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Look Outside (Jam version)'s itch.io pageWhich Theme(s)/Horror Genre(s) did you use for your game?
Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, Eldritch
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Which Theme(s)/Horror Genre(s) did you use for your game?
Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, Eldritch
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Comments
For a jam game, this is absolutely amazing and I'd be surprised if it wasn't in the top five of the games submitted here. The biggest complaint for me is that the hunger system doesn't appear to work; eventually I stopped trying to eat because it didn't seem to do anything. I loved the concept of item durability and enemy positioning, and honestly this game's combat system reminded me both of Morrowind (whose combat was also dealt with dice rolls and also had weapon durability) and Mother 0 (enemy positioning). But I'm just not sure what the latter concept actually did; I would've expected enemies would do a lot more damage as they come closer, but that wasn't actually the case. Unfortunately, I haven't finished it yet; I got to the hour mark and decided that I'd seen enough to leave a review, and I almost don't want to finish because I know you plan on an even bigger full release.
Also, I'm with KV on the crafting part. I hope the release will include a recipe book or a journal to help the player keep track of not only the items they want to craft/cook, but what those items will do. Molotovs are pretty self-explanatory, but for the food in particular, it'd be interesting if certain foods buff you while others don't (or god forbid you fail to make something and get poisoned from it). All in all, I enjoyed this. I definitely want to see what the full version will have in it.
No notes. The bugs are going to be fixed, and I will more than likely play this (the full fixed version) on stream one day. Really REALLY good work.
3 things I liked about this entry:
3 things I did not like:
This is a truly ambitious game. A bit too much content for a month-long jam, and as a consequence there are quite a few bugs and spelling errors, but overall it's really fun and nails the horror atmosphere! Were it not for the bugs and the length I would honestly try to finish it.
Thanks for playing!
For the games' length - yeah, I have a habit of making jam games generally too ambitious, that's just part of what makes a jam exciting to me! Its a bad habit and often results in janky unpolished jam games, but every once in a while it really pays off.
There's no quick way to check specific status numbers, but you can check if you're hungry, tired etc by looking at yourself in the mirror. I didnt want to have too many specific numbers there, just wanted the players to have to generally "take care of themselves" at home, but not necessarily have to fine tune themselves to numbers, if they're not critical like life and stamina. I felt that would make the life stats too prominent and take away from exploring. The way I see it, the more of this info is shown, the more it implies that its important to constantly worry about, so keeping it abstract would help the player only worry about it if one of the stats is low. Of course, because of the hunger glitch, hunger IS something to constantly worry about right now, but obviously thats a glitch, not really something the design is meant to deal with! The hunger glitch really comes from not testing the game myself extensively enough in the last few days of the jam, I focused way more on adding exploration content, and of course tested that stuff by warping to it, not by playing the game at length - thats when stuff like that can arise. Unfortunate, but it happens!
Im considering to add small icons in the menu screen (if I can figure out how to do that in mz) that appear if you are below 50% of a stat, like a warning before the real status effects hit you. That way you get a bit more of a warning you can check back on, but still without giving you too many numbers to look at.
For weapon durability, the idea is for weapons to break based on a dice roll, but get to a "half-broken" state first where they are still usable. This usually makes it a bit weaker, but more importantly, using it becomes risky - if it "breaks" again a second time in combat, you're left without a weapon mid-fight. I felt like this half-broken state was important in a game where you cant switch weapons mid-battle, to avoid a situation where you are left with no weapons at all just because of a single bad roll, even though you went into a fight with a completely pristine, battle-ready baseball bat - It can still happen of course, but now you need two consecutive bad rolls, so you have way more wiggle room to deal with bad luck. Maybe a key issue here is the wording, all the half-broken weapons are described in different ways, they should have some kind of more explicit, HALF-BROKEN tag or something that makes this more clear. And maybe the tutorial about weapon breaking should be re-written too, might not be clear enough.
Thanks again for playing, I appreciate the thoughts!
I love the art style, the body and cosmic horror were all well done. Great job! Keep up the great work!
Thank you!
One enemy scared the ever loving shit out of me when their sequence happened. Reminds me a lot of the SCP story when day breaks, but with a lot more body horror than just people merging into fleshy blobs. I think I may have to start the game over though, since I have reached a point with the food system where even though I'm eating every day, the character still ended up starving, even though there's plenty of food around.
I'm also not a 100% certain if the snacks are actually doing anything for hunger, since there was a tip saying it helps, but once a snack is eaten it just says that you regain some health and stamina, but nothing else in regard to how your hunger is doing. My health was halved and the lil guy was starving to death, even after a TV dinner and 3 snacks.
Even though the fights are manageable, it's really nice that they are avoidable, since it is scary seeing what each different enemy type can do. I also came across an apartment stocked with supplies, and now I worry if someone is gonna bust into my apartment while I sleep.
Thanks for playing!
Yes, unfortunately in the jam build, theres a mistake in the food calculation, and only the best possible cooked food is currently really sating hunger (cooking beef, chicken, frozen pizza etc) and snacks also dont work for hunger! (used the wrong operator somewhere, a x3 became a -3, whoops) The latest build on the other page fixes all this, but this is all post-jam fixes uploaded separately. If you want to try it out, check here later, after you've rated the jam version - https://frankiesmileshow.itch.io/look-outside
O H N O, gotta love it when there's little bugs that slip through. I already rated the game, and honestly even with those bugs the game is really solid, since I still had to make it pretty far (almost an hour) before the food issue eventually cropped up. Looking forward to playing the updated version since I have to start over anyway. :D
Love this!
Absolutely awesome game!