Embark on an art-filled quest in The Forever Labyrinth

We’re always looking for new ways to tell stories that connect people to the culture of our shared world, and we’ve found that games can be an incredible vehicle for truly immersive storytelling. This is why we started a gaming residency program challenging developers to build games that connect players with art like never before. Last year we launched some of these playful experiences and today we are very excited to share another.

For this project we challenged the expert storytellers at inkle — the independent studio behind games such as Overboard!, Heaven’s Vault and A Highland Song — to take people on a unique journey of artistic discovery and exploration — and they came up with The Forever Labyrinth.

“When we began, we were pretty overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the corpus,” recalls Jon Ingold, inkle's narrative director. “The Forever Labyrinth is a game played by making connections between artifacts, and it's a story about making connections between people and art. By digging deeper into the incredible archive available it gave us the scope to make the game bigger and broader, adding more art that connected in new and different ways. And in turn that meant we could add more stories and secrets to explore.”

Art has a unique power to transport us — to different times, places and realms of imagination. In the Forever Labyrinth this power becomes ever more literal as artworks become portals in an ever-changing maze filled with humanity’s artistic legacy. On your mission to rescue the lost Professor Sheldrake you’ll find clues, decipher cryptic messages and meet mysterious characters, whilst outwitting a lurking monster, and racing against time to prevent an impending collapse in the Forever Labyrinth.

This blend of inkle’s expertise in storytelling with the diverse and extensive collections from Google Arts & Culture partners resulted in an immersive experience that invites players to explore and learn about art up-close within an interactive world.

The Forever Labyrinth is available now on the Google Arts & Culture website. You can download the Arts & Culture app on Android or iOS to keep the Labyrinth in your pocket. Logging in to your Google account will let you save your progress and continue the adventure across devices.

We hope you’ll enjoy discovering new artworks and unexpected cross cultural connections. Good luck adventurers!