That elusive hot wolf, give me a couple days and ill figure out where he is hiding. 

Time for Apathesis! 25th VN I will read and rate from this jam, here we go!

Edit 1: Interesting. No time for review comment now. Let's rate.

Apathesis has balls, I'll give it that.

Before I read this, I had lightly skimmed the comments on here and on discord, and what I'd gathered was that it was a gothic entry with a handful of fanciful elements. I thought, "Wow. Okay. I like du Maurier. I like Irving. This sounds great!"

And then I read it, and it was very much… Not. That.

No, I think I would describe it as dark postmodern surrealism. 

Or something similar. Idk.

The graphic presentation is simple but effective. A bit rough in places, like how the protagonist glides across the screen like she's a desktop icon. I guess that lends a certain mystical quality too? I don't mean to sound like a dick here, the handful of custom animations were appreciated, and the music is good. All of that stuff is incidental, though. The elephant here is the narrative.

The text is a dense maze that reflects the setting. It smacks the reader again and again with its difficulty: the vocab is tough and the text blocks are giant and never-ending. It repeats itself in more ways than one, and it makes the reader question what in God's name is actually happening.

I admire this approach, in a way. Few stories have the backbone to tell a reader, "Sit down and shut up because this is how we are going to do things around here." Such stories are not for everyone, and Apathesis definitely wears that badge proudly.

It reminds me of experimental music. The point is not to "sound good", but to create something textually interesting. 

With all of that in mind, I have a hard time saying that I enjoyed reading this. I think it's fitting that you changed the itch noun from "game" to "exaltation" because this felt more like an experience rather than a game or even a story. 

It did make me feel things. Boredom admittedly being one of them, but I can see this being a really deep and explorative read for an audience smarter than me. And, well, that's pretty much what I took away from this. 

Apathesis is creative and daring. But it is also not for me.

I liked the alien feel you get while playing. The story, the prose, the ambiance, the places you visit. Everything is out of this world, kind of off in a way you can't explain. I felt like you managed to pinpoint a feeling of being displaced, like the character really shouldn't be there.

The prose can be hard to read sometimes and I brutforced the puzzle because I couldn't understand it, I wasn't sure of the right path before reading your devlog !

Still, I liked it for its ambience.

Apathesis is quite the ambitious project for a game jam. It aims for something great (even calling itself gothic) but, while it doesn’t fully miss the mark, leaves a bit to be desired. That very ambition ends up a double-edged sword, where it becomes the game’s most engaging and memorable moments but make it extremely dense to enter in the first place. Writing is meandering and wordy which does absolutely fit the plot and setting, but really dips into tedium at points. Gameplay and pacing are excellent, though, Apathesis really knows how to drip information for the player, especially on a macro scale.

I must be completely frank, this was a hard story for me to get into.

The prose is very complex and abstract at places, sometimes requiring me to re-read the sentences to truly get what the author is saying (this might be me being an ESL speaker, but I suspect the prose would feel pretty opaque to the average English speaker too). This isn't necessarily a problem per se: some passages are genuinely beautiful, and the complexity seems appropriate for what the dev is going for.

The problem is that this complex verbosity is used for scenes where basically nothing happens: as a reader, all I'm getting for my effort is often very abstract philosophical reasonings and the protagonist visiting the same rooms over and over. To be honest, past a certain point, not only did I not bother to try and understand what I was reading when it wasn't apparent on first try, I basically started to click forward very quickly to get to the point.

I will clarify that I don't hate the story in concept: the protagonist's introspective journey through the looping sanctuary intrigues me. But the combination of flowery complex prose, abstractness, and very little actually happening turned me off for most of it. I will say I loved the flashback to the village: that was one of those rare instances where I was able to fully appreciate the dev's writing, because all the introspection was intermingled with a bit of specificity and concreteness. (Also, I love the surrealism of the whole setting.)

I will also say that I did not complete the game: considering other people in the comments said they had trouble solving the puzzle and knowing I hadn't paid attention to the story as much as they had, I didn't try too hard. I think I will wait for the director's commentary or the cheat codes. :-P

One aspect I will give the game high praise for is the presentation. The atmosphere is impeccable, I love the backgrounds, I love the music, and the prose is appropriately evocative when it's not being too obtuse. The only part I'm not 100% sure about is the placement of the sprites on the screen: more often than not, they don't feel part of the world they are inhabiting (probably because they're shown in full and their movements are very linear).

