The storyline was interesting, but hampered by a lot of problems. The writing was not grammatically correct and a bit hard to parse in places. I suspect English isn't your first language, so I won't hold that against you, but it is difficult to get into a game where the focus is on the story when it isn't written very well. The big problem is that the game likes to waste the player's time for no reason. "I should look around before going into the school... ok I looked around and there was nothing." That sort of thing happens too often in the game. There's a lot of wandering around trying to make the story progress that just doesn't really add anything. Some of it could be charming, but the language barrier hurts that (like when you walk around the town and talk to everyone - this could be cute with lots of funny little interactions, but it mostly isn't). Also, the maps are pretty ugly. They feel haphazard and seem like the wrong tiles are used for floors or walls (I think at one point a wall tile is used to to break up rooms as a partition). At any rate, this isn't a bad effort, but falls flat in some key areas. A little more direction and a little less time wasting would have made this more of a joy to play. (For instance, I wandered around inside the school looking for something to light the way, when a simple message of "I should check the shack that dog was guarding" would have sent me in the right direction. You then have the player go back into the school and wander around again, so maybe try to cut back on some of the confusion wherever possible.)
Viewing post in Letters from a lost time jam comments
Hi. Thanks for this detailed feedback. I premise that I don't want to justify the choices at all. I would just like to explain the reasons, then maybe I made wrong choices or made badly. I begin by apologizing for the language because yes, I know very little English. This is one of the fears I had as the story is the very fundamental part of the game. So I'm sorry you don't understand much. For the moments of exploration outside the house and school, it doesn't add much but it is to stay consistent with the plot itself (which predicts that the protagonist knows nothing, at least up to a certain point). However, I played with the environment to make people understand which places to explore (the grass in the prologue and the plants outside the school). Same thing happens in gardens where there is a camouflaged plant to be found. I developed it with a player in mind who does not run left and right to finish the game as soon as possible, but a player who observes the details. For tiles, I would have liked you to have been more specific. In the part where the torch must be looked for, I had thought of inserting something to guide but I preferred to avoid "helping" too much. The game continuously guides the player through the protagonist's thoughts. I could fix the part of the school once the contest is over, when I can upload other versions. Thanks again.
I think if you'd described the flowers or something it would have made finding the patch of ground a bit more rewarding. As it was, getting a message over and over that says "nothing there" or whatever was more discouraging than anything and didn't seem to add to the game. Make it have meaning. There's nothing wrong with a game that makes the player stop to observe things, but there has to be something to observe. If you say there's nothing there, that's what the player will think. They won't think "oh this is a nice patch of grass."