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The player character, Ivy, breaks other characters from their unhealthy relationship cycle to learn how to break herself out of an emotionally abusive cycle with her mother.
Extra Credit Challenges
Extra Public Domain
Extra Time
Extra Credits
Sensory information
N/A
Content warnings
Yes, emotional abuse is a strong theme in the game. There is also a major character who is strongly implied to literally eat people.
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Comments
I was floored by the audio and visuals here! Everything on display really sells the grim fantasy of the setting. It feels a bit Alice in Wonderland: vibrant imagery contrasted with fascinating but untrustworthy characters to create a sense of unease, of ambiguous danger. You can almost read each character's type straight from their designs. Alma is knightly, almost princely; Crocodile is witchy, elegant, and yet monstrous. And the painterly style really sets it apart from, say, an anime-style VN, making it more unique just at a glance. Also those auras? What are those about! I can only speculate.
(Possible spoilers:)
I enjoyed the theme of relationships. I found myself trying to strike a delicate balance between being sensitive to others' needs without surrendering my own. In the last scene, when compromise just didn't seem possible, I felt that. Ivy's acceptance of her nature in my ending, and letting go of what she wanted... that was bittersweet. That felt real.
All in all, thanks to this team for the oustanding submission. This was among my favorite experiences from this jam.
Really well done! The art, music and writing are all superb. Going with a VN for the cycles theme was an inspired choice as repetition and knowledge are the key to getting that good end. Especially love the cycles theme as displayed in Alma's backstory. Great stuff!
Thank you! I'm really glad you enjoyed our game and that the connection to the theme came across so clearly. And I'm still kinda in awe of the amount of content our musician produced in such a short period (he even made a couple other tracks for other games and finished with our game a day or two early!!!!!)
I feel like there's an early disconnect between the art and the narrative. The room with the "black mold and fungi" looks more like its covered in blood, and the "big woman" immediately made me wonder how the narrator knows the gender of the figure being shown. The latter example is also shortly made more confusing by the next character being referred to with "their" showing that the narrator either isn't one to immediately guess or psychic when it comes to gender.
That's fair! Admittedly my hands were a little tied with the backgrounds since I had to find CC free use stock photos and edit them. You would not believe how few photos there are for dirty laundry rooms xD. Due to the nature of jams and sacrifices we have to make, I did not spend a lot of time on the backgrounds and it shows in some cases. Thank you for pointing it out- I'll keep a closer eye on that kind of thing in the future.
I did not want to focus on gender exploration for this project but I still wanted to reflect some gender diversity in my characters, with a heavier focus on female characters. Big woman/Alma is a woman, and the second character is nonbinary. That said, it probably would have been more appropriate for Ivy to have asked about pronouns very briefly instead of being psychic about genders, and that would help us all develop good habits :) Although in the case of Whisp, who doesn't talk until the end of your encounter with them, they wouldn't have shared that kind of information anyway!
Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!
If I ever hear anyone saying video games are not art, I'm gonna send them here to play this game and prove them wrong. Very nicely done.
Video with S P O I L E R S!
Haha, thanks! I'm glad it impressed you and I appreciate the compliments! And thank you so much for the video!
Haha, you found it too, huh?