Great job on this one! I love all of the little details you've put in, from the character movements to the CGs. I'm also a really big fan of the letterboxed framing of the game, with Ritsu in front - it works well, and creates a really unique feel! And the way it cuts Ritsu off from everyone else works so well with the story. The art itself is also really pretty - I love the softness of the lines on all the characters, and the glow and lights in the backgrounds feel really satisfying (and makes the creepier / more unsettling moments feel that much more drastic). I also give a lot of credit for the complexity of your characters and their dynamics - they feel realistically flawed, in ways that impacts the story naturally and paints a clearer picture of Ritsu. That's an impressive thing to balance, especially in just a month!
Play game
Iris to Id -Ghosts in the Machine-'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Overall | #68 | 4.028 | 4.028 |
| Music | #73 | 4.111 | 4.111 |
| Voice Acting | #83 | 2.778 | 2.778 |
| Story | #84 | 4.222 | 4.222 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Content Warnings
Dark Themes, Psychological Horror/Distress, Depictions of Blood, Violence, Death, Vehicular Accidents, Insect Injury (centipedes), Supernatural Elements, Drinking and Alcohol
Log Line
A tale of four unconventional friends bound together by a series of increasingly sinister events.
Team Credits & Cast
Archeia, Shira, Hannatokki, Kira - Artists and Writers
Is your submission created with the Light.VN visual novel engine?
Does your submission contain Boy's Love content?
Does your submission contain voice acting?
Comments
I saw in another comment that this was made by some beginners, which if I'm understanding that correctly then great job to you all because you've put out something impressive! Very great visuals and variety of UI elements. Out of curiosity, what engine did you use? It's one I don't recognize.
Thank you so much for playing our game! Shira and I are the beginners in this project, and we had such a good time making this game with Archeia. If it weren't for Archeia's experience and initiative, I don't know if we'd be able to put out a game like this, especially at such a short amount of time haha ;w;
Archeia worked really hard on the UI and interface, as well as so much of the visual direction of the game. ;w; I think all three of us worked really hard to make what we did, so I'm just super happy we worked on this project together.
And the engine we used is Visual Novel Maker! It was the first time I've ever used it, but it was really good and I found myself quickly learning how to get used to it!
I will say as someone who was once a newbie myself that game jams like these are great ways to keep building up skills, something about working alongside other devs to reach a deadline helps a lot. xD The love and care yall put in to everything definitely shines through. Ah, VNN! I don't see that one used a lot, but I always hear that it's a good engine to work in. ^^
I definitely learned a lot during this process, it's been half a month now and I'm still buzzing from the game jam frenzy ;w; And thank you so much, I'm so glad to hear that!
I'm pretty new to using engines and making visual novels, but as a beginner, it was very easy for me to learn, and I had a lot of fun directing scenes ;w; It was a good experience
The art is so pretty and the transition in the game looked neat, it's a feat you was able to get this much done in such a small time window. Story is intriguing and the characters was pretty fleshed out with fun interaction, I would want to know more about them. Character design was great!
There was several glitches,it seem you are aware of it in the devlog, like the screen freeze black once when Ritsu was asked to do something, I restarted the game and loaded the save and skipped through and it worked. Skipping caused quick menu to disappear sometimes. I also think some video didn't load for me as sometime the scene is black for a while, like when the dialog mentioned that it was raining. I'm on a low power Windows laptop though so maybe my laptop was too weak to play this.
Another thing, maybe I'm just spoiled by Renpy, but not being able to skip past scene transition, and not being able to leave the playing session and return to the main menu during playing can be a quality of life issue, especially if the player is forgetful and doesn't save often.
There wasn’t any indication about the demo end and suddenly I was on the main menu screen with the glitchy effect, that I assumed I missed something or it's a bizarre ddlc setup, so I even replayed it and it restarted from the beginning. Was it really the end or did I miss something?
Last thing, the 1.7 gig download is pretty intimidating for a Visual novel demo, would it be possible to trim/ compress it down a bit? Players might avoid downloading if the game was too big.
Still, great premise and I liked what I saw so far. Looking forward to the full game!
Hi Saitoki, Thank you for playing! About your feedback:
- The raining part was intentionally black since it's a storytelling tool to imply something.
- There is a bug where if you start the game it should have started on the loading screen but the title screen not appearing until you finish the Ritsu PoV is intentional. We made sure you can load anytime through the UI at the very least. We're sorry for the inconvenience.
- The demo ending is implied in the narrative as the PoV changed by the UI and it showing the title screen for the first time.
- There is a ""DDLC"" element to the Title Screen. You kinda just missed it haha.
- The 1.7 GB is something we have to live with for this project sadly. There's a lot of audio and art assets and it's a two hour long novel for the prologue. We can try optimizing it but since we only had less than 3 weeks to start, we didn't have time for this.
We're planning to use our engine of choice for this game finally and hopefully the confusion and issues will be fixed by then!
We appreciate that you spent the time to play through our game, saitoki!!
We are aware that our demo is far from perfect, but we made the best we could in the time frame we had. We will do our utmost to improve on the game in the future too, until it is a full, satisfying experience.
Our three-man team is made of two beginners when it comes to making games, so this month was certainly a challenge and a learning curve for us.
We appreciated the feedback, but would it be possible to not spoil parts of the plot in your review without warning?
Thank you for your time again! :D
Hey, sorry about that, I have edited that part out from the comment. As a solo dev myself, I understand how hard it is to make a game in such a short time frame. I really liked the game and would like to see more of it, and it's more like some input to improve the build after the jam ( the jam host allow you to make change to the game build 2 days after it ended, and everyone had been making change already, you don't need to limit yourself to the jam period). What I asked was already answered and I'm sorry if that came across as complaining.
I had a great time with this game. The character designs are top notch, and I was so invested in what happens to Ritsu. The centipede imagery was disgusting, and I'm going to feel really weird about eating pasta for a while.
I don't know if the story will be more straightforward in future updates, but I love how understated the ending with Kazuya and the ring is.
I also love that you included "Put Out My Eyes." It's such a striking poem, and it fits the game so well.
Consider me a fan! I look forward to following this project and seeing what happens with the story!
Thank you so much orino!! I'm glad that our characters' designs were enjoyable, and that you enjoyed the story and the scenes! I was honestly a bit worried about that scare, but I'm glad it was effective haha sorry
I really liked the poem too, the first time archeia showed it to us like that, I was so shook! hehe
Thank you again for your comment!!
I had a great time! Plenty of little hidden details a curiosities, as well as some spooky imagery at times. Very cool!
I absolutely adore the art and the character interaction in this game! The art is extremely cute but can definitely be scary when it needs to be. The designs and personalities for the characters are so good too! Each character has very distinct personalities, but they still mesh so well as a group (would've loved to see more of Kira, but with the one month working time, all of you did amazing!). I really love Ritsu, whenever something bad happened to him I felt threatened too, the scares in the game got me so tense ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ I'm really looking forward to the development of this project!! Good job to the team and thank you for sharing this with us!!
Thank you so much!! We wanted to put so many more character perspectives and components into the game, but we weren't able to with the timeframe we had 😠We were hoping to express the characters' personalities and dynamics well with this chapter, and I'm glad that the scares worked! ;w; thank you so much for your comment, we saw it and were so happy! (Also, I wanted to see more of Kira too, I miss them ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜)
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