Welcome, voyager, to Antescher. Please watch your step, and read this important travel guide. “To explore the eerie ruins,” it reads, “without at least a motion scanner to warn of the sudden appearance of the gigantic ants, is still considered suicidal.” You may wish to check out the city’s Great Pyramid and the obscure Monument before you are consumed by huge mutant insects. Enjoy your stay Videogames have long been thought of as, among other things, a form of virtual tourism to imaginary places, but what if we treated those places as real objects of study? That is the conceit of Konstantinos Dimopoulos’ new book Virtual Cities, a guide for the prospective traveller to 45 game conurbations. It starts with Antescher, from Sandy White’s 1983 classic Ant Attack, taking in Dun Darach, Woodtick (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge), Clock Town (Majora’s Mask), Whiterun (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim), Novigrad (The Witcher 3), City 17 (Half-Life 2), and more along the way. These are not traditional walkthroughs but evocative essays on the feel of a place. So Dimopoulos writes of Yharnam from Bloodborne: “The blooddrenched city of metal and stone, now all but ruined, finally resembles the wild architectural fever-dream it always aspired to become.”