clickbliss

Single Press: Without Direction

by Marie (@rlpte)

• Direction
  
• by  Kristian Kronstrand
  
• PC (itch.io)
  

Single Press is a series of short writings on small games.

What makes one person to matter to another? And how would you express that? What words would you use? What picture would you paint? Direction tries to paint it’s own picture through a series of increasingly surreal, loosely connected vignettes, arching towards a broader question: how can we represent the things that defy words?

Direction appears an abstraction of the abstract. It’s a glass shattering into pieces that don’t fit, but you know the sound well. Playing it feels like something about nothing, a dream. It’s all there, you can see it, it makes sense there, but you can’t read the text. You wake up and all these things you thought you knew make no sense.

The visuals and environments work to sell the dreaminess. The entire game is painted in stark black and white and is cell shaded magnificently, echoing Suda 51’s Killer 7. The black and white scheme, along with the text, also brings the comic book inspired MadWorld to mind. The Killer 7 imagery goes further, as the camera uses uneasy angles, making moving around difficult, evoking a nauseous feeling. There are no menus in the game, and even simply quitting it requires holding the escape key as it fades to black.

The game aims to embody the feelings that come after a breakup. The confusion, the aimlessness, the pain of trying to reconcile with a losing such an intimate part of one’s life. At times the imagery conveys the kind of blank depression of losing something integral, at others the drowning sensation of scrambling to maintain that love, and at points, the feeling of being a slave to these emotions, the ways they cripple us. At other times there can feel like there’s nothing here.

The description of the game reads a quote from Haruki Murakami’s 1Q48, “If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.“ This echoes the feeling the game gave me. It feels like it’s grasping at some hidden truth beyond its scale. There’s text that hints at the indescribable nature of what makes both a person and what makes love, but maybe it’s not actually grasping for anything like that. I’ve struggled with how much meaning I wanted from Direction, ranging from grand ideas about personhood to wondering if there was really anything to it at all. Maybe this confusion of the player was a part  of Direction after all.