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Garry Francis4 years ago(+2)

This game is HUGE! I haven't finished it yet (found over 50 rooms and filled about 4 of the 6 pages in the notebook), but I've played enough to get a good feel for it. The descriptions are very good, but all the atmospheric background messages start to get a bit annoying after a while. I was disappointed at the huge number of essentially empty rooms, especially when I couldn't examine anything that looked promising in those rooms. There seems to be something strange going on at the secret woodland path. The first time I played, I discovered a spade. The second time I played, I discovered a knife. Wha? I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a puzzle, as I haven't worked out what's going on yet. There are a few other bugs too, but nothing monumental.

This is essentially a murder mystery. I don't normally go much on murder mysteries in adventures, but this one is very well done. I'm keen to finish it now to see who committed the murder. I don't think it was me, but who knows...

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Dark Blue Monkey4 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

:-) Thanks for the feedback.    I have trimmed a few of the rooms down.  They didn't used to be empty, but another reviewer told me to take out all the extraneous stuff that wasn't pertinent. 

I'll perhaps trim a few more rooms then.. I can think of three or four that serve no purpose.

The game is actually randomly generated each time.  There is an overarching story, think of it like "An inspector calls", where there are many suspects.  The game will choose to show you one 'facet' of the story each time you play through.  You can see if you can work out the whole story from that facet (there's all the information!), but you found a different murder weapon, and it might be in a different place because each time the murderer is different, and how they did it might be different too...  All the suspects want him dead, including you!  But which one got to him first, and how they did it, that's unique to you to figure out... But once you put it all together, you should get a good idea of why ;-)


I'll take a look at the room list, and trim some stuff down further......


Thanks for the feedback!    The game's huge by the jam standards, but it's about average for a full-sized text adventure.  Maybe Chris should have given a size hint as well as a theme ;-)

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Garry Francis4 years ago(+1)

Ah, that explains it. I hate random games. Most adventurers do. No offence, but it makes it really hard to write hints, walkthroughs and solutions. Now I've got the extra challenge of working out which parts are random. Sheesh. Nevertheless, it's still a good game. Very atmospheric descriptions.

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Dark Blue Monkey4 years ago (1 edit)

Hehe, that's what I was going for.   The randomness won't create anything that's illogical, everything is strongly bounded to be internally consistent and each potential solution  fits into the overarching story.   So if you found a thing in a place, there's a good reason why it was in THAT place which you need to figure out. It's a murder investigation, after all :)   Let's just say that, each time you play, a different person got to him first, and that includes you.....  It's only random insofar as you find out who was pushed over the edge first...   But there's a darker story underpinning it too, if you want to try to work that out, there are clues....   :)

I'm in the middle of stripping out some of the less-useful 'connector' rooms, and I'm adding some descriptive text for some of the scenery objects to trim it down.       I'll upload an update in about 10 minutes (you'll need to restart your game if you want to play on the reduced map).  There are about 5 or 6 rooms which I added for a particular reason, which seem a bit empty at the moment..... ;-)

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