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(1 edit)

Some of this isn’t really feedback and could use it’s own thread. But, either way, Kari tells you to meet her at the Mall at dusk/sunset specifically. You can review what needs to be done to progress the story at the computer desk back home.

So I guess my take away is that there needs to be something that forces the player to use the desk for the first time.

You don’t have to use the tome to identify shrooms. Read the researcher pages and extract information from that. Making it rain is an involved sequence of puzzles that themselves have are sequences of puzzles. And guess what will happen when you make it rain? It’s also part of a puzzle. I’m not kidding that this is a difficult game. Some of the existing, seasoned players claim to have spent 7 hours on the Woods alone. The RNG is there only because you’re trying to brute force a solution.

I’ve had this in development for so long that I occasionally forget new players probably have no idea what the stats are. I’ll consider a legend or something.

Stamina(White) - Energy to spend on interacting with things and going to places when awake. Works in reverse when asleep. When completely refilled you wake up.

Body(Red) - sends you to the void on the next dream if it gets completely drained. At the moment it’s not particularly painful due negative feedback, so it’s fine to experience at least once.

Mind(Blue) - Some times used in dialogue and other interactions. If it goes to 0 in the dream world you will get a nightmare event. There are 5 events currently, only one is unlocked initially and the other 4 are added to the pool as you experience them by exploring the dream world.

Will(Green) - “Currency” stat that is used to force certain dialogue interactions or to perform extraordinary actions

Cohesion - restored by interacting with NPCs and selecting colored dialogue choice(that use up the stat of that color). Max 2 per NPC per day. Halved every day.

Dissonance - Increases by 1 point every day. Lewd acts have a 50% chance on lowering it. Resets to 0 after a nightmare event

Every time you sleep Mind decreases(or increases) by ( Dissonance - Cohesion ) * 5

Hunger and Thirst - self explanatory, but will start to drain stats if left in the red for a full period.

The day is split into Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Dusk, Evening, Night (and a ??? state for dreams) Each period has 5 Time Units that represented by dots next to the period. After all 5 are gone the period changes. These drain when you travel (usually 3 points) and when you do something (1-2 points).

Ah, going by the initial thing of "what you struggled with" it felt like these went here.

I poked at the Kari thing a bit further, and I managed to trigger the mall meeting, but I loaded the save a few more times to doublecheck some stuff.  She doesn't specify "dusk" in the dialogue, just "after class".  Heading back home, the diary (which I had checked a few times before making my post) is a little more clear at saying "before dark", but it seems rather easy to miss the specific period of "dusk", as at least a couple of my attempts managed to clear the entire dusk period before I could reach the mall.  (Namely, one where I headed home, swapped outfits, went to the mall at "afternoon", went back to the house and ended up at "dusk", but going back to the mall ended up at "evening"; somehow used up all the dusk time in coming back from the mall and going to it again.)

As for the mushroom puzzle, I had spent some time with the pages trying to identify the shrooms before I finally managed to stumble on getting the book... about all I could figure appearance-wise was that "one of the three important shrooms that look the same glows at night" and the visual link to reality for another type.  And it felt in that one of my runs at it, I collected two glowing ones and they had different effects upon consumption, hence the sense of RNG I had.

I'll admit that if one of them had an audio cue like the research pages imply, I may not have heard it due to outside audio at the time.
I still don't know how I got all the trees to be colorful on one of my attempts.

The bars I had some hints for, having played some very early versions of this long ago, but I was misremembering some of the differences between Mind and Will.  Good to know on the Cohesion and Dissonance, and I can't believe I somehow never registered the Hunger and Thirst indicators.

There's definitely lots of stumbling in the dark, but am still gonna keep poking at it, heh.