The Walk

Hey — I made a small thing you can walk through. It's free, it runs in your browser, and it's about five minutes long.

It's fourteen landscape paintings, all old enough to be out of copyright, stitched edge to edge into one continuous world. You start on a hill in 1865 and you keep going right: Winslow Homer's boys snapping the whip, Thomas Cole's Oxbow, Lake George, the Rockies, the Andes, Salisbury Cathedral, a Dutch wood from 1670, van Gogh's wheat field, Cézanne's mountain. Then the light goes gold and you sit down.

You're Friedrich's Wanderer — the fellow standing on the rock in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. He's been up there since 1818 and he's taking one day off. He left a straw dummy in his coat so nobody would notice.

Controls

• Arrow keys or WASD — walk. Up and down move you toward or away from the horizon, and you get smaller or bigger as you go.
• Click anywhere — walk there instead.
• Space — skip a line of talk.

That's all of them. No puzzles, no enemies, nothing that can kill you and nothing to collect. People say things as you pass and then you keep walking. It's a wide game, so the fullscreen button in the corner of the frame is worth a click.

Every painting gets credited on screen as you walk into it, and all fourteen are listed again at the end. They're CC0 from The Met's open access collection — which means they belong to everyone, you included. That's sort of the whole point.

If you make it to the end, I'd like to hear about it.