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(3 edits) (+2)

I'm extremely impressed by the entire package of "Limbo Line" with its theme and execution! This is certainly a rollercoaster of an experience: it got funny moments, anxiety, anguish, mystery, horror, it simply got everything. 

The gameplay is comparable to - I merely bring up a popular game example as a reference because I couldn't quite find the name of genre/category but I know it's a staple for VNs that involve management - the daily life events in the "Persona" series. There is a joy to be found of doing mundane tasks to kill time, picking who you want to hang out with, or how to react in a conversation; except here I'm trapped with the uncomfortable feeling of an office job's first day (at a callcentre) and it's even worse  when I'm told by my admin that my performance decides my fate of life-and-death! This makes for a unique immersive game premise - nothing about it is relaxing though, so it's an exciting twist on the formula. I already tried to form a plan in my head on how to escape, whereby the suspense ramped up when hints were dropped about Maddie, and I totally felt this as some objective shift of snooping around without looking suspicious.

I played without a walkthrough. Due to the complexity and many choice prompts I could not see everything. I simply followed my gut feeling, and if I hit a dead end, I try the other option. So eventually I've seen a fair number of bad endings until I hit a good ending. From then on I decided I was ready to write this review - although I certainly wish to come back later to see if I can unlock more gallery pictures! (...Still so many Spooktober entries to play)

Art:

- Stylish use of lime & purple in the palette. It makes the game stand out as a sci-fi style office setting. Combined with the clean art of backgrounds and characters, there is a sterile feel to it despite the pleasant pastel colouring.

- The use of UI within UI with the phone, pc, camera directed towards Nine for the main view. Everything looks so slick.

- Cool use of room depth perspective: with Nyari sitting behind Nine and sometimes a colleague appearing next to their side. I skimmed through the game page so I had no idea what Tava looked like and when they approached your booth with their head obscured outside view, it spooked me a little, haha. Sprites are dynamic with multiple poses. 

Writing:

- The characters are great, I love them all! Even Niard is likable (I hope this does not count as a praise). You got your colleagues of different personalities that encapsulate the office life. I like the mix of callers and that there are both light-hearted silly problems they call you for and also heavy hitting ones, and you're on the edge not knowing what to expect. The gallery pictures you get when you improved their life situation are cute bonuses.

- I love the natural feeling to the dialogue of the cast. It brings the weight of the game's atmosphere closer to you.

Audio:

- The music is amazing. 

- Great voice acting. I like the voice filters for the more alien looking characters. The natural dialogue style is especially enhanced when the voices sounds like real people we could have met on street.

Spoiler:

There were some parts that I found unsettling as I wasn't quite prepared for them, namely these Maddie's files you access. Can't handle weird repetitive sounds very well that play for a long duration, so I had to take a break before I continued on with the game. Couldn't figure out what I should do with these files, and I assumed I was missing hints in this playthrough, so I just played on to see wherever the story took me.

(+2)

Thank you so much for taking the time check out the game and leave such epic detailed feedback! I feel like what I said in my comment was nowhere near enough now >.< haha.

You also really cheered me up because I happened to see this while I was in a gigantic queue for a theme park ride, and it just really lifted my mood :3

I think the bad ends are probably more exciting than the good ends for the most part anyways, haha. The good ends wound up being somewhat rushed in comparison x3 Plus I do tend to struggle with writing happier endings because I personally prefer the bad ones as a player!

I imagine LPB will be very pleased to read your comments on the colour palette and style because that's exactly what she was going for when she described to me how she wanted things to look/feel! It will never fail to amaze me how I can give her a very basic, probably not particularly helpful description of a character, and then she just works her magic and it comes out awesome! I had nothing to do with the colour palette whatsoever because I knew that she'd come up with something stunning :3

Hehe, Niard would be so pleased to hear you say that x3 And I'm really glad the writing didn't suck since aside from putting everything together and sorta directing assets, that was my main job! Throughout the entire jam, I just felt like I didn't deserve to have such a wonderful team, and that if anything was gonna let the project down, it'd be my writing >.<

And I'm super glad to hear you thought that about the music because I both love and despise creating soundtracks at the same time xD I get so much joy from doing it, but I also feel like it consumes me to the point of insanity, haha. I'm still frustrated that I had to use 3 tracks from asset packs because no matter what I did, I couldn't get the sort of sound I wanted for Niard and Nyari's themes especially!

SPOILERS

Ahh, man, sorry they ended up making you feel like that >.< Was the sound files that you download from Maddie's page that you're talking about? Or the ones that are within the game on the PC inside her folder? Either way, do you think I should edit my warnings somehow to better alert players? I don't want to wind up making anyone feel crappy >.< I just went with 'disturbing sounds' hoping it would cover everything, but I wasn't really sure if it'd do the job!

The Maddie stuff essentially just leads to another ending which is considered a bad ending anyways, so you're not missing out on too much :3

(1 edit) (+1)

Thank you very much for your detailed reply. You've already been replying to a lot of comments, don't worry about it. :)

This reply is mostly to come back to what I had put under the spoiler tag. It's specifically about the attachment with the singing and the screen blinking. I don't know how long the clip actually took, but I was startled a bit. So I believe I just pressed Window key to get out of the game and turned the volume down, not sure anymore. There are some games I cannot play for this reason, but I know my limits. Anyway I'm doing fine. Your warning is sufficient and I imagine it doesn't make sense to say where these appear as a new player could not understand it either way.

