. Some go for the classic dunes of rolling sand, others go for the more realistic dry wasteland; some might lean hard into the Egyptian theming, while others find their own ways to be creative with it. And so, with deserts all being so different, it’s important to highlight the best ones found in video games.
10/10 Dry Dry Desert
The most classic and recognizable deserts in gaming have to belong to Mario. From the land of the angry sun to the deadly Shifting Sand Lands, Mario has some of the most iconic — and one of those is Dry Dry Desert. Coming from the original Paper Mario, Dry Dry Desert is the setting of Chapter 2 as Mario must navigate around these maze-like dunes in search of ancient ruins, dealing with all the secrets hidden among the sands.
A regular playthrough usually won’t have the player exploring much of the desert though, just being a stroll, a visit to the lovely Dry Dry Outpost, and then straight to the ruins. While this is all still quite fun, the true magic of this location comes in deeper exploration — the desert has so many rooms, and each of them are completely unique with so many things to discover for those who go looking. Dry Dry Desert is just fun to get utterly lost in; perfect for a desert!
9/10 Lost Sands
Straight from Paper Mario to its spiritual successor, we have Bug Fables. While Bug Fables does its best to not walk in Paper Mario’s footprints directly, it just couldn’t help but throw in a desert. Even here, it makes sure to stay extra distinct with the Lost Sands. The Lost Sands is the setting for both Chapter 3 and 4, a land of sand and bandits that travelers are said to get lost in — but it’s the only way to reach the Bee Kingdom.
Differing itself from Dry Dry Desert, the Lost Sands is less of a place to get lost in and more of a massive puzzle to solve as you open up your different paths through the desert maze in order to find your way about. That’s not to say the desert doesn’t hold secrets; it has plenty. Despite being so much smaller, it’s jam-packed with things to do and see. Plus, upon reaching the end of this long trek, you get a chance to look down and realize you were only inside a tiny little sandbox the whole time.
8/10 Olathe
A lot of deserts aren’t actually the rolling sands we’ve come to know from media; you may even have one right in your backyard, and that’s what we see in Lisa the Painful’s Olathe, though it comes with an extra pinch of post-apocalypse. Olathe is just a random desert in America like any other, now transformed by a mysterious white flash which made all women disappear, dooming the world and throwing it into anarchy.
In terms of being a desert, Olathe is as barren as can be, adding to the utter collapse of civilization with no food and barely any fresh water to be seen for miles. The actual land of Olathe takes a backseat to the Mad Max-style warlords who run the land, each having their own quirks to their gangs — such as worshiping one guy’s beauty to only accepting people with hair and killing bald people. They give Olathe a load of personality.
7/10 Sizzlin’ Sands
Sometimes even the most generic of locations can be spiced up with some kind of special twist to it, and no game has done that special twisting better than Bugsnax — especially in the Sizzlin’ Sands. The Sizzlin’ Sands are a late-game area in Bugsnax, unlocked as part of one of the last quests, and it is a massive sandbox with bits of ancient ruins and an oasis.
Living up to the harshness of the desert, Sizzlin’ Sands has some of the most aggressive Bugsnax with Picantis, Flapjackerack, and Buffalocust, easily making it one of the more tricky areas to get ’em all without getting burnt. Despite this, the desert also makes for quite a peaceful place to just relax by the oasis at night, and with the sheer size of the area, it’s just fun to run about and play in — almost like a literal sandbox in this case.
6/10 Gerudo Desert
Deserts have always been a staple of the Zelda series, especially since Ocarina of Time when they became the home of the Gerudo people. It’s always interesting to see how each game re-designs the homelands for the different races of Hyrule, and Breath of the Wild may offer the best one yet for the Gerudo. Gerudo Desert is a massive stretch of the world covered only in harsh sands. It’s home to Gerudo Village and one of the divine beasts.
It’s likely one of the harshest areas in the entire game, as you need both high heat and cold resistance to brave the desert, and sand will constantly slow Link down — though it can be made easier through use of the sand seals. The main point of interest is Gerudo Town, a bastion among the harsh desert and a bustling trading town where only females are allowed. Sneaking in through cross-dressing is one of the most memorable moments of the game. The desert is full of so much to see like the rest of the game, and hours can be poured into exploring it.
