A closer look
If you go back and play Spider-Man games from the early 2000s, you'll notice something hilarious: his webs shoot straight up into the empty sky, magically pulling him forward regardless of his surroundings. Insomniac Games refused to accept this physics-defying nonsense. For their iteration of the webslinger, they engineered a wildly complex ray-casting system that fires invisible lines from the character in real-time to detect the nearest building facade. If there isn't a building to your left, you cannot swing from your left hand. This dedication to diegetic physics not only grounds the traversal in reality but completely changes how players navigate the city, forcing them to treat the concrete canyons of Manhattan as a giant, interactive jungle gym.
