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Bakar1 year ago (1 edit)

I finally finished the demo. The downside is that I played the first version so some of my bug reports are outdated and I was also going to suggest making the UI focus texture a little more noticeable, but I still encountered a couple of issues that haven't been mentioned yet.

However, I must first say that I think the game is quite enthralling as it is and I want to know what happens next in the story, and I guess before too because the passage of time is creative to say the least even if chapters are roughly linear. I think nonlinear narratives are difficult to pull off in video games, especially RPGs where constant progression tends to be a core mechanic so good job there.

I thought the story was going to be more schizo but it's not that hard to follow actually. The focus on hunting and butchering reminds me a little bit of Pathologic, especially because of the surgical tool lying around near the beginning. I bet there's going to be a level made completely out of flesh later.

Besides that the symbolism is done very well. After all that deer imagery and story moments involving deer you get the feeling that other recursive elements will have a similar degree of significance in the future. Perhaps the fish where a little explicit, I'm not sure.

The presentation in general is fantastic so far. The only issues I encountered were some instances of poor collisions and some RPG maker textures showing up such as a regular old fantasy treasure chest in one occasion. Also, I'm certain that a music track is just Nirvana, that was just a song from Nirvana, I mean come on. It broke my immersion a little bit to hear Nirvana out of nowhere, someone please hide grandma's shotgun just in case.

Finally I have a couple of bugs to report. The first one is that I could speak again with Sarah at the Hidden Pool after recruiting her. She shows up for a split second after re-entering the area and I could still interact with invisible Sarah. However, I could neither dismiss her nor get at extra Sarah this way.

Additionally, both Winter and Billy can wear little girl clothes apparently as I realized after acquiring the Farm Girl II. Actually not a bad armor before you get the funeral suit. 

Furthermore, using teen Sarah's basic attack against the Warbear consistently crashed the game while other skills did not. I had the traitor card equipped which also seemed to have no effect.

Finally, the final boss of the demo got stuck using the bloodrite shield ability for most of its turns and I won easily by spamming crackerlacker and guarding with every other character in the party. I'm not sure if that's an issue or the AI simply works like that.

Anyways, great game. My prediction is that college will suck because college sucks.

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horbror1 year ago(+1)

Thanks for playing it all the way through! A lot of things will be switched up considerably in ACT3. I want the progression of the story to be an increasing amount of "oh fuck".  

Thanks for the bugreports, some of it is on my list but some things were unknown to me. How teensarah interacts with most encounters is a bit poorly tested, since most people, me included, just use her at the end and dont go back to grind out some more. I will add the strange attack interaction to my list. 

You probably got a bit lucky with the Jackalope, there is a lot of RNG to almost every enemy. This is something that needs to be tweaked over time. I dont want to remove the randomness, but it needs to be kept in check so that it does not become uninteresting. 

The nirvana song is a complete cover, there is nothing sampled from the original. The singing is also, as with every other singing in the songs, done with programming. I get your point, but I still felt it was appropriate as a sort of mood introduction to Sarah's teenage years, and a bit of foreshadowing to what adult Sarah will initially be like if you are familiar with the original song. There are other references in the soundtrack to other songs but most of them are much more subtle. 

UI-color was changed in the newer version and people seem to like it a lot more, I do too. 

Concerning the schizo-nature of the narrative it is a bit of a deception. Everything actually fits together according to the in universe logic of the game world, and more details will come through as the game continues.  Even something that might seem completely random such as "MR.TV", is a part of the bigger picture. 

I love games like Yume Nikki but always wished they would actually make sense and you could figure out how everything works. Twin Peaks is a pretty good comparison, seems nonsensical but when you figure out what set of rules the world operates by you get it. 

The collision is just pretty shit and will continue to be so for a long time. I am going to focus on finishing and polishing chapter 1 for now, actually doing something about the collision will mean changing how maps are handled entirely. 

The clothes follow a style system which will be explained more thoroughly in chapter 2. Winter, Sarah and Billy share one of the styles, it works like armor type, this is why it becomes a bit funny. Dont know if I actually want to fix that or just keep it around for a laugh. 

University will be awful, but it can be a lot better or worse depending on player choice. 

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