Creaks

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Radim Jurda’s greatest fear is being misinterpreted. His response to our question is perhaps not so unexpected: this is the artist and designer’s first ever interview, after all, and he’s keen to get his point across clearly. Indeed, Creaks is an oddity that requires explanation, a puzzle-platformer in which things are frequently not as they may appear. It’s a horror game – although it’s more unsettling than scary – in which you must tiptoe through a ramshackle house in search of an exit. Its inhabitants are frequent obstacles to this. They mess with your head, too. Did that hatstand just move, or did we imagine it?

Creaks was born from the shadows in the edges of the eyes, the anxiety at not knowing what is real and what’s simply a trick of the light. It first took shape as a concept around five years ago, as Jurda’s diploma project at his university. “It was all about this aspect of what you see, but also how generally there is some part of the story that you don’t know, and how you fill it with your own imagination,” Jurda says. “And how actually that will become reality for you, and can become completely different to the real thing.” A tricky email exchange, in which Jurda’s own assumptions led to the appearance of a problem that didn’t really exist, had inspired this train of thought. “I had misinterpreted some stuff, and behaved completely differently. So this was a theme that was interesting to me at the time. I was doing these visualisations of feelings versus reality, and how something simple can be difficult for somebody and their psychology. Some simple stuff, it can be a maze.”

Maze is right.