A cute story about friendship and a li’l ghost. And it has some fun point-and-click (and drag-and-drop) gameplay.
I downloaded it, but since the Windows build didn’t seem to run on Linux (sometimes Windows builds of Unity games do run on Linux, and sometimes they don’t, and sometimes they do but 2D graphics get weird, this one kept trying to start without starting), I had to play it in-browser instead.
Story
It seemed kinda spooky, especially until the ghost appeared. And I liked that the player character didn’t say anything other than through choices and point-and-click.
I think the humour was good, and you did well with the character personalities too.
And I like reading about friendship. Cute ghost stories about friendship are usually fun to read.
Audio
I think one of the things that got me to play this entry was seeing it mentioned as having the best voice actor in the jam. And yeah, the voice acting worked really well in this entry. It really showed the personalities of the characters and the relationship between them.
The music was nice too, although I found myself turning down the SFX volume to more properly listen to the music, and some tracks felt a bit short (e.g. there was one where it seems like it’s slowing down, and instead of changing into something slower paced for at least a couple of bars it just jumps back to the start, feeling like the piece was meant to be longer but that you ran out of time and left it shorter). You did manage to keep the music both spooky and cute.
The sounds that the ghost made were nice (also kinda needed), while the thunder was loud enough that I turned it down. I almost feel like it could make sense to have separate volume sliders for them.
Art
Both cute, painterly and spooky. The li’l ghost is adorable, and made some nice drawings too. The expressions are so expressive… I mean they complement the text and voice acting really well, and they give off a cartoon vibe that’s really cute. And I loved the animations too: the little ghost (was that his name?) didn’t need a voice actor with those animations, right? (I’m sorta guessing Li’l Ghost nods when I ask this question.)
UI and Accessibility
The UI looks good, and I like the point-and-click mechanics. But I also think the accessibility features could be better, especially the following:
- While the point-and-click mechanics probably make these harder to implement, it would be nice if there was rollback and/or history. Even just a short-term history (being able to re-read the last five lines of dialogue or so) would help if a player accidentally ends a line of dialogue before reading the whole line. (I didn’t have much trouble, since I was waiting for each voice line to finish before advancing the text… and I avoided enabling auto forward because I felt like that would force me to keep reading at a pace dictated by the game while not being able to re-read text if I missed something; if there was a way to re-read a few lines back in time I probably would have enabled auto-forward on my first playthrough.) Also, on later playthroughs where I was trying to get through some parts quickly, getting too far and having to start over was kinda annoying.
- I was able to read the moving text (when the individual characters in a word are moving up and down or shaking) but an option to disable those effects might be useful for people who don’t see as well as I do. But at least you don’t seem to have those effects in those bits of text (choices and location names) that aren’t voiced. Seeing as you mention in a devlog that you plan on releasing the text in more languages but leave the audio in English, I think an option to keep the text steady (and perhaps even options to change the font or font size) would be nice.
Marketing
The capsule image (thumbnail, but why not use a fancy word for it?) shows the artstyle, hints at the type of story, and the font makes me think it’ll probably be a fun story. It is.
The ~~logoline~~ logline, seems interesting and spooky. And it says “little ghost”, not just ghost, so I guess it also hints at the cuteness without mentioning it directly.
The game page is pretty but readable. – Actually, it’s pretty and readable. Or at least I wouldn’t consider it “pretty” if the text was hard to read. – Anyway, it gives me the impression that this is a cute ghost story.
Other
The drag-and-drop minigame took me a little while to get through because I kept clicking on things without getting them to move until I realised I had to hold the mouse button while dragging them.
What I liked most? Probably a lot of stuff, but if I had to pick just one thing I might pick the voice acting because that’s something this entry did really well and many entries didn’t even bother having VA. (And just because the Writing and Art sections above are a bit short doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the writing and art. I might just be better at putting into words what I think about audio and UI.)
And what I liked least? Probably the lack of rollback/history making it tricky to re-read stuff I missed.