(+1)

Hi, since Potato has many of the same thoughts that I did, I'm just going to add a little bit more.

First off, this is a gigantic and well-executed effort. I read through what you wrote, and please don't think for a second that you didn't deserve such a great team, because you did. Everyone involved did a fantastic job like Potato mentioned, and putting all of it together is no joke, and to do it so wonderfully at that.

I was blown away with how much content there was to offer, for a Jam Game at that. I loved the the effect used for Niard's voice, and those background transitions were clean.
Similar to how Potato played, I did not use a guide, and I really enjoyed getting to know the characters a lot more. However, (this is probably not your fault) I had some technical issues (prolly because of my potato PC) so the game froze at times and I had glitches with the audio. So I only managed to get a few of the endings, but if I get the chance I'll explore it all.

As I was playing through the game, the only thing I could think about is how much work this entire game entailed, so much so that it made me feel bad about my own skills( I know it's not right to compare and self-deprecate, but I want to be honest😅)

Kudos, and I'm wishing you and the team for the very best for any future projects!


I'm glad to hear you thought similarly to Potato :3 The project certainly did feel like perhaps we had bitten off more than we could chew as the deadline crept closer, haha. As exhausting as it may be, I do enjoy really pushing myself against a deadline though. It's very helpful in allowing me to cope with my mental health, even if it's not really a healthy way to work over too long a period of time x3 

Man, I'm over the moon that you enjoyed Niard's voice effects because I still wasn't sure if I was all that happy with what I did even after I finished up with it! And it took me almost an entire day's work just to add the darn things because I was an idiot and thought that maybe I could make something cool by adding 2 layers to the VA's voice >.< I'd already cut all of the individual lines, so I then went and made pitched-up and pitched-down versions, did some reverb and reverse reverb on all of them, then some delay, and then editing the volume was a nightmare afterwards as well! It was just a grind, haha. I had to keep making hot drinks and reassuring myself that I was at least making progress with each completed line, haha.

The issues you encountered probably weren't because of your potato PC x3 cos my PC is relatively decent and there are some weird audio glitches for me too! Some I know why they occur, others I'm just clueless T_T I know that voice lines don't stop playing when you use skip mode and that's because of the weird way that I make several sprite expression changes per line. It sorta prevents me from halting audio because the system thinks that each bit of text after an expression change is a new line, even though it's not, it's just part of the same sentence, and so if I use the stop voice function, it will cut off the VA halfway through a line >.< There has to be around it, I'm just not a particularly competent coder (well, I'm not a coder at all, which is why I'm using Naninovel xD) I could ditch the mid-sentence expression changes to solve the problem easily, but I really like having those in for more movement.

And then there's rewinding, which sometimes breaks audio or even freezes the game completely, which I have no idea how to fix aside from preventing the player from using the rewind feature >.<

And I still have no clue how to fix the nasty bug which occurs due to missing transition material (I don't even know what that means >.<) near the start of the game if you have skip mode active when Acheros leaves Nine with Kiol. That then causes the save function to bug and will crash the game any time the player tries to save. I still can't believe I thought I had fixed that by adding a forced wait to the line, completely forgetting that skip mode ignores wait commands T_T 

But I've had other folks say in the past that just reaching a loading screen causes my other Unity games to freeze on their potato laptops, so who knows what other problems there are in the darn thing >.<

To be honest, what you said regarding thinking about how much work a game has entailed while playing through it is exactly what I've been thinking to myself while playing through the Spooktober games cos man, there are so many that you can tell have had countless hours put into them :3 Everyone's worked so hard on their games this year that I'm just blown away!

And heck, as you say, I wind up comparing myself to others and self-deprecating all the time >.< It's kinda hard not to really cos you wanna check out other people's works, but then what happens to me is I just constantly come across stuff that's absolutely incredible, and at the same time I can't help feeling a bit like I suck in comparison >.< but I have to keep reminding myself that everyone's got something to bring to the table :3 I feel like at this point, I'm a sort of Jack of all trades, master of none type (though I can't draw to save my life, so I can only cover art stuff my using pre-existing assets and making basic edits!) I'd rather actually have a solid skill in one area though. 

If it makes you feel any better, when I played through Wolfskin's Curse, I couldn't help but think it was pretty much perfect, haha. Everything about it is so polished that it looks like a commercial release that was years in the making rather than a 1-month jam game! I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if you guys won 1st place prize for it because it's just flawless :3

I sure as hell couldn't have put together anything remotely like this without having such an awesome team though! It's such a blessing to be able to work with people on something and have heaps of fun at the same time ^-^

(+1)

I agree, deadlines can help! Rather than just staring at a wall, so I see what you're saying.

The work for Niard's voice really did show! And I'm sorry to hear that it was such a grueling process for you :(

Ohh I see, yes I do like the mid-sentence expression changes! Hopefully there's a workaround for both in the near future.

Well, at least you're trying and tried your best to fix any bugs! The game is still playable, so it should be alright. Just have to save scum I guess to get everything.

Yeah, the submissions are mind-blowing! I think your reminder is a good one, and it's cool that you're a Jack of All Trades! There's huge merit in that, and it's fun although I do see your point to be more comfortable with one skill. Perhaps writing? I think you that well! unfortunately goes under the radar sometimes with games.

Thanks for the Kind words about our game! And I do feel the same way that I got to meet cool people, have fun, and play so many well-thought out submissions here.

Take care <3