Thinking about space in the limit means wondering why we put up walls. Is it a game of hide-and-seek, or the fear of being found? Purely symbolically, there is no absolute safety other than the mother's womb. Then we are left to search for each other by wading through our own fence of teeth, moving through the wall of language. We build our houses and our neighbourhoods, our cities, wanting to make movement as easy as possible. By planning spaces, by creating logical connections we still, in our human multitude, are in any case - each of us - doomed to a maze. No one is able to build a perfect, cosy and comprehensible world with pre-determined passageways, but the phantasm of the Demiurge has not yet left us to the end.

In Stitch, the game is potentially divided into several worlds, in the prototype you can go into the first world - in the final version we're thinking of 7-8 worlds. Each of the worlds explores philosophical and mathematical aspects of space, time and cause-effect. The first level explores Life Together, or co-existence. By combining space and objects any map is in itself a walking around emptiness, an absence, and the game map is no exception. In our game, space, inhabited by poetic lines as architectural forms, at first acts as a pictorial backdrop but gradually becomes a central protagonist, a source of anxiety and hope. Labyrinth - the absence of entrance-exit. For the first world of exploration we have chosen the Labyrinth, and Winston Hugh Auden's poem, as a silent guide and clue for the player. Jean-Luc Nancy writes that All Being is only either co-existence or, quite simply, it is not. Objecting to the secondaryity of the 'other' implicitly assumed in the tradition of the notion of 'together' (the other is the one who goes along with me), Nancy insists on the primacy of together, 'togetherness', 'totality' being 'the first feature of being', 'an absolutely primordial structure'.

Experience An event, an experience, is the arrival of something new in the world, and this arrival is impossible without 'together'. We think of it together - in a place of Labyrinth, as a place of co-presence of the other, striking a balance between exploring the world and the puzzle. The Labyrinth, according to Roland Barthes, is the paradox of a closed space - because it is open. It symbolises the paradoxical effort through which the subject creates an obstacle to itself - the subject works for its conclusion by exerting a remarkable effort to find a way out. The labyrinth is similar to love, it is total autonomy, the strongest inner work in total uncertainty. Only for someone on the outside the exit is obvious and in the labyrinth the most distant is the closest and the most intimate is the unknown. We play on Lacan's proposed point of extimite, the point of extimacy for the subject - where the inside becomes the outside, using the poetic word as the experience of inventing personal meaning. In poetry, as in the visual arts, which include the art of making games, language plays a leading role in liberating and becoming the subjective truth about oneself, the world and the experience of Life Together, as Barthes understands it, for example. This unknowable realm is nevertheless subject to, indeed - must always - belong to the continuation and reinterpretation, the reconquista - the re-conquest of words. We imagine a game where the labyrinth becomes a clue and an answer.

(Further spoiler) Mechanics. In this system, in order to get out you have to stop "working for your own confinement" and start reading and, succumbing to the game itself rather than rebelling against it, find the leading thread in its absence.In the game this is the ability to guess, be able to read the poem and follow the meaning of the lines without falling for the open entries, loopholes and temptations of shortcuts, as this does not work here and you cannot pass the game in that case. The next part of the game (potentially, not the prototype) opens only if you've managed to get through the labyrinth by reading part of the poem. The collected words and lines add up to a story and the worlds expand, the puzzles expand as well.

By incorporating a labyrinth into the game, we would like to remind you of the great variety of labyrinths that already exist, those that have been completed and those that are yet to be completed. To give a piece of our attention to all that is present in the world as a matter of course - architecture, visual arts, poetry - and waiting for us to emerge from our personal mazes, to talk our way through them with each other, to find our own together and, of course, to remind us that they are waiting for us to learn how to create new ones.

Ksenia Kononenko