5/10 Mojave Wasteland
Sometimes a setting doesn’t have to be too visually interesting in order to worm its way into a player’s heart; it just needs to create a fascinating world. No series creates fascinating worlds quite like Fallout, especially with New Vegas’ Mojave Wasteland. The Mojave Wasteland is quite the packed place in Fallout’s world, despite being a barren desert, being home to Mr. House’s New Vegas Strip as a major city and being the front line between Caesar’s Legion and the NCR.
Like other Fallout maps, New Vegas offers so much to do and see throughout all the desert, with cities built around what remnants there were, the strange Vault experiments to find, and some of Fallout’s most memorable quests to take part in. But, what makes the Mojave so special is how alive and real it feels. The conflict on display is incredibly well-written with each faction having great histories and so much detail behind them, and the world is in a constant state of reacting to this conflict, making you feel like just one player in it all.
4/10 Sand Kingdom
As said before, Mario is no stranger to desert levels and has the theming down pat with few variations… except for in Mario Odyssey, where like most conventions, that theming is thrown out the window, and we get the strange Sand Kingdom. As the first truly explorable kingdom in the game, the Sand Kingdom is a quite literal open sandbox, a desert now encased in ice that terrorizes the local residents.
While Sand Kingdom looks like a generic desert level on the surface, it flips so many little things and adds tiny bits of creativity to tip the scales into making it special. From the more Mexican and Latin American theming to the Jaxis which make exploring so fun — to the distinct mix of ice and blazing heat. Add in how much there is to see and do here, and Sand Kingdom easily becomes one of the most fun kingdoms to explore.
3/10 Lanayru Desert
While deserts in video games are plenty of fun, they’re often quite misleading to what they are. Deserts aren’t just rolling seas of sand that have always been that way; they’re dry places that could sprout with life in the right conditions, and Skyward Sword’s Lanayru Desert actually uses this to create excellent area! Lanayru Desert was once a prosperous land of advanced robots, but overtime their civilization collapsed, and now all that’s left behind is a barren desert Link must traverse.
The gimmick of the area is that it is filled with timeshift stones that when hit will convert a small area into how it was in the past, when the area was still operational, filled with life, and even had an ocean. You get to use this for combat with bringing enemies back to life, restarting the old robots of the area, and even turning the sand dunes into water to sail about this sand sea in an incredible moment. It’s easily one of the most memorable areas in the game.
2/10 Hourglass Twins
When you get area templates like this, they usually come with their own mechanics. Ice levels are supposed to be slippery, water levels have loads of swimming, and desert levels… Well, they get sand? That usually gets made the main mechanic as levels are forced to be creative, and no level is more creative with sand than Outer Wilds’ Hourglass Twins. As one of many planets in this tiny solar system, these twins have their own unique gimmick. Throughout the game’s time loop, sand will be transferred between them, uncovering one and burying the other.
Hourglass is the location that best shows off the game’s time loop mechanic with it being a literal hourglass clock to tick away the loop. This planet becomes a battle against time to explore as you have to make a mad dash to explore the deepest parts before they get buried and crush you — or wait a while to see the already buried secrets become gradually uncovered. These two planets have secrets galore with some of the game’s most memorable locations, including a buried city, a cave of teleporting rocks, and even the core to the game’s mystery.
1/10 Greed
What does the desert have to do with Hell itself? Not much, but Ultrakill is going to make it have something to do with it. Despite being set in Hell, the action-packed shooter manages to have a desert level through the 4th circle: Greed. Greed in Ultrakill is an endless burning desert filled with old ruins and sinking monuments of the human world, with the greedy being forced forever into the punishment of Sisyphus.
Not only being fantastically creative, Greed uses all of those interesting elements within its gameplay — introducing sand that burns you and enemies, sand-coated enemies that don’t bleed, having you explore the dark interior of the pyramids, and even skating down the side of it in the boss fight. It’s an area that never stops going hard with the action and spectacle, and it easily makes itself one of Ultrakill’s most memorable, and in a game like this, that’s a high praise indeed.
