Writing: An interesting writing style and plenty of choices that do seem to matter. And even though I haven’t even got through all the achievements I haven’t got tired enough to stop trying (the reason I’m not done yet is I’ve also been playing some of the other VNs from the jam, so I decided to return to this one later).
Theme: It is spooky and halloweeny even if I don’t think it’s as scary as most of the VNs I’ve read from this jam. (Wait, did I just use the phrase “most of the VNs I’ve read from this jam” again? I should get better at writing, unless I’m writing poorly on purpose to show you that not everyone can write as elegantly as you did or something like that.)
Music? There isn’t a lot of different music in there, but I guess there doesn’t need to be. The one that there is does a good job at seeming oddly modern and traditional at the same time, just like those characters seem to mostly be older than any humans while also being in a U-Bahn station. And since the story takes place in that one place (and maybe a train) there isn’t really a need for having different music in different places.
Voice acting: Pretty good, but the inconsistent volumes take a bit away from it. Yes, it was worse when I first played it than this time, and yes, I saw in the post-mortem that you were aware of it. In the first version I had to turn down the volume when the narrator spoke and back up when others spoke, and now the difference is smaller. But maybe you could have increased the volume of some lines a bit more (especially some of the Crone’s lines… unless her inconsistent volume serves to show that she’s unsure about who to be and thus unsure how loud to talk or something). And by default the music is kinda loud compared to the voices, and the sound effect of the sobbing mother is also kinda loud compared to the narrator by default. Luckily it’s easy for readers to move those volume sliders.
And also some lines are missing audio and some have extra audio.
And also some lines are missing audio and some have extra audio. I mean repetitions. Well, at least it isn’t like the first version where some lines had audio from other lines. But I probably shouldn’t be too harsh on this considering I also didn’t get audio quite perfect myself either.
Eye candy? Well, why am I suddenly referring to candy as if I were trying to rate this entry by the joke categories that the jam somehow uses as rating criteria? If I meant to write a paragraph about art, I should call it art, but maybe that won’t be this paragraph.
Art: it looks pretty good. I didn’t even realize the background had been made in part by AI. AI is so good nowadays. It can even draw a forest with lots of different trees in less time than I can draw five trees and copy-paste them to make more. I think the art looks great and the camera panning and zooming works well too.
Fun: Well, aside from fun as in comedy which I guess I should count as writing, but it does make it interesting to read so I guess it adds to the fun too. And the achievements are also fun. I didn’t have time to implement achievements myself. And the minigame, though simple, was pretty fun.
I also read the post-mortem by the way.
mossinasi, my artist, was originally planning to make 3D station model but then didn’t manage to overcome 3D textures. Having little time left, we AI-generated the background, using Midjourney, then editing it manually.
I didn’t bother with 3D textures, my 3D was untextured and then I drew in some details on the rendered images. And for two of my backgrounds I edited photographs I had taken during the jam. I do suspect editing AI output would have been faster than what I did though.
no in-game credits simply because I forgot about them and haven’t had time to make… a credits screen
How uncool! You could have put them in a variable in options.py that makes them appear on the about screen (or the learn screen as it’s called in this particular VN). But yeah, showing them at the end (or in both places) would have been nice too. And don’t worry, I think putting them on the description page was probably enough. I just used a German word I felt like the narrator would have said if he’d read that post-mortem.
And I didn’t know about ghost stations. But they definitely seem like a halloweeny thing. I guess I haven’t spent a lot of time in Berlin (I’ve gone through Berlin on the way from one place to another though.)