itch.io

just played the demo - what a gorgeous little game. excited to see it continue :)

i really love this game's thoughtful framing and visuals - especially the little touches, like when a part of the background forms the border for a piece of text, or when the text angles to match the perspective of a window pane, or when the text appears behind something. i wish more visual novels did stuff like that.

the writing is at times very evocative, which carries the game a long way - but i also found that some of my favorite parts were when we got these montages of "still shots", giving us a moment to just absorb these places and really sink into the mood of the game. those moments are really special.

i like that the game plays a little bit with its own style - sometimes surprising you a little bit.

if i had one suggestion, it would be to use a chunkier, sans serif font for the in-game text (the text used on the main menu screen might actually work really well). with the current serif font, it sometimes became difficult to read - the thinner parts of the letters get lost in the backgrounds when the backgrounds are noisy (e.g. leaves, cris-crossing lines) or when the contrast is low or when the font is smaller. italics were almost always tough to read too. a thicker, blockier font (and in a larger size, in some places) would help readability a lot.

overall, though, this game is doing a lot of fun experiments with presentation, and the ending moment of the demo does a delightful job of hinting where it's going to keep going. looking forward to seeing more!

Thank you! That's definitely a big part of what it's going for :)

As for the hint, assuming you're talking about the part of the trunk that ends in the tip:

Can you get into John's room without mentioning one specific other character?

Thank you so much! Really glad you enjoyed it :)

This GUI rocks - thank you so much for making it available!

I used a modified version in my first VN - Parts of the Elephant!