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Withering Dreams's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #1 | 4.333 | 4.333 |
| Story | #1 | 3.667 | 3.667 |
| Gameplay | #2 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Creativity | #2 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall | #2 | 3.556 | 3.556 |
| Horror | #3 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Theme | #3 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How did you choose to implement the Theme: Urban Horror in your game?
The game features our MC who recently moves to an apartment in the city and is tormented by a creature feeding on their past trauma. We used the familiar feeling of an apartment to create the dread of feeling trapped and the uncanny as the familiar becomes unfamiliar.
Did you implement any of the optional Bonus Challenges, and if so, which ones?
We included a few important scenes that take place in parks and a short stealth puzzle where the MC has to make it to a door without making noise.
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Comments
Posted as a Review The Old Event #1: January 2025
Cool intro, nice little finding stuff in boxes in the apartment, but no music or ambience or anything is very felt. Convo after painting is hard to follow with how it is written. Weird. What's up with all the water in the kitchen, etc now. Ok, now we have ambience; redeemed. Somewhat. Why was the orange a banana in the code? What's up with the Now Loading screen?
This seems maybe a bit inspired by Oculus and also by Heriditary with the calls checking on art/work. Love the hallway transition.
Wow that whole planting seed at the tree and after was great with the call after. And now the freaky apartment jeez. Love the vignette now too.
After the road and wreck reveal it went very downhill though. Not obvious at all what to do and once I watched a playthrough to see what to do didn't even feel like finishing. Whoops.
Doing this review long after the jam ended, so I'm not going to mess around with number values, but some of the rating categories are still useful for formatting.
Playtime - probably between 30-40 minutes on average, but it depends on how often you get stuck on the puzzles.
Presentation - Excellent in basically every respect. A fair amount of custom art/sprites/etc and what wasn't custom was used well. Great visual storytelling through the map designs, lots of small details and stuff moving around over the course of the game as time passes - the water bottles especially were a nice touch. The creature design was interesting as well. The ringtone/alarm did last a bit too long each time, although I liked what the game does with it later.
Story/Horror - I found it interesting enough, if a bit predictable. It's told very well though, both in text and visually (as I already mentioned). It wasn't particularly scary, although I could see somebody getting jumpscared in the stealth sequence due to how abrupt it starts and how easy it is to fail accidentally. Decent slow-burn psychological horror though over the course of the game though, and it was overall effective at portraying its themes of grief and slow self-destruction. I also felt it fit the jam's Urban Horror theme well, although that's probably just because I liked the map design so much.
Gameplay - Pretty standard "fetch items and solve puzzles" stuff, but I personally like that style of RPG Maker Horror game so it worked well for me. None of the puzzles were too difficult and I found all of them reasonably engaging. I actually think the "chase" sections were quite well done, since they focused more on avoiding the creature using the map clutter rather than just running away while dodging obstacles like a typical chase. The stealth section felt sudden and a little out of place, and wasn't particularly difficult once I figured out what was going on, but it wasn't bad. There were a lot of passability errors in the maps in the middle of the game, but thankfully none that really impacted the gameplay in places like the final "chase".
Overall - Definitely a game I would recommend, especially if you like the somewhat traditional style of "RPG Maker Horror game" (Ao Oni, Ib, Crooked Man, etcetera). I would have rated it highly during the actual ratings period, and I'm glad Beregon picked it for the Monthly Reviews because it would be a shame for all the new people who've come to these jams since to miss out on this.