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(1 edit) (+1)

The atmosphere of the game was absolutely fantastic; the music was very evocative, the rune stones in the bowl thrown onto the mat was a great take on runecasting, the book to give some basic instructions was quite nice... but it had some rather glaring problems, in my eyes, though some of these are probably due to the short time period for the game jam. I could easily see this becoming a fun little game to play if it was fleshed out more and had more time to bake in the oven, though.

First off, the fail state comes far too quickly after making a bad selection, so it's far too easy to accidentally brute force options you're unsure of, especially when many of the non-directional selections only consist of two or three options.

Secondly, the rune mat itself, or "board" as it's labelled in the book, doesn't have any explanation for the various sections and what THEIR symbols mean. While there are some example expressions in the back of the book that showed the way, not understanding what each section of the board meant for which runes left me uncomfortably frustrated feeling like I was lacking some important bit of understanding- or worse, that it was just window dressing for theme and actually had absolutely nothing to do with anything, which is what it felt more and more like as I continued to progress towards the end, and if so, is a rather big let-down.

Thirdly, you throw the runes exactly once per questioning period, instead of throwing them for each question, which means that the questions tend to spread out amongst the runes (unless a simple yes/no) so you learn to disregard runes that would have been involved in previous questions, generally. This takes a lot of the mystique out of the experience, and pulls me, at least, out of the immersion that the tent, the low lighting, the beautiful background music, the awesome visuals, everything else works together to present.

The fact that there are so few questions I'm attributing directly to it being a Game Jam game, and a more fleshed out release would likely have many more questions and more variability to it. Because it is just a single path that doesn't change, it lost some points in the enjoyability catagory for me; there's no replayability really once you clear a section, since everything else (that I did not exhaustively test, but I did test a few alternatives) is a fail state. Also, incredibly unfortunately, clicking doesn't advance text to the end of the current block so you can read it all right away, but progresses to the next block of text entirely, meaning that clicking will erase what is being said and skip to the next part unless it's the specific question; good for speedrunning and getting back to where you were off a fail state, bad for frustration with getting to a new part and accidentally skipping it. Combine that with the issues above, and that's why my final score is 3/4/3.