By the 1870s 95% of the prison population of the south was black. Laws were enacted targeting freed slaves in order to incarcerate them and put them back on the plantations they'd been freed from. Now, I play fast and loose with history in this game, but please understand that every decision I made is with purpose. The plantation owner is a racist who, while he might enslave a white person, would not choose to kill one and turn him into a zombie. He even disagreed with creating a living zombie of a white woman (in his own misogynistic and racist way). He only attempts to kill the protagonist (a white man) bc you the player have decided to fight him, but that wouldn't have been his choice. He's trying to make the protagonist his right-hand man. Now, I didn't mean to suggest that no other races were subject to convict leasing, but the entire first half of the game explains why the protagonist has found himself in this predicament and should, with some thought, explain why many freed slaves would have no way of getting themselves out of it. Neither he nor his family could pay his way to freedom. In fact, the game is set in Florida, which outlawed convicted leasing after the death of a white prisoner who should have been freed instead. His family sent the money to the prison to secure his release, but it was likely stolen. I think it's telling that it took the death of a white man to end convict leasing. Many, many black people died in the harsh conditions they were thrust into, particularly in Florida, which was said to have had the harshest conditions of any state.

I agree with the rest of your assessment; however, I'm not sure exactly what to do to fix the issues. I've thought about adding an interactive flashback during the long cellar speech, but I'm not sure what that would entail and then the player would be playing as the antagonist, a truly loathsome character. I could try to shorten the speech, but that would only be to condense things. I don't think there's any information I could remove that isn't necessary to the player to understand exactly what's happening. It's certainly wordy, tho, so I'm sure some of it could be condensed without losing anything. As for the graphics... unless I hired someone to make them, they're kinda the best I can do.

Thanks for playing and giving great feedback on the game! I wasn't sure how the parallax layers were supposed to move so I messed around with it til it "felt" right, but it never really was how I thought it should be, and now I know why! I tried to find ways to break up the staircase speech, and if I had had more time I probably would have shortened the stairs and tried to condense the info a bit. I also just ran out of time. And the part after where it ends would have been more gameplay. But the game isn't really meant to be an RPG or to have a ton of puzzles, more like a choose-your-own-adventure book in video game form. I know I need to work on the tone... I wanted to add a little more humor throughout to break up some of the longer stretches of heavy speech, but I just kind of went with the first draft and that's just how it came out. Eventually I'll rework this into something better. I actually had ideas for all three of the theme words and I'm planning on making a three-in-one game based on that. I gotta finish something else first, but I'll work on this when I need a break from that. Thanks again for the great feedback, it was really helpful! :)

Thank you so much! I'm glad you liked it! I tried to design the battle to have a little bit of strategy, but not be too tough to complete since it's a game jam entry, but the story itself will have a few fights in key places. I plan to finish the game at some point (I've already finished one new area and working on more), and the decision at the end of this demo splits the narrative in two, so this fight is definitely important, but maybe making the actual fight optional would be a good idea if the game attracts more of a visual novel/adventure crowd who might want to just skip the fighting entirely.

Thanks for playing!

I had forgotten about the movie, having first heard of it and then watched it as a teen due to liking the band White Zombie, so it was a trip when I started researching the origins of zombies and stumbling across the movie again from that. I got the idea for the game from a YouTube video positing that the end of slavery in America didn't really happen until the 1940s when convict leasing was outlawed, and having remembered that originally zombies were tied to Voodoo and slavery, I knew I had to make a game about it.

Thanks for the kind words, and I'm glad you enjoyed the game. I'm still trying to figure out how to resize/skewer in Gimp without getting terrible distortion. XD It took me forever to cobble together the artwork. If you're interested, I plan on continue to work on the game, so I'll be posting updates on my itchio page in the future.

Thanks for playing and reviewing! I'm sure it's going to be too much reading all at once for a lot of people. I think the only thing I really could have done was pared back the dialogue, as a lot of it had some heavy flourishes that made it longer than absolutely necessary. I was kind of going for slow so that the horror would punctuate that, but I think it could feel boring to some or just be too long and drawn out.