Yes, absolutely. And it’s certainly possible to design a game that doesn’t need compass directions, but I think that’s a very specific kind of design. You need to build it in a way that it doesn’t matter how you get from one place to another, it doesn’t matter how the space is connected or what path you take, it only matters where you are. And certainly some games don’t want to fit in those design restrictions.
I think in a lot of cases you probably want compass/compassless to be options within the same game, if at all possible.
Yes, but as you also say, navigating more spatially helps a lot with re-routing. Especially if there’s branching or looping. And building a spatial layout when all you have is the chains and branches of connections is a hard computational problem. So I think if you leave out the directions you’re making it much worse for people who navigate spatially.
I’ve always been curious, if you think in terms of chains of locations, how do you build a feel for a bigger space (if you do)? Like, how did you navigate Eat Me, where the map sometimes changes as you play? How do you deal with, “oh no, this room (or connection) is destroyed and my route is blocked, now how do I get where I want to go?”
Or something like Sugarlawn, which has a lot of separate areas that are gated and looped together and there are often different ways to get to a particular place? I made an interactive graph of Sugarlawn’s locations and where the objects come from and go to, and even with color-coding for the regions, for me it’s nearly incomprehensible without dragging it into a shape that somewhat reflects the “physical” layout.
And on the “people’s heads are wired differently” subject, here’s a post from Chandler Groover in one of the most interesting old threads about compassless games. Lots of good points in that thread.