It's got a good flow between the action and text segments. At first it felt like they were competing with each other since one was active and the other passive and immersive, but after a few levels the action started to feel like it sort of resets you for the next session. The sprites are neat and animated, and there's been good bit of care put into the way the text is presented. Audio is also something that didn't feel like it fit the nature of the game at first, but it all starts to come together after a while for a hypnotic arcade experience.
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I think it’s difficult to make the primary hypnotic content in “a hypnosis game” feel like they fit into the rest of the game in most circumstances; it has the most natural presentation in an adventure game with a first-person viewpoint, and this is most definitely not that…
So I swung for the fences on writing suggestions to merge them into the same state of flow, and tried to use the “two distinct modes” structure as a strength rather than a weakness. When using hypnosis to express concepts and kink other than the literal process of hypnosis itself, a hypnotist needs to find room for playing with the suggestions and altered state of consciousness they’ve induced, after getting them established in the first place. I think that’s hard to do in anything prerecorded, including a game, because with no feedback, how do you match the “play” portion to your subject’s attention span and the parts of the suggestions that resonated with them the most? Permissive phrasing and vague insinuation are the traditional tools here (for good reason; they’re also important elements of hypnotic suggestion in general!), but Vacation represents my experiment with a different approach: abandoning the structure of language and using words as items in and of themselves that the subject is using in an activity that has, itself, been associated with the hypnotic effects I intended to elicit.
Association gets stronger through repetition, so it doesn’t surprise me that the modes feel better-integrated later on, when the interplay between them feels more familiar. I also expect the mode alternation to produce fractionation effects and generally increasing hypnotic susceptibility, so the arcade portions get longer as I expect time loss / time dilation and extension-of-attention-span effects to be intensifying. Glad to hear the interaction between them worked out for you!