Congratulations on taking home the Spooktober win!! 🏆
A harrowing look into a distinctly possible future where AI and hyper-capitalism with no regard for morality and human life reign supreme.
Gonna hide the rest due to spoilers:
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Having done multiple playthroughs to see different endings, I appreciate how even most of the "choices" players do actually get the opportunity to make don't change the outcome or even the subsequent dialogue at all, really hammering home how powerless the MC is (starting from the very beginning, where mods and a massive medical bill were foisted upon them without permission or consultation).
I love the amount of care and detail that went into the UI, including the way the UI itself is a story element, further feeding into a sense of hopelessness and external locus of control.
The characters are well-written and multi-faceted, which was a pleasant surprise from their first impressions. Penny is definitely a stand out, and almost feels like the epitome of a twisted corrupt VTuber whose sole goal is to extort and exploit their followers, despite (initially) coming off as cute, innocent, "helpful," and flirty, so it was fun seeing to what lengths she would go to maintain this façade, as well as how drastically her answers shifted when answering "Honestly".
The story was also excellently crafted. As soon as I found out that Sharpe already had 2 strikes, I knew where the story was heading long-term, which didn't make being railroaded (heh) into it any less horrifying... although I'm glad that Riley survived! She's one of my favourite characters, so that was a pleasant surprise.
(Also, how the hell did you manage to make this game while also writing for protoViolence within the same month?!?1?one)
The (animated) backgrounds, animations, CGs, cinematography, music and SFX are all really well done and super polished, and collectively amount to a really immersive experience, so amazing job! It also really highlights some of the advantages of using NaniNovel and Unity over other engines, such as RenPy.
I did run into that bug where the game freezes the first time running it, although amusingly, it let me open the Save window, but then froze when trying to save, lol. Fortunately, I didn't even have to restart my computer to get it working — closing and relaunching the game did the trick.
Re: the itch.io page design, the top portion looks awesome! But as soon as I scroll down below the page fold and the background gears animation is gone, I'm "greeted" by super bright yellow on either side of the centre column, making my eyes bleed. >_<;
One minor game-related UX issue: in terms of (pure) keyboard accessibility, I was able to use the ↑ arrow key to navigate to the choices in the center, but for whatever reason, using the ← and → arrow keys didn't let me switch choices, so if I had been exclusively using KB to play, I'd be forced into only picking the leftmost choice (and I don't recall how that worked in instances where the leftmost choice was forcibly disabled). I don't recall which version number I played, but it was an earlier version. So disregard this if it's since been fixed.
In terms of optimization, 1 GB is absolutely massive for a jam game, so I'm curious what could be done with file type conversions and file compression (lossless or even partially lossy) to shrink that down a bit with minimal to no noticeable drop in quality.
As an aside, holy hell, it seems impossible to find YouTube videos of this game outside of the itch.io comments, because of the game name. Sadge... :')
Fantastic job to everyone on the team, and again, massive congrats on the big win!!