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Smog and Sensibility's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Monsterous! | #53 | 3.906 | 4.429 |
Scariness... | #89 | 3.150 | 3.571 |
Halloweeny? | #110 | 3.276 | 3.714 |
Overall | #112 | 3.150 | 3.571 |
Fun | #113 | 3.276 | 3.714 |
Candy!! | #142 | 2.142 | 2.429 |
Ranked from 7 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Log Line
In this game you will set out on a prearranged marriage to one of your fathers young industrialist type friends. Along the way you will meet monsters of various sizes (assuming you can pick the correct paths), and maybe you will even live long enough to tell your grandkids about this expereience.
Content Warnings
Death, Suggestions of cannibalism,
Team Members
TheeRatPrince: Character Portrait Art
TheseusInABottle: Project Lead, Programmer, Background Artist, Writer, ect.
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Comments
Writing: The story interesting, but the writing although not really the easiest to read. I mean, English is my third language, so having to look up the words “betroth”, “saunter” and “holler” in a dictionary was okay. I’m more concerned about some sentences perhaps being a little bit too long.
I started reading that sentence. “As you sit in your train car turning”, is the train car turning? Well, turns out it’s not. It means I’m turning a letter in my hand. But there’s quite a few words between “turning” and “in your hand”. You know where that would work well? In a contract written by Smogulus intended to get signed by people that don’t understand it.
I’d also mention here that the text isn’t rewindable, so if I accidentally click before I finish reading a line, I have to go all the way back to the start of the VN and go from there to the place where the text I missed was. Which only gets more noticeable when some of the text is a bit hard to read.
Story: The characters are pretty fun, and the story is exciting, scary and oddly comical. I like the story despite the issue I mentioned in the other paragraph.
Theme: It involves weird supernatural creatures, and Smogulus is either scary, creepy or both, so I think you got this category right.
Audio: I can hear people talking somewhere, probably outside the building I’m in. The laptop I’m playing on isn’t completely silent either. I hear sounds that probably aren’t there. But I think the VN itself is silent. So I guess there isn’t a lot to talk about in this paragraph…
So if you do want to add audio, what could you add? Trains and carts (including horseless carts) aren’t completely silent. I mean, you don’t have audio for them, but you do mention in the text that some carts aren’t silent, so if you wanted to add sound somewhere, that could be a place. Also the door getting unlocked seems to make a sound according to the text, so that’s another obvious place to put sound. And the wedding bells. And the field scene could have bird chirps. The sewers collapsing could be another place.
And music could be nice on the main menu and maybe the church scene. A pipe organ could work be an obvious instrument to use if you’re able to write music for it and record it… More realistically, you could find some existing music under a license that lets you use it in the VN, or you could try to get someone to write something for it.
Art: I think the characters look pretty fun and both them and the background suit the story. The characters look more painted whereas the backgrounds look more like edited photographs, but that does separate the foregrounds from the backgrounds. And text is shown in a nice and readable font, white on a reasonably dark semi-transparent black background, providing good contrast between the foreground and background colour. It would have been nice if there could have been some fancy border around the textbox, but that’s not really a big deal.
Fun: Good story, turning industrialization into a character. But this is also the paragraph where I would mention technical stuff like minigames and achievements if they’re present. I don’t really think it’s bad not to have those, but I do think it’s kinda noticeable that there isn’t a “back” or a “history” button to re-read lines you’ve already read.
[Edit: I haven’t read Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility that I think there might be some references to, so maybe I’d like this one even more if I had read that.]
Best part: I think what I liked most where the characters and story.
What I’d suggest doing differently next time you make a VN: The long sentences (and lack of a back button if it isn’t too hard to add).
This was a very enjoyable experience, I love Nos.