Play story
Restless's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Best "La Petite Mort" | #4 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
| Overall | #5 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
| Best "Le Grand Guignol" | #6 | 3.583 | 3.583 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Which category does your game belong in?
Le Grand Guignol
for games made in 4 hours or more
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
This was really impressive! Mental health treatment for ghosts is such a creative idea i'm surprised it's not a genre yet.
Despite the charming and witty dialogue segments the story stayed pretty serious so you still felt for the characters. I got the we're a happy family ending and it was very satisfying.
The UI felt pretty intuitive, it's definitely a nice change of pace. Just wished it wasn't as susceptible to trial and error.
Overall an outstanding experience.
This was a lot of fun, although it took me a little bit to get used to the UI.
Note for Windows users: a few Windows folks with particular OS installs have let us know the game doesn’t properly start up for them. zarf has worked out the issue, which he describes thus:
“On Windows, you need to install the 2017 VS C++ redistributable, from this page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads
Sorry about that. In the future we’ll make sure that’s bundled.
(If you play a lot of Steam games, you almost certainly have this installed already. But obviously that isn’t everybody.)”
That download doesn't solve the issue for me on Windows 10.
My first playthrough had a lovely ending, the second horribly sad, but I found both enjoyable and for the most part the grammar held together. I think I may have found one small bug when I asked Sylvie to call me Marie and she called me Barbara from that point onwards, but perhaps she just wasn't listening!
For some reason it keeps freezing once the baby is introduced, which sucks because otherwise it's really good.
Superb writing and narration, original script (this could work on a theater play, I guess). As I'm not a re-player, I will eventually never find the good ending. But this doesn't mean the rest of the world won't like it (evidence on the countrary, I might say). Another step into character-driven IF and a new technical solution.
A single nitpick for eventual further releases: It doesn't look like having more than one feeling switched on does something (like being sad AND angry), so maybe the choices should be mutually exclusive.
I don't know what to make of this. I don't know how my character works or how the only(?) other character works. I don't know what my goals are or how to approach them. I don't know if these deficiencies are in the game or in me.
On a purely technical level: text should appear faster and not jiggle.
(edit: Second try. Any attempt to take a proactive action in the gameworld gets me a not-really-grammatical blurt of third-person narration and kicks me back to the title screen. Except one time my interlocutor announced she "had sage" and gameovered me apropos of nothing.)
(edit: Actually, a lot of the game has a translated-from-another-language feel to it. And it's hard to imagine Emily Short writing such hyper-stilted dialogue. (The ghost is off-kilter intentionally, I guess. But the human's diction is nearly as odd. And the intermittent blurts of narration are worse!)
I absolutely do not know what to make of it.)
(edit: And a few hours later the author talks about the game on her blog. Which gives a bit of context for the experience, if not the oddness of playing it.)