A Diagonal Frogger That Fills Us With Rage
As it turns out, Frogger was a lie. In that game, the frog could move forwards, backwards, left and right. Direction Quad says nah, frogs can only move diagonally. They’re the bishops of the pond world.
Now, imagine a Frogger level built with those rules. You have to move diagonally, even when you just want to progress forwards. That means zig-zagging constantly, hoping that you can keep a tight enough line that you don’t fall off a log or headbutt an eight-wheeler.
Even writing it now, I’m genuinely not sure I want to play that game. It sounds finicky and awkward, like it might be a froggy ball-ache. Moving diagonally while the world moves in cardinal directions sounds like a recipe for infuriation, or – at the very least – a rub-your-belly-while-patting-your-head situation.
Taking A Classic In A New Direction
Full kudos to No Checkpoint and Eastasiasoft for the frog-leap into the unknown. Direction Quad doesn’t feel like any other game out there. Frogger is the closest cousin and an undoubted inspiration, but there’s just too much that makes this different. The Direction Quad frog is always moving, for example, and you can never stay still. Plus the levels are short and discrete rather than endless-runners.
Each level slaps you in the corner of a map. That corner is frequently the most distant from the exit. Regardless, your job is to the finish line. You can pick up the flies and coins on the way if you want, but they’re optional.
A starter pistol sounds and you’re off. The frog wastes no time to head in a diagonal direction, and you can jostle him to an alternative diagonal with the analogue stick. These are your only tools for getting to the exit: there’s no hop or lick-tongue here. All you can do is move from one diagonal direction to another.
Even those limited moves are limited further. Because you can’t move in just any diagonal direction. This is a little complicated to describe, so hear us out: you are moving ‘generally’ in a cardinal direction. Perhaps you are headed up the game screen. That means you can switch from up-and-to-the-left to up-and-to-the-right. Those are the two directions you have to hand.
How do you switch to move more rightwards? You need to bounce on springboards that are pointing to the right. Now you can switch from up-and-to-the-right to down-and-to-the-right. Close your eyes and visualise it. Got it? Hmm, perhaps not.
Tripping Over Our Flippers
The thing is, and issue #1 with the whole concept, is that diagonal directions are shared between ‘heading up’ and ‘heading right’. There’s always an overlap. It can mean that it’s very difficult to tell which direction you are ultimately heading in. Am I starting the level heading downwards? There’s a 50/50 chance that you are.
You may not have got all that, but the takeaway is relatively simple: Direction Quad is extremely unfriendly when you first start, and reasonably unfriendly from that moment on. Often, you have to die once to understand which direction you’re facing. Even having played for hours, we’re still getting turned around, being unsure of where we’re heading. We would often hit a confluence of springboards (a corner, perhaps) and be completely unaware of which direction we’re heading. So we die. And die again.
It can take a good fifteen minutes to calibrate to what Direction Quad wants. And then you have to master the levels. These are inventive and brilliant, we have to say: there are levels that demand fine control through tight chicanes; levels that require timing, ensuring that you slip through a sequence of blades; and there are bosses that require consistent and long-term control.
They are so dense with stuff that you are always on your flippers, reacting and hoping to emerge out the other side. But it’s here that issue #2 turns the corner and runs us over.
A Little Zig, A Little Zag
We have to admit that we never found the whole ‘zigzag to move forward’ enjoyable. Not once. A tight corridor means quickfire presses of left and right, in the hope that you don’t nick a pixel on the wall. But this simple action has so many built-in problems.
You never feel in control. You’re constantly hoping that you’ve pressed buttons in the right rhythm to move onward without over-compensating in any direction. Direction Quad also didn’t seem to recognise every input. We’d often lunge in a direction we didn’t expect, or continue in a direction that we thought we’d ducked out of. And then there’s the collision detection. Direction Quad is extremely ungenerous, killing you if you even glance at a spike or laser wall. It’s always sharpening a knife, ready to shank you for a single mistake.
It got to the point where I would stare blankly at Direction Quad on my hard drive, knowing full well that I needed to play some more levels, but never once wanting to. I could admire what it was doing – this is something utterly new, finding a new direction (quite literally) for a retro classic. But I could never move past admiration into, you know, enjoying it.
An Innovative Concept, Tied Up
Direction Quad feels a little like Frogger, but with the frog’s shoelaces tied together (we know, frogs aren’t big shoe-wearers). To some, that might sound like an intriguing extra layer of difficulty. To us, it was rage-inducing. If you’re fond of a little masochism, give Direction Quad a go.
Important Links
Direction Quad Hops Onto Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch And PC, With Old-School Precision And Plenty Of Pain – https://www.thexboxhub.com/direction-quad-hops-onto-xbox-playstation-nintendo-switch-and-pc-with-old-school-precision-and-plenty-of-pain/
Buy Direction Quad from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/direction-quad/9n9j3wnhb2g3
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