Posted as a Review The Old Event #1: January 2025

Love the pixel art backgrounds. Music, eh. The music might be genre appropriate, I don't know, but it's very off mood and distracting.

Once again, story wise I am confused with this one, and maybe that is the point. There seems to be no thematic elements threading through the story as a whole, although there is a typical structure to the plot at least.

The details and plot reveals don't seem to coelesce into anything but some shock value, but even that is fairly disappointing.

To be blunt, it's not great. The plot is quite rushed and has holes you could fit a tractor through, the music and sprites are all basic RTP except for one janky low-effort edit (albeit one that got a chuckle out of me when I first saw it), and it has no choices or gameplay to speak of.

However, it also took me about 5 minutes to read from start to finish. It's over quickly enough that the average reader might not even care about all the criticisms I just levelled, and it's both free and playable in browser. I wouldn't call it good, but thanks to the incredibly short runtime it's not offensively bad either. It does what it set out to do, and it doesn't waste your time doing it. It also uses its RTP and/or web-searched graphics about as well as could be asked of it - the background images probably took some amount of searching to find and look alright (although they're very pixelated - presumably by a deliberate filter choice), and the character sprites are at least of a consistent style (since they're probably all from the same set) and fit what personality their assigned characters are given.

Also, it was made live on-stream in about 6 hours, so I think it's reasonably impressive in that light. Honestly, based on some other comments I've read, the process of creating the game seems to have been more enjoyable to both the creator and the chat than the final product, but unfortunately I haven't been able to locate a VOD of the livestream in question.

Overall, there are definitely worse ways to spend a few minutes of your life, and it's enjoyable enough for what it is.

So Beregon asked us to look at old horror games from previous Game Jams and this one had my attention first because I was particularly involved at the beginning of it [sadly I was eepy] but now with a different time zone, I get to see this game at a different light. First, let me copy-paste what I wrote in the general overall rating: 

"I feel like this game was briskly paced, like someone immediately trying to find the closest restroom [or checkpoints to each horror plot point] after we established the relationships of the characters. I think messing around with character movement in a visual novel could help mitigate this issue. I know this was made via Twitch with the help of chat but chat could have given you more advice to change up the assets [particularly the music] to set the mood better. All in all, this is a cute use of the RTP and I hope to learn more from this."

Second, when editing RTP, being lazy with it ruins the horror aspects of your game. I saw it with the horse and it made me stop the game my first playthrough. Ironic since it was so short. I struggle with pacing issues but this felt like a bullet speeding by in comparison to some of my other rush-jobs. Here's hoping this will encourage a remake taking all of this advice in the future!

It was fun participating in the creation of this visual novel!

I may be a bit biased, but I still tried to rate it fairly (IMO).

This game cured my depression

Story:

Interesting concept, I hadn't seen RPGMaker be used to make kinetic or visual novels before! The story at the start reminded me of Until Dawn but a little more serious, which I didn't mind. I think the horror elements could have been better explored- the first twist itself isn't too bad, and even includes a fair amount of foreshadowing that worked pretty well. However the later reveal and ending left a lot of questions unanswered. The story hints at the main character's guilt and kind of ends with a slight reveal about why he feels this way, but I don't think it's explored enough to for the player to fully empathize with him- instead the ending just feels kind of confusing, and maybe rushed?

However for a game written in six hours it does do a pretty decent job of conveying the story. I especially liked the first half, there were probably too many characters but I liked how the game tried to explore their mixed feelings about why they had come up to go camping, it felt more realistic.

Gameplay:

I'm sorry but though the kinetic novel format is interesting, there aren't really any gameplay elements in here. If there were even just some choices, closer to a visual novel, then I would be able to rate this element higher.

Presentation:

That's enough about the story I guess. The music was cute, but in some parts (especially before the first twist) I think it didn't fit some of the more serious scenes. The actual kinetic novel did fit the look of one surprisingly well also, so good job on that.

Creativity:

Also despite some of the more cliche scenes the story itself was pretty unique, even if it didn't always make sense. Some of the ideas felt a bit wild to me, but they were definitively things I hadn't seen explored before.

Horror:

I think a lot of elements did have some good foreshadowing, but I think the transition from cutesy outing to horror in the woods was a bit too quick and felt a little rushed, I think some more time on this section could have helped to make the whole game a bit more spooky and perhaps to make the ending more effective.

Theme:

For the theme, I personally wished there had been more focus on 'Depths of the Earth'- maybe the characters talk about exploring a cave early on in their trip, or maybe the "bad thing" happened somewhere dark and it's something that Kirby sometimes thinks about early on- even just including a spooky flashback at the beginning before his friend startles him out of his thoughts, I think that would have worked well in the story and also made the theme and horror blend in better.

-Final thoughts-

There's definitely some areas this project could have worked on to get higher ratings within this jam. But other than that, great work! Especially on a game made in only 6 hours, that's wild!

When I discovered this product, I was a bit confused about its nature. Indeed, I didn't know if it was a game or a book, as I was only reading without the possibility to interact. This led me to think that it would be more appropriate to add choices or interactive elements to make the experience more like a game. Indeed, I think that this would allow to engage the users more and bring an additional playful aspect.

In addition, it might be interesting to offer a downloadable version of this product, so that users can easily access it from any device. This feature would be especially appreciated by users who want to be able to access it offline or in areas with a limited internet connection.

All in all, I think these two elements could add a lot to this product and improve the user experience considerably.

This game has a horse head accountant, therefor it's perfect. 5 stars!