The slow submergence into adulthood inherently hits us all differently. In me and my peers I primarily witness it as a blindfolded overcommitment to work, play, procrastination or a combination of the three, somehow forgetting the humanist notion so peddled by our modern world that we are both our own engines and our own fuel.

Feeling Around in the Darkness

Silence and Darkness came into being as a pushback against the dangerous inertia instilled in us through the perceived country-wide stasis of COVID. In attempt to cut through the monotony I had told myself to commit to some game jams as to push for some creative engagement. Silence and Darkness was my submission for the Brackeys game Jam 2021.1. I was prompted to join the jam by a fellow jammer I was chatting to after my submission to the Blackthornprod Game Jam #3 the previous month. The jam’s theme “Stronger Together” leapt out from the screen at me in electric, contrasty cyan and magenta stimulating many thoughts but few which stuck—leading to the first of the event’s seven days to flutter past.

Emerging out of the end of a long, dark and unusually dormant winter filled, pulling in tow an ever-present awareness of the impending void hanging just out of or grasp waiting for our bodies to expire, I eventually attached myself to the idea of the perceptive senses being stronger together. This idea, it must be noted, was brought about by Tina (TunaFish Art) who always provides an incredible amount of critical support that propels me onto better things.

Weaving this theme into the gameplay and narrative, while mirroring the internalised weight of the UK’s pandemic winter, a story emerged. A barely sensing being would traverse the darkness, obtaining ways of orienting themselves in strange environments, later coming out into the world to realise that reality is not as limited as it had once seemed. Meanwhile a wholesome disregard of individual existential dread results in a foregrounding of togetherness as a method finding worldly meaning.

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