Post by hardclumping in The Space Between comments

Viewing post in The Space Between comments

I'm sorry, I could not finish this game - I found the slow pace of the dialogue excruciating, which was exacerbated by the fact that, during all dialogue sequences, you are locked to one position/viewing angle (for example, Multiple 10-second waits where all you see is a wall texture and the line "Hm..." with absolutely nothing else to do).

Walking down the theater while having a conversation could have been interesting, but I found myself very frustrated when, every ten steps, Clara would lock you in a dialogue sequence for Over a Minute to pontificate on whether the audience are performers (they are).

If I'm honest with myself, I would have just stuck it out to the end of the game, but I had a hunch that itch.io's launcher had auto-downloaded the oldest version, which it did - the 1.06 version is not the one people will be downloading with the launcher unless they select it manually. I had just watched the Extremely slow cremation sequence when I realized this and, hoping that the latest version would let me skip forward through dialogue at my own reading pace, tried to restart the game. Once I realized that I would then have to sit through the same dialogue for another thirty minutes, I had to give up.

To be clear: I absolutely do not want to just skip through dialogue, this subject matter is interesting to me as a performance studies academic. I would genuinely love to finish this game some day so I can think about it in its entirety, but it will be when I'm able to push forward at my own pace.

chrstphfr5 years ago(+1)

Thank you for playing the game! Yes it was a conscious decision to dictate the reading pace and to not let the player skip dialogues or cutscenes, I wanted it to be that slow and I wanted to selectively give and take interactivity. This did not change in v1.0.6, I know this is not for everyone. But thank you for pointing out, that the launcher automatically downloads v1.0.0! I'll try to change that.

hardclumping5 years ago (1 edit) (+5)

I figured it was a conscious choice, but it makes the balance of interactivity severely imbalanced towards "take." The only interactivity I had experienced at all in the game up to the point where I had to stop for my own sanity was to slowly explore environments and find the button prompt. As I implied, if we'd just be able to look or walk around during these dialogues, the problem would be alleviated quite a bit - we're never locked to a view worth staring at. Another solution would be to give each dialogue a mandatory ~3 seconds, and after that give the user an option to press forward. 10+ seconds for how short these lines tend to be is, frankly, astounding.

Another cool addition would be to make sure each dialogue line is preceded by the name of the person speaking, or giving each person specific colors for their text. Sometimes when you press E on Clara, she is the one to start talking, other times it's you, so it sometimes takes a while to figure out who is saying what. If this is meant to evoke/expand upon some kind of "blurry separations between people/viewpoints" theme, it's not quite salient yet.

I'm not trying to be mean, I was really excited for this game when I heard about it, but I only have so much time to literally stare at wall textures before I need the game to move on.

SenseiYasir5 years ago

I couldn't have said it any better.

chrstphfr5 years ago(+5)

No, of course you're not mean, everyone has certain preferences, opinions and ideas of how things should work. And for me it was crucial to have this drawn-out, slowed down, static moments, where you are thrown back to yourself. That's why Clara also has no idle animation, although I animated it. And trying to figure out, not knowing and deciding for yourself, who exactly is talking, was also part of the concept. In the game's case, user experience is part of the artistic vision and was not designed to maximize user productivity or activity, in the hopes that the user doesn't get bored. With this project, I am not interested in entertainment as an end in itself. Again, that's not for everyone, but than again, 45 minutes of attention time, even for this decelerated kind of experience, is what I expect from the audience.