Firsts

Firsts is a small, quiet game about the emotional texture of beginning. It tells its story not through dialogue or text, but through movement, shape, and gesture - each interaction a small act of discovery. I wanted to explore how minimal input - moving, clicking, holding - can carry emotional weight when placed in the right context. 

The game draws on a shared experience: leaving home for the first time, facing a world that doesn’t quite know you, and then returning changed. The narrative unfolds in three abstract vignettes, each using a different mode of interaction to evoke a first step - departure, defiance, and return. But the choices are subtle. You may not know you’ve made a decision, only that something feels different. That feeling of “I think I just did something”- that was what I wanted to preserve. 

With no words and limited visual detail, the challenge became: how do you communicate story, identity, and transformation using only shape and motion? The result is something like a playable haiku: short, sparse, and open to interpretation. Every interaction is deliberately underexplained, inviting the player to bring their own meaning and project their own story. 

Firsts was made in under twenty hours as an experiment in poetic form. It is about what happens when we move forward, when we hesitate, and when we offer something of ourselves to the people we return to - hoping they’ll recognise us, even if we’re not quite the same shape anymore.