I really enjoyed the game, it's always fun escaping the claws of maniac killers that like to torture us! The voice acting was super cool, and the concept and puzzles very enjoyable. My only critic is that there was no option to change the FOV, and the wobbly effect from the camera was dizzying, but I was able to complete the demo otherwise. Great work!

This game obviously had a lot of time and effort put into it, and I ended up spending an hour trying to beat this game, so you get the full wall of text. You're welcome, but also, I'm sorry.

I try really hard to not review a game until I've beaten it but I'm sorry, the 'rye' hint is too vague. First I thought maybe it was talking about a flour plant explosion since those can happen, but after 5-10 minutes of not finding anything particularly notable I stumbled upon 'killer in the rye', which is a reference to ergotism, or St. Anthony's fire. This I thought must be it, because it links the given hint, death by rye, to something with 'fire' in the name, like how you get threatened with fire in that room. However, I could not determine any particular year that referenced St. Anthony's fire.

• 0857 is potentially the first ever reference to ergotism
• 0994 is when thousands of people in France died of it
• The order of hospitallers of St Anthony was established in 1100, and it's from here that we get the connection to the affliction being called St. Anthony's Fire
• There was an outbreak in Paris in 1129
• There were particularly notable outbreaks during The Great Famine, 1315-1317
• in 1596 a german physician, Wendelin Thelius, connected the ergot fungus to rye
• in 1582, a german physician, Adam Loncier, uses ergot to help with pregnant women's labor
• the blight was called cockspur, and a connection between ergotized rye and bread poisoning was stated in a letter to the French royal academy of sciences in 1676
• The affliction was first called 'ergotism' in 1853

Just to try and cover my bases, I literally checked every value from 1800 to 1927, then all the values from 1100 to 1200, then all the values from 1100 to 1200. Nothing has worked, so either I chased down the wrong rabbit hole or there's something year I missed.

What made this worse is that, after every 5th attempt or so on that room, the floor will no longer function: After a death, you'll reload in the room but then fall into the abyss. There's no resetting manually to a checkpoint or anything, the only this that can be done is re-opening the game.

This results in re-watching the intro, which after 5 times I can tell you is maybe just a tad too long. I'm not sure why the pauses between captioned bits between the detective and the doctor are quite so long, I feel like they could have been cut to make that ordeal much more manageable.

Since we're here as developers, I guess I'll give my two cents on puzzle designs like this. First a prelude: I've heard interesting takes on accessibility in games specifically around language: Usually we consider a game accessible if it's translated into multiple languages, but another take I saw was the idea of removing language altogether. If you didn't have language to get across an idea, how else would you convey that instruction to the player? Of course not every game can obtain something like this, and it's not like such games are inherently better, but it prompts an interesting consideration, a framing or a lens to approach one's game from an accessibility perspective.

With that said, I feel like using riddle that are very UK centric is going in the opposite direction, as far as accessibility goes (this in relation to the whitechapel murders and, I can only hope to assume (see challenges above) the st anthony's fire riddle). In this case it's not a language barrier, but a cultural one. There's nothing wrong with making a less accessible game--I have enjoyed Bennet Foddy's Getting Over It and part of the ethos of that game is that it's excessively brutal and difficult and unforgiving. But, whereas in that game that sort of difficulty is a core part of the experience, I'm not sure what exactly this game is buying from being similarly obscure. Fond feelings from other fellow UK people, I suppose, but I wonder how valuable that sort of thing really is for a game, I wouldn't be able to judge.

Getting more to the point, my only real critique isn't anything with the UK-ness of the game, but with the conceit of the riddles in the first place. You've said in replies and on the game page (and the villain taunts you about it in game) that the intent is to get the player to use resources outside of the game, chatGPT or google or something, to help find the answers, and I'm not sure why that was a priority or what that adds to the game. Or put another way, I'm not sure what the core message of the game is, because the creative decisions go all over the place.

Like, one angle on this is that the character we play as is some test subject: A mad scientist wants to see what it's like when someone records their perspective from literally their point of view, from within their skull. The villain alludes maybe to seeing from someone else's perspective, so maybe the idea is also that video to be recorded isn't meant for the main character to review, but for someone else to view. So the theme is about perspective: how we value our own, the extent to how much we might value it, and what it might be like to literally view someone else's perspective. Also is allows for the creepy imagery of having a camera grafted into one's head, very on point.

But then the villain asks you to solve riddles. I think the riddles are less the point and maybe, it's about recording yourself struggling and panicking? So that whoever watches the recording gets to relive the panic? but then that could be done in so many ways. Being forced to look someone in the eye as you sacrifice them to save yourself, that's something that could have impact and leans more into the Saw inspiration. Having to bodily harm yourself, and having that recorded from your perspective, would add some amount of terror for whoever is watching--I feel like Resident Evil 7 and Village did that pretty good, with Ethan having to heal himself from some horiffic injuries. These are just some other ideas--I recognize that these are probably harder to implement than some voice lines and keypad puzzles, so I'm not even that bothered by these puzzles existing as they are. But if this game is something that's going to see some continued development, and it feels like it very well might (and that effort would be justified, there's lots of good stuff here), I feel like the mechanical gameplay conceit of answering riddles truly should be reconsidered, or at least adjusted.

I'm sorry I couldn't complete your game. I do like the parts I liked about it very much--the voicework, the presentation, these are clearly very well done.

This game for me has some Saw vibes, post proc is great!

The voice acting is so good and the mechanics had me hooked. I did find the controls for looking around a bit wobbly and the camera focusing in and out constantly made me have a hard time looking around.

But otherwise, there's so much love put into the game and I enjoyed it very much, can't wait to see more content for it!

My favourite game so far. I loved the UK trivia as I used to live in Whitechapel and I knew the answers  to both riddles by heart. Really cool concept and execution and very, very fitting to the theme. Wish you luck. 

I was really getting into this because the fidelity and post processing was up there, but after completing the waiting puzzle I moved on and when I tried to open a door I was teleported back to said waiting puzzle room whilst and was subsequently locked in  and  the game soft locked me. 

This game is oozing with style! Great visual direction and voice acting. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the puzzles basically boiling down to trivia knowledge, but I really enjoyed the waiting one.

I don't know if it's my penchant for being where I shouldn't, but I managed to softlock myself a few times; I headed backwards through the vents into the first room after going through the door and got stuck behind the cabinet, and you can very easily get stuck by heading back through a closing door. I also encountered a consistent bug where if I interacted with something in the next room after dying, it would reset me to the last spawn point, behind the recently closed door. While I'm nitpicking, the distance blur is a little brutal at times, and might benefit from being tuned a little, but that's mostly personal preference.

Regardless, fantastic work, especially for getting this done in only a week! Lots of cool ideas in here. Really enjoyed playing!

Phenomenal voice acting and game design! There was a lot of passion and hard work that went into this and it showed! The second puzzle was too hard for me to figure out  and I got stumped. I felt like it had to do something with the Fibonacci sequence but i couldnt figure it out. Anyways great work and I hope your team continue to make great games like this in the Future!

By far the best looking game, although the VHS effect and the high mouse sens made me a little nauseous (being nitpicky here). Really loved the voice acting and sound design as well! How did you even do this in a week?!