I liked your writing style, it's ornate and could appear heavy at times, but I think it serves the purpose of the story by making the experience mystical. I found it hard to see the theme in the VN, even based on distant definitions of the word expansion. But I guess that's the problem with a theme like this one, it's hard to see what others are seeing at times.

My biggest concern is that the clues given by the journals are a little too vague for my liking, so I quickly find myself having to spam the options to see the different possibilities, which isn't very interactive. Also, for the technical aspects, I've seen a lot of paragraphs sticking out of the textbox. There should be a way to avoid that by having more, smaller paragraphs. And it was a bit strange to see the sprites floating in the air too. Overall, I'd say it's quite a unique experience thanks to your prose and the general feeling of the VN, although I'm not sure what I've read!

It's nice to see something this formally ambitious in the jam. The result feels slightly clunky and underplaytested, however; how vague the feedback is and how easy it is to misinterpret as the game misleading you means that it's too easy to lose track of what you're doing and what you already tried. How much new text there is across iterations, tricking you into thinking you discovered something new or are on the right track, doesn't help. Simple as the underlying mechanism may be, the game doesn't communicate it well enough to provide compelling puzzle gameplay – I spent more time wondering how exactly this thing works (do you need to exhaust all options & see all text? do you need to make whatever the correct choices are just once, across multiple iterations, or during a single one?) than "solving" it. (as in, looking at the script because it was really just not fun anymore and i was afraid i had somehow misunderstood the point)

The prose gets points for style, even if the dialog in particular feels overwrought and rhythmically weak at times. Between that and the image choices and the audio design, there's definitely a mood successfully established. I don't mind the character portraits remaining quite thin – it feels purposeful. Those two guys who show up sometimes not amounting to a lot or not leaving much of an impression maybe feels like a slight misstep; there was room to exaggerate them a little just to juice up the character interactions.

As for the ending, I feel like it lacks the proper buildup to land as an anticlimax. The tension dissipates away in the "gameplay" portion, at least if you're spending a lot of time stuck in it, but it doesn't feel like this is taken into account – the story essentially goes from 0% to 100% and the abruptly ends. There's nothing too surprising or incongruent about the general nature of the climax, but it just doesn't feel like it follows from what comes before tonally.

Apathesis deserves praise for taking a big swing and its strong sense of style, but the final product is often too frustrating for its own good.

For me it relayed a bit too much on descriptions based on the story...

My issue mainly with this story is, besides the notes. It doesn't really feel like a visual novel. More like a novel. The ending felt like a visual novel. Something was off here for me in it that didn't felt like I am reading a vn.

It's definitly an experience. It's just a harder time for people like me that can't read novels greatly.

It wasn't a bad one though. The music and usage of sprites works. I wished all the names would be like didi and gogo to give your own iconic touch.
I think the best thing would have been just the bunny floating and all the other ones be differently fullbody. XD

Still even with some *annoying* things. I can recommend this trip to read and maybe people can find things behind the descriptions that I cannot see.

Playing it was such an "experience", an exaltation indeed. I have a fondness for this kind of writing, so I found the trippy adventure enjoyable. The scattered notes are a nice touch for the main mechanics of the story progression.

I think what I like the most is the choice of music, they truly enhance the scenes. On the other hand (maybe it's just me being too nitpicky), I found some visual aspects... questionable. Some dialogues have too many words that they start to overlap with the quick menu buttons (the back, skip, etc.) Some breathing room would be nice. Having the sprites "float" is also something I'm personally not a fan of. But I guess the various ways you manipulate the sprites' movements kinda make up for it.

Lastly (kind of) I'm still conflicted about the idea of "village" here. Like, on one hand, I get the impression that it should be the traditional tribal-ish one, but on the other hand there are power generators and stuff. Having the omega wolf speak in such manners detracts me from the experience lol. That "private property" for the village border.... I can't not laugh at that. I don't know if it was intentional with that one but that totally caught me off guard.

I think with visuals that better suit the story, everything would be much better. But hey, it's a casual game jam, and IIRC your forte is in writing, and the game delivered. Not recommended to play the game if you're not sober though.