Skip to main content

On Sale: GamesAssetsToolsTabletopComics
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines

I have some rather mixed feelings about this game.

Firstly, I’ll say that the graphics and audio are spectacularly done. No complaints with that, 5/5. But my complaints have to do with the rest of the game.

This game is basically a slightly unorthodox kinetic visual novel, and that’s a decent framework, but it’s not very up-front with that. In my first playthru, I spent a great deal of time wondering when I was going to play the game. The part that gives you a menu and tells you to click everything, most egregiously, felt like a forced tutorial for some kind of menu system that you might find in a different kind of game. It put me in a mindset of tending to ignore the story you were trying to tell.

And as for that story, given that it’s tasked with carrying the whole game, I’m not really impressed, either with the story in general, or with its connection to the “unstable” theme. Firstly, the “unstable” theme… while there’s a token mention of an “unstable climate”, that’s not actually what the story is about. The actual story is about a worldwide government conspiracy where the sun is secretly a giant lightbulb in a giant room that the flat Earth is on the floor of.

And to be perfectly honest, I find that story just in general to be rather uninspired and uncompelling. How is this supposed to make me feel? Because I don’t feel anything. There’s this message that’s shoved in your face the whole time about how you shouldn’t trust the World Government, but… in the real world, there is no World Government.

Now, it’s certainly possible to make this into a compelling story. Just take a look at, for example, The Lord of the Rings, which manages to make a compelling part of its narrative the dangers of the fictional One Ring. But it doesn’t do that just by painting the One Ring as one-dimensionally obviously bad. We see both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings multiple occasions where Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins are actually materially helped by the power of the One Ring. It has to be destroyed and its power cannot be trusted, but we can fully understand how attempting to use it against Sauron might seem to characters in-universe like a good idea, even without the corruption of its direct influence.

This game, by contrast, seems to pretty much be going out of its way to paint anyone in-universe who believes the World Government as stupid sheep who don’t think for themselves. Which I suppose might feel good to real-world conspiracy theorists, but doesn’t make for a particularly good story.

(8 edits)

Thank you for playing.
I hope you can understand that such a well known and detailed story like "The Lord Of The Rings" (which you mentioned in your comparison) would be hard to compress in a 7 minute long story which was written within a few days for a game jam.

The theme unstable lies within the chapter's detail of the story (I am sorry if it was not clear enough), but in the end it is not like a physics game where "unstable" is visibly obvious.

(I will update the game's description for more clarification).
One core element of the story is the question:
-How society's stability will be affected from a dieing sun?-

Chapter 1: The world suffers from +unstable cimate conditions due to a dieing sun.
Chapter 2: The anonymous source is telling that the World Government is conspirating with the try to gatekeep truth to prevent a +destabilsation of human's society.
Chapter 3: The spaceship's systems are becoming +unstable and the crew's thoughts about the once before trusted World Government is +scattered.

Chapter 4: This one is a bit harder to explain because it is up to the viewer's phantasy and how the post story will be interpreted:
It seems that the "sun" died earlier as expected due to the crash with the ship.
= In the end: the World Gov.'s conspiracy plan to gatekeep truth failed because it would be obvious for the humans that there is no more sunlight.

Possible interpretable post story:
- What will happen with the society's stability without a sun?
- If destablisation, could the society get its stability back because of the incoming secondary light (a new sun) which is the light from the window of the higher beeing's laboratory?

Edit: I edited this so much because I found some typos, one after another, it was early morning for me as I wrote this. :)

I didn’t get anything about society’s stability from the story to be honest, and I find the premise rather abstract, considering humans will never be around to experience a dying Sun (in fact, the Earth will turn into a completely inhospitable Venus-like planet long before the Sun.

Which, again, is not necessarily a problem, but its impact can only be as strong as any other unrealistic completely fictional idea. I brought up The Lord of the Rings not because I think your story has to be that complicated, but because that story is pure fiction and yet gets people fully invested in its world. The fact of the matter is if you want quick and efficient investment into your story, it needs to be grounded. The less realistic your story is, the more work you need to do before it really makes an impact.

I think if a dying Sun is a really interesting idea to you as a sort of fantasy horror concept, you should spend more time really creating a fantasy world that a player can get invested in despite its lack of connection to the real world. Alternatively, create a sci-fi scenario that at least somewhat creates a veneer of realism. As it is, you show a flat Earth – something so obviously at odds with known scientific reality that it’s practically a meme at this point – and a giant room with a giant lightbulb. If you at least made your universe somewhat grounded by saying that humans moved to Mars or something, and if the World Government established some kind of nuclear-powered light-producing satellite or whatever, I might be able to suspend my disbelief enough to take your story seriously with less investment.

Thank you that you are taking your time to write more and showing interest of a more detailed story.

Please take in consideration that this submission was submitted 3 days, 20 hours before the deadline.
I still have more ideas for a more detailed story with some more chapters, but I had to scrap a lot of content due to my time, at least I made this alone including graphics and music.
So I am sorry about that I could not deliver a more detailed story for you.

I know that the flat earth has a certain meme factor, as an artist I wanted to create some emotions about the topic of the flat earth. :)