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This was stunning!!! The way the story is laid out was so well done. I thought the "stay warm"/big lightbulb parts were well balanced and were a good set up and gameplay loop that you used so effectively. I forgot to talk about this in my video, but I often think about gameplay loops and how to kind of "weaponize" them against the player and I think you did that here really well. You set something up for us to do and then used those familiar expectations to subvert them. Easier said than done and you did a really good job of it here! 

The music was really good, the art was beautiful. That cover shot of her looking at the aurora literally rendered me speechless when I saw it in context. What a beautiful moment. 

I think gameplay wise the only thing I didn't love was the way the text jumped forward sometimes. I know it's a good tool for cutting someone off, or for flow of conversation. But I felt bad I was missing stuff and I felt a little silly I couldn't read that fast. I think there's visual indicators like a "But -!" that can showcase that same story beat while being more accessible for slow readers. 

Really great job! Heart wrenching, well written, well executed. 

(+1)

Thank you so much for taking the time to play through my game and make a video on it! Like I said in the Discord, I added a downloadable file for content warnings that I meant to include before. It's in kind of a weird format, but I wanted to offer options to people who like to minimize spoilers.

I'm really glad you recorded this one. It's super interesting to see how different people react to different scenes. Everyone initially sympathizes with completely different characters in completely different ways.

It's such a strange feeling hearing someone cry because of something I made. There's a small sense of guilt, but it's oddly warm? Just knowing that something I wrote connected with a person I've never met before enough to move them to tears. It makes me sound like some kind of creep if I'm like "It was great listening to you have to reach for a box of tissues!" though. I hope you get what I mean.

I'm also really happy you liked the gameplay of the snowy sections. It took a lot of iterating on the same thing to get players moving how they needed to. I set up the first snowy map just to teach players how the rocks and the lights worked in a safe environment, but a lot of my friends got completely lost before they even found the first rock. For the other sections to make sense, it was necessary to have those basics down, so there were a lot of changes I made before and after posting. I probably flexed my game design muscles more for that one area than I have for any of my other actually-gameplay-focused games. It means a lot that you appreciate what I was going for.

(It was heartbreaking watching you grab the Power Pod .5 seconds after the timer ran out, by the way.)

I was acutely aware of the issues with cutting off textboxes early, and I made an effort to keep important dialogue out of any text you couldn't keep onscreen. In theory, anything that you might have missed could be gleaned from context. 

I get the frustration, though. There's no way to know you didn't miss anything important if you can't see what you missed. I want to keep the interruptions for the dialogue's pacing, but it's something I would have liked to have an option for. It'd be easy to add a toggle if I used basically any other engine, but navigating around RPG Maker's base code AND all the plugins I'd already included just wasn't feasible for me, unfortunately. If I revisit it, I'll definitely look at writing my own plugin to make an adjustment.

Thank you again for playing.