This is a great game and one of the highlights of the jam. It's clear that you're a seasoned developer, but I was still surprised that you only have a prior game under your belt. How you've approached this game demonstrates your potential as a professional and experienced indie developer.
I think what makes me say that with confidence is that you clearly know how to approach the design of an adventure game. There's considerable amounts of voice acting, cutscene-style sequences, and lots of well-scripted encounters. This is definitely a very polished experience for a short jam game.
Gameplay-wise, the puzzles are solid for an adventure game. Most of the item combinations are commonsense and only took a little bit of exploring and backtracking to figure out. Okay, maybe the pendulum didn't make much sense, but the context feedback in the game made things easy enough.
The story itself is a playful case of parallel narratives as the player slowly realises the protagonist's story aligns with the lighthouse. There's plenty of environmental storytelling and notes scattered around to give the player an insight into what happened before the montage of visions at the end.
Horror-wise, this is more of a story-based horror game than a scarefest. There are no jump scares, just lots of ghostly visions that manifest around the island to assist in the story and keep the player on their toes. I think you could have comfortably made these a little more in-your-face, but that's just me.
Graphically, this is about exactly the sort of fidelity expected for the HPS1 jam. The consistency between the assets is pretty good, and the island is lovingly put together in a way that makes the environment feel realistic and alive. The view from the top of the lighthouse is pretty breathtaking.
Just some random thoughts of feedback:
- The temporal aspect of storytelling is something to think about. It came to mind a few times: Firstly, whether the game is meant to be contemporary, historical, or both is a little confusing due to the mixed assets, such as the posters and old paintings. This also applies to the significance of the ending: is the protagonist confronting old memories, or is he hallucinating? It's hard to tell how time operates, as playful as the loop reveal actually is.
- I know this is a bit of a stale adventure trope, but an inventory menu could have been helpful to remind the player of their current items, and a little more item-based feedback animation could be useful as well.
I did a video playthrough below:
Thanks for the great experience! I look forward to playing more of your games.- FSV