itch.io

I absolutely love this game. One of the best old-school-style point-and-click horror games I've seen recently, and combined with the monsters moving unfairly quickly while the player remains confined to a pointing and clicking system, it makes for a terrifying experience. The art design was phenomenal too, with each subsequent room ramping up the tension (ex. the portrait, which for some people was a relatively soothing human touch, suddenly becoming headless). You really know how to make this genre work. 

I can't find any fault with this game. The easter egg was of course the cherry on top ;) I can only hope that you make more. 

So.... I made an itchio account just to comment on your games. Hope that isn't too weird.

Your craft is, simply put, absolutely fantastic. I admit I'm pretty new to this genre as a whole. Text-based games can feel a little hefty sometimes--a little bit too much work to digest for someone like me whose attention span is already short enough as is for most flashy shiny games to keep my focus, let alone ones that make me read through blocks of text--so it's an absolute treat to come across a game of its genre that so seamlessly marries the spatial immersion of a traditional video game with the natural evocative power of words. It's why Kentucky Route Zero is a favorite of mine, but I feel like this game surpasses even that one in terms of intimacy and intensity. It might have to do with the smaller space and the subject matter of the game, obviously, but your elegant game design takes much of the credit, too.

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I came from your tumblr post so I did get a glimpse into your thought processes behind this, and can I just say the grid format was genius? I know you said it was directly inspired by A Dark Room, but I haven't played that one so I sadly don't have that point of comparison. But the Silent Hill influence really shone through in how it gave off the perfect third-person-but-first-person-intimate perspective without using any sprites or markers to indicate the location of the character, which imo would have ruined a lot of its emotional impact (it's actually one of the minor problems I have with the OG SH games, and really just visual games as a whole). It was also simple to navigate, which made combing all the rooms very easy and thus not an exercise in frustration wondering if I hadn't missed a corner of the room somewhere. The confrontation in room 201 really spiked my adrenaline, but personally my favorite moment was having to manually click the prompt to reveal the screaming red DO NOT OPEN letters in room 208--made me feel like I was moving my flashlight over them in real time, and the pang of dread it sent through my stomach was very real. 

I cried for the toddler. I don't care if it's a bloody horror cliché to use children as a device for poignancy, it gets me every fucking time and you positioned the beds so well that I had already found the T-rex plushie and the bandaids and the snacks long before I got to the inevitable corpse wrapped in sheets like an unbearable gift. By that point I was almost hoping the corpse would be the adult's. Or at least that there would be two of them in that room. That there was only the child was almost infuriating in the sheer despair of it. You could have let us pick up the T-rex. I would have in a heartbeat. God damn this game is good.

All in all, thanks so much for making this. It sure hits differently playing this in 2021. Hope you and yours are doing alright.