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Adore the presentation on this! The vibe is impeccable, graphics strong and cohesive as a whole, great music and sound effects the whole lot! I also appreciate the continuous narrative while progressing through the game. Sadly the moment it reaches windowed mode it crashes for me, so I could only play up to there. I tried it a few times up till there, but while the window opens and I hear some sound, nothing else happens and it crashes to desktop. No worries, could be my not so up-to-date laptop.

The following is a list of notes I wrote down while playing, but please view these in the context of really liking the game (The more you like it, the more small things become noticeable in my experience!) If you're not interested in player feedback at all then feel free to ignore (we all know we'd want to polish a hundred things but can't within the time-frame).

While I like the animated and timed textboxes (great pop-in animations too), I would personally prefer to be able to move onto the next textbox with a keypress myself. Sometimes they were too fast and I couldn't read what they said. My eyes would first have to find where the new box is and wouldn't always make it to the end, or other things were happening on screen. While replaying after the crash, I would've liked to be able to skip through the textboxes instead.

While most controls are labelled quite clearly I was a little lost at the start of the game, when asked to move the control sticks. My bad though, should've read the text yo posted here! Similarly when asked to hit start or f11, I pressed start on my keyboard, before realizing that was a controller-only option.

The first time the game console starts and you're welcomed to the opening screen, there's an exit placed below the main TV, but it remained non-functional. Because I walked over it and expected something to happen, my brain registered this as just visual extras, meaning I didn't recognize the first exist as being such.

I enjoyed the volume up/down mechanic, but up until the last puzzle that forces you to use it I felt very little need to do it, the optimal route felt like putting volume on full and just running it. Moving my character on the sound waves also felt a little off and unpredictable, the speed wasn't always what it was moving on ground and moving left/right had different speeds, meaning I had trouble timing the soundwave walks.

On the first red/white split puzzle I got stuck by moving both characters to one of the exits, but there was no way back or way to restart the level and I had to re-start the game. I also found these puzzles (especially the one after) to be good in theory, but difficult to execute due to the movement of the character. The slow acceleration start and de-acceleration after letting go of a key made it tricky to do the precise movements the game was asking of me, when movement felt slightly like being on ice.

All in all great presentation, hope you polish this up post-jam as it seems so close to being complete and fully polished, very impressive! Love the glitchy shaders that change over time, too, rather than being the same effect repeated.

that means a lot coming from you dude! since your game is pretty much an aesthetic maximum haha. and damn, the end of the game does actually close the game for you automatically, but there should be other visual aspects after you go into windowed mode. it looks a little bit like the game crashes after you go into the monitor, but the window you're left with should have other things going on in it. i'm assuming you waited a little bit while the music was going? if you can hear the sounds, you should be able to hear the music track conclude before it permanently closes itself. after about 3 seconds of the empty window you should see something happen.

and yeah the textboxes not being on input really made me cringe at myself, but i added the entire story sequence intro on the last couple days and i didn't have enough time to make it input-based. i figured i didn't want to troubleshoot it this late into the game, so i opted for timed textboxes. in between my frantic development and that i had to rewatch the intro cinematic over and over, i might have been a little too stingy with the amount of time i allotted the players :p i was kicking myself for not putting a coefficient in front of the timers for quick tweaking of how long everyone got. i might've slapped on like 1.25 to 1.5 times more wait time in between each textbox.

also funny story about the pop-in for the textboxes--obviously Teleco's was meant to look like it's coming out of glowy TV static, but the Channeler's text was based on the black-barred yellow Helvetica font that they use to subtitle old undubbed foreign films here. so i wanted the Channeler to speak one word at a time with the text being pushed up and disappearing with each new line, so further emphasize the CRT/VHS era aesthetic. the left on read dev works in movies and actually was really excited to see that i did that, and we had a good laugh over it. :'] but i didn't have enough time to figure that out either, so it uses the same pop-in as Teleco's.

and yeahhhhh lmao, i know i designed the starting area a little messily. i was telling someone earlier about how i think the visual design of the starting island is also confused by the vertical columnal arrangement of CRTs. since you were supposed to make one complete circuit before having your signal pass, i felt bad putting the splitter entrance and exit there, since you wouldn't know what to do with them and they're much more noticeable than the tile path leading to the first "gaomono" creature.

you can move with the soundwaves to go faster in any direction, but i kind of mixed in advanced and casual approaches so that the game could be completed in 10 minutes by someone who isn't familiar with it, but could be completed much faster by someone who was more familiar with it. like the momentum physics were meant for being able to corner faster and make precise approaches towards the gaomono. cranking to maximum and simply waiting will get you through everything else until the end, but if you control your volume as you go you can bypass everything quickly. in fact, if the gaomono are muted, you can actually bounce off them since their audio waves don't lock you in place, so they can kind of boost you to make you go faster. in an earlier iteration, the first splitter is approached by a gaomono that's locked in place if you keep the volume high, but it stressed people out and i thought it would prolong the challenge too much, so i opted to keep it out. but luckily everyone seems to figure out that you have to modulate the volume slowly for the last one.

and oh no, i don't think i've seen anyone get stuck like you describe but i can imagine exactly how that happened. damn. yeah that's an oversight then haha. 

thank you for your feedback! it's a damn shame you couldn't see the ending, because i think it really caps it off in a memorable way, but i'm glad that you spent the time on it and i hope you'll be around for when we take it even further. :]