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Birds Nest's itch.io pageTheme inspiration
Passage: the act or process of moving through, under, over, or past something on the way from one place to another. I focused on the "moving past something" aspect of that. This weekend also happened to be my great grandfather's funeral which brought up a lot of feelings for me, and I felt that using this as an opportunity for an emotional and creative outlet would be productive in a lot of ways. It definitely was. I'm very tired now, though.
Sensory info
N/A
Content info
There are some allusions to illegal activities and mild cursing, but I believe that's the extent.
Extra Credit Challenges
Extra CGA
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Comments
Hey SmokeAndAsh, thanks for the opportunity to experience a piece of your own story through this game. The writing was easily some of the best I've seen in any recent game jam, and I was quickly able to identify with the main characters. The amount of personality you were able to build into each NPC is really impressive.
On top of that, the unique art style and cutscene animations added a lot of flavor. I also like how the largely grayscale color scheme helps reflect the solemn mood and "lack of feeling" mentioned by the main character.
If you have a chance to add on to this game later, one thing that I'd love to see are portraits added to the dialogue box in order to see the face of the person who's talking. This would be especially helpful in cutscenes with 3+ people.
Finally, I also wanted to mention how cool it is that dialogue choices allow you to change the story a bit, which helps each person's playthrough feel more personal. The amount of dialogue you were able to write in such a short jam is impressive on its own, but the fact that you also wrote alternate lines and branching dialogue trees is amazing.
Thanks again for sharing this experience, and please keep us posted if you release a new version at some point. I'll definitely be excited to see more about this project, or whatever you're planning to release next!
Thank you for the game and for sharing your personal experience!
Despite the subject of the story, I can't say that I've felt sad when playing it. Rather, the game made me feel somewhat indifferent at the beginning, but slowly grow me more and more interested in details of the complex family relations and why everything is happening the way it is. I especially liked segments when I was allowed to just talk to different people and explore their reactions. I wish this type of storytelling was more of the focus of the game, but I understand that character dialogs and narration were needed to emotionally ground player in the story.
With that said, I felt a bit of a dissonance between exploration segments and dialog segments. Talking to everybody on the funeral felt out of the character for me, as it was established during the dialog sequences.
This game is a clearly a rather personal experience to you and as a short, interactive story does very well. The abstract artwork itself doing well to help build on my imagination as the characters interacted. As a game, however, I'm not sure if there is much for me to say unfortunately, yet in the end, I did enjoy my experience with it. Keep on the good work.
Thank you very much for your insight and critique. I definitely understand not having much to work with in terms of critique on traditional game mechanics, but I really appreciate that you enjoyed the experience and art. It means a lot to me to see that expressing myself - or anyone expressing themselves through games, even with minimal mechanic qualities, can be a worthwhile experience.
Thank you for taking the time to check it out and comment!
A really deep take on the topic. I guess everyone has their own way of dealing with loss and I am happy that this has helped you. It obviously is more of an experience than a game, but I feel that's okay.
I really appreciate that! Yeah, I feel that this probably falls more into the "Walking Simulator" category of games. I completely understand that not everyone finds personal value in these sorts of projects, and I think that's fair. I was definitely more focused on the visuals and narrative than on any kind of "mechanic" other than walking and dialogue.
Thank you very much for checking it out!