By Zack Hamilton and Gui Santos
Link to game: https://radioteque.itch.io/saudade
It’s surprising how often first-person exploration games, often described dismissively as “walking simulators” by close minded players, are also memory simulators. There are those that allude to or recount events that have already transpired – pioneers of the genre like Gone Home and Dear Esther fall into this category – and then there are others which attempt to approximate the hazy dream-world of recollection, to manifest the obscure multisensory experience of remembering before your eyes and beneath your fingertips. Saudade, a student project created by Zack Hamilton with help from Gui Santos, is of the latter mould, described by Hamilton as “a short simulation of homesickness”.
Saudade explores the ways memory warps and rearranges lived experiences in our minds, condensing places, thoughts and feelings into a continuous and amorphous stream of senses and emotions that possesses its own logic and symbolism.
A beach, an apartment, a museum; Saudade’s narrator wants to recall time spent with their mother but it’s places and scenery that they remember most vividly rather than details of the woman herself. The player visits these locations one after another, each following on intuitively from the last in the way that the stage sets of memories do, despite their nonsensical spatial relation to one another.
Perhaps it’s something about the gelatinous movement speed in Saudade and similar exploration games that so thoroughly captures the frozen snowglobe feeling that memories posses. In their slowness, they approximate the way in which memories seem to stretch beyond their natural duration, unfolding in slow motion like a flashback in a Hollywood film. Indeed, Saudade also expresses an interest in how media and technology inform our perception of what memories look and feel like. If sun bleached instagram filters are example of technology being deployed to imbue our memories with a feeling of authenticity then Saudade’s ASCII visual style, whereby every surface and object is built different coloured letters and numbers, seems to emphasise the artificiality inherent in all technologically assisted depictions of past experiences.
Towards the end of the game, I see a silhouette hanging above the horizon, arms outstretched like a crucifix or perhaps an angel. “I’m climbing the ramp up to the museum….” says the narrator, “and if I look hard enough I can I still see you over the horizon”. Without a doubt the iconic shape the narrator sees is that of Christ the Redeemer, the statue that surveys Rio de Janeiro from atop Corcovado mountain. The museum too, an enormous white disc seemingly suspended in air like flying saucer or a Bond villain’s secret lair, is clearly Oscar Niemeyer’s Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, located about 10km east of the Redeemer on the other side Guanabara Bay. At this point, it seems likely to me the “mother” addressed by the narrator isn’t a person at all but Rio de Janeiro itself. Or more likely, it’s more ambiguous than that.
“Saudade” is a Portuguese word widely claimed to be untranslatable into English, but which can be roughly understood as referring to feelings of longing and melancholy not unlike what English speakers know as nostalgia. Another distinctive feature of saudade however is an underlying instinct that the thing which is pined for can never be recovered – that it’s lost or missing forever. Considering its sombre score and gloomy colour palette, there’s a brooding unease to Saudade that goes beyond the fleeting pangs of sentimentality I recognise as homesickness. While I don’t doubt that the narrator literally misses Rio de Janeiro, the city, I also wonder whether it might represent some other important part of their life; cities, after all, are composed not only of glass, metal and concrete but communities and families, thoughts and memories. Staring into the black spaces between the alphanumeric characters that comprise this quiet and lonely world, I wonder whether something, or someone, has been irrevocably lost.
Related works: Home is Where One Starts (Wehle, 2014); Dear Esther (Chinese Room, 2012); Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013)
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