This is the first game I played in the jam, and I keep coming back and giving it higher and higher scores. It centers a lot of things that I have a great deal of anxiety and self-hatred around and it’s taken a lot of time for me to go back and recognize how strong the writing is to cause that – it’s not stumbling into this, it’s telling a story of a character with a lot of the same things going on as I have, and reminding me of how uncomfortably shallow most of my coping/masking mechanisms are. I’m going back to this now – I stopped early when I got too stressed out, but now that I have rated everything in the jam I feel like I can go back and give this the time it deserves – and give myself the time, patience, and compassion I wasn’t allowing for myself when I was feeling a lot of time pressure.
But yeah, I think this is excellent writing now. Maybe someday I’ll be more tolerant towards myself.
One thing that did throw me off early was getting distracted by a red herring in a very early puzzle – a reference to esolangs in the prose made me totally fail to recognize the answer right in front of me and instead feed the puzzle file into a Brainfuck interpreter which, if it skips unknown tokens, emits what looks like deliberately-engineered output in another “one character instruction” esolang that I couldn’t recognize! A friend and I spent a while trying to figure out which one it was, scouring the text for hints, before realizing and trying the obvious and discovering it to be correct. So, uh, that might not have helped my mood. And I’m still not quite convinced there isn’t some secondary solution in there, I suppose I’ll find out later on…