Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous.

• Great work on getting a prototype available for the jam! I think the aesthetic is a unique blend of cosmic, skeletal and esoteric, definitely the sort of things that make for a really good surreal game. The visuals are great and really evocative too - the grainy dithering effect and monochrome reminiscent of graphics on the Macintosh. It's no coincidence that the HyperCard software on the Macintosh formed the basis of Myst - this visual style is really nostalgic and the game could really evoke the 3D adventure games of that era. So I'm really looking forward to what comes of this, and I definitely encourage you to keep at fleshing out this game! 

  For constructive feedback, my best advice would be to look at games in the 3D point-and-click genre that spawned in the mid-to-late 90s, and some of the criticism that was launched against that genre of the time. Detractors of the genre cited the sterile rendered environments, lack of interactivity with the world, and lack of context and meaning behind the design of puzzles as major criticisms. Not that this game is going to shape up like that - but to make a truly awesome game it could be helpful to think about what makes 3D adventure games tick. 

  Some games in that genre, like Riven, really attempted to respond to these criticisms by creating a interesting lore and integrating it into the game world. These involved a story that existed beyond the player's motivation to progress to new areas, puzzles that taught the player something about the world, and served an ingame purpose rather than as an artificial obstacle. These sort of ideas could be helpful in designing intuitive puzzles!

  As the original De Offectibus also focused on esoterica and rituals, I think there's a lot of interesting creative ideas that could develop into a really good point-and-click game design.  Thanks for submitting this to SCREAMWORLD, and I really hope you get the time/effort available to finish this series and make something awesome!