The game totally violates separation of power, but I’m working with this as more of an alternate universe ethics sim rather than a civics sim. The scale is basically an unquestioned god in this universe, and the detective is merely feeding it information.
I appreciate the feedback. I did worry as I was making it about the time it takes to complete.
You’re also not the first person to dislike the hidden words mechanic, but I stand by the choice. I didn’t want this game to fall into the detective game trap where you’re just clicking buttons without thinking.
As for clicking back through whole conversations, you may have missed it, but there is a back button that backs you up from your current page. That makes it a little quicker to navigate and take a different path. I did consider a “journal” that takes notes for you of places to come back to, but I ended up cutting that for time.
All in all, you’re not wrong that the writing was ambitious, possibly to my detriment here. I underestimated how much time and work it was going to take, but once I’d concocted this story it was hard to slim it down any more than I did. I already cut two characters entirely, but I needed Dylan to be responsible and Lena for motive. At the point I realized it was a bit much for the time limit, it would have required starting over to remove any more.
Lastly, on the UX front, that footer was supposed to contain a settings menu with audio sliders and text accessibility settings. It ended up only containing the exit button, which I agree I probably should have just scrapped. That’s getting fixed in the postjam release anyways.