This was a joy to play. i loved the autumnal vibe, and the antagonist was quite unique. The map was huge so lots to see and explore. My one complaint, and maybe this was just a weird bug, but the compass you find mixes up east and west. NW is actually NE, et cetera. That caused me some confusion at first, but after a bit I knew to flip it when plotting my course to the next destination. Is the tree creature somehow based off Irish folklore? At any rate, great job!
Ooh that's strange, are you sure you haven't misunderstood how a compas works? The red end of the needle will always point north, so to tell which way west or east is you line up the red point with N on the compas and the directions on the compas face should be correct with west to your left and east to your right.
It is true that when you turn 90 degrees to the right the red arrow will be pointing to the W on the compas but this only indicates that North is 90 degrees to the left of your facing. As the red end of the compas is magnetised to the north pole of the earth this should be how a real compas functions too by my understanding.
The tree creature wasn't based of any IRL folklore, or at eaast not intentionally, I just wanted to make something with a bit of a slenderman and weeping angel inspiration combined with seeing people play prop hunt.
Thank you for playing, I'm glad you had a good time.
The compass in the game is wrong. The needle always points to the north, so if the needle spins then the whole dial must spin with it, and the front of the compass would indicate the correct direction. What you need to do when walking is ignore the dial, "remove" it from your mind, only focus on the needle and mentally create a dial which spins with the needle. Try this in Google maps or Streetview where the needle spins like here but there's no dial.
Here is a video demonstration of a magnetic compass. This is the type of physical compass I'm familliar with reading so it's what I chose to emulate for this game. The game shouldn't have the same ux as google maps because google maps is meant to be a convenient method of navigating in real life, whereas this is a horror game about navigating with less than modern tools.