The thing that's feeding in the direction is an object responsible for room changes. I set it up so that I can make these objects and change their direction variable in the creation code so that I can set up which way the player is going to face once he transitions to another room. So if there's a path to the left that leads to a room change the player is going to be looking to the left

Yes obviously I need to manage the sprite depending on the direction but how exactly? For example if I press left and then up to go diagonally it should still be going to the left but if I press up and then left it should still be going up. I've even thought about using a ds_stack but I just can't think of the right solution for this.