The Spirit of the Ants

ABOUT THE GAME

• A game about ants, melancholia, and childhood fever dreams.

• A short walking experience where you head toward the train station, encountering mystical, benign ants along winding paths.

• A game essay exploring hauntology, labyrinths, W.G. Sebald, and the nature of melancholia as a pursuit of uncanny wisdom.

ON MELANCHOLIA AND LABYTHINTH

    Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I stands as one of the most striking representations of the intellectual condition of sadness. The central figure is surrounded by disordered, overly tangible tools — a ladder, an hourglass, geometrical shapes. Under the gaze of the winged figure, these objects lose their natural purpose, becoming mere symbols of reflection and enigmatic wisdom. Melancholia, in this sense, is a pathology of the creative mind.

    I was struck by a moment in W.G. Sebald’s Vertigo, where the narrator believes he sees Dante passing by and decides to follow him. After several fruitless turns, the long-dead poet vanishes, and the narrator is overtaken by a growing sense of vertigo. Sebald’s narrator, like those in his other works, seems to live in a constant state of melancholy, where knowledge feels fractured and enters the mind as strange, almost meaningless puzzles. One evening, troubled by insomnia, he is shocked by the sight of his shoes — tattered, ownerless, and falling apart.

    The Spirit of the Ants is a game that explores this kind of melancholy through the slow unfolding of a labyrinth. Labyrinths are a natural choice for designing vertigo, disorienting the player with each turn and making every action feel potentially futile, as one step may lead you astray. It's worth noting that certain characteristics of a labyrinth overlap with melancholia. A symbol of detours and dead ends might as well represent a dizzying sadness.

WANT TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS KIND OF STUFF?

    Along with the game files, you can find a complementary essay I wrote a year ago on the novel The Rings of Saturn, which explores similar concepts and philosophies presented in this game. In a nutshell, the essay discusses how the novel builds a pattern of attending to unreal, hyperreal, and surreal moments in life that act as distractions, and how those moments are found in dreams, mirrors, mist, duplicates, art and literature (and of course video games).

MUSIC

Song From The Hill – Ravi shankar

Noche en la estación de trenes II – Alberto Iglesias

SFX

https://freesound.org/people/Damiana79/sounds/765252/

https://freesound.org/people/Piggimon/sounds/366372/

https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/636964/

https://freesound.org/people/marb7e/sounds/620340/

https://freesound.org/people/jorickhoofd/sounds/176651/

https://freesound.org/people/jimblodget/sounds/66639/

https://freesound.org/people/nlux/sounds/620302/

PARTIAL ART ASSETS FROM

Photos taken by W.G. Sebald in Vertigo