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CommieKazie

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A member registered Apr 03, 2021

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Looks like it's back in stock today on Spear Witch? I was hoping to order it through Tuesday Knight Games so I could get a couple of things with the shipping though. But the low availability!

Really touching entry, loved the music and was really drawn in by the characters. Really gets you thinking.

Only issue: Thought  I had a bug with the game, but I just didn't realize I had to press E to get started, and one of the levels it took me awhile to remember to jump! Otherwise excellent! 

Ohhh! I missed the switch to 2nd person on that.


Hahaha, I love that idea though. I caught "mother knows best" and Finn as tangled references, I completely missed the Gothel anagram (and I kept thinking about Zelle, the money transfer app, haha)


I also caught "slimy, yet, satisfying", though I'm sure I missed some others!

WebGL throws a wrench in everything, we had an issue with it too and didn't include it :/ Shame though, since it makes things so accessible.

I love your piano music!

I'm sure you're aware of much of this, but here are my notes as I go through:
- (e) on items after you start an interaction will close the dialogue instead of skipping to end, but the typewriter sound will keep playing. It'd be nice if it skipped, 'cause the text goes out kinda slow.  (The sound effect is a bit much by the time you're halfway through the chat with Max too).
- There were interactions that gave choices without a way to interact?

Gotta say, I loved your fourth wall break.
And standing desks are great :P

Interesting story idea! Of course it was an info-dump, but I liked the touch that Max was a ghost as he's telling you about it.

I agree with Scoot-o-Speed that the 4th wall breaks were very strong. I was expecting those to pay off in a game-mechanic sort of way from how they were being used.

I noticed I could walk around the pier from the sand and tried to get out of the labyrinth that way, turns out I couldn't, haha. I'm sure this is more of a jam limitation, but it'd've been nice if the beach by the pier didn't let you walk down there.

I loved how the left-hand rule (as soon as it was introduced by that crab) got you directly out the way you came in, and if you followed it from the entrance, took you straight through. Great touch. Naturally, I didn't try this until I wandered through the labyrinth aimlessly for a while.

Really enjoyed Gavi's skipping animation, though Gavi's hitbox often got me stuck in dead-ends in the maze.

This was probably also a jam limitation, but the repeated crab dialogues had me doubting my sanity. (I just went back in to confirm there were repeats, I know at least the "Day 430: running out of supplies and missing my family" and the left-hand rule repeats). I was expecting to be able to use what crabs said to me as a metric for if I'd talked to a crab before, with the meta-expectation that previous visitors wouldn't speak to crabs word-for-word even if they talked to the same ones a couple of times.

Very cute! I don't trust Owen at all, Gavi seemed trustworthy though!

Echoing a few others here: Awesome atmosphere. I had to check that my headphones were plugged in because it sounded like the voice was coming from my apartment walls. Very disconcerting. Going from light to light was incredibly disconcerting, really awesome job on that.

Like Corrade said, the way you made the world feel flat and infinite while using gentle curves to obfuscate line of sight was great.

The classical music and distortion were great touches, but it was unclear to me if I was supposed to be doing something or just waiting for the track to end. I went up to the big lighthouse and was able to clip through it. Waiting and clipping pulled me out of it. It may have worked better if we were walking towards something that lasted most of the track? Just a thought.

World-building-wise, it was unclear to me (and maybe this is where the unreliable narrator comes in) whether the world was actually the way the narrator described it. I was unsure what HADES was by the time the game "disconnected" me. I may have missed something though, just letting you know what I got!

(Also, tossing a vote in, I didn't mind the snow)
Thanks for making it! Please don't make me walk between lampposts in the dark again :P

Very interesting concept, it did a great job of building foreboding as the creatures in the narrative changed. I agree with aXu, the voice acting was surprisingly good! I was hoping for some meaningful choices when it came to the
SPOILERS AHEAD
"You need to find a way to convince Alicia to live". That felt like the beginning of the game where we get to make meaningful choices to engage with Alicia.

Loved the concept!

I agree with a couple other commenters here: It'd be nice if the movement speed was a bit faster. I want to see the other ending, but it's basically impossible to speed run :(

I also agree that the music got repetitive, but if the walk speed was faster I might not have noticed? It was during one of my walkabouts trying to figure out which door opened that I started to notice it looping. It was pleasant background before then.

I really liked the Finn and Mother characters, a lot of games that do the "You don't know who to trust" are either too opaque or too transparent. (See: Myst, "Which brother do you trust" for too transparent, and... I don't have an opaque example on hand) but I felt like you did a solid balance. I had reasons to trust or distrust either. You did a great job building those characters while also doing your worldbuilding. I also loved the moral quandary you presented with the final choice. Nothing new, but still fun.
(SPOILERS AHEAD for anyone reading through comments first:)
Having the main reasons to distrust Finn coming up at the very end was effective for me. I'd gotten used to him being the Hero, so even though the information you give at the end is a pretty strong "no he's bad" statement it conflicted with what I'd already decided on.
It was a very interesting choice to have Mother trying to figure out what was going on with Zele as the story progressed too. I started distrusting Mother because she was _obviously_ the bad AI, but Finn and Mother were foils for each other, and then swapped sides over time, but not enough for me to _know_ what to do. Well done.

Final thought: Holy references Batman! I got at least 3 Disney, 1 Bioshock, and I'm sure there were some that I missed. If that was your 4th wall break, then it was very subtle, but if that was just for fun it definitely took me out of it a bit. Like when you start counting "Umm"s from a public speaker, haha

I echo WordyRobin on a lot of their points:
(Spoilers? ahead if you haven't played yet)
It was very interesting that you got to be the unreliable narrator to a captive. That was dark and intriguing. I really loved the way you did worldbuilding though the lies/truths you could tell your pal.
It didn't feel like the dialogue choices made a difference in the creature's mood though? I was unsure if my choices had impact. Maybe I didn't play long enough? I did two playthroughs, the first I ran out of fuel fair and square, the second I got a "game over" when I still had toxic waste in the ship, which was sad.

It might be nice to be able to give players the option to turn off the fish-eye. That started to get to me a bit, especially since the wall and floor colors were similar enough. I wound up learning the ship layout by collision.

The core gameplay loop did become tedious, maybe decreasing the number of times you had to fill the fuel tank before you could get the next story-chunk at the helm? The world was intriguing but the gameplay loop got in the way of it for me.

Really cool concept, it was amazing how a few short phrases could be so evocative of personal memory. So simple and yet so effective at bringing me back to places. Like WordyRobin, it also took me a bit to figure out that it was toggling through phrases and not _choosing_ them. (And sometimes the first one that popped up was the one I wanted, so I had to toggle all the way around, minor stuff though)

Super interesting!

(1 edit)

Thanks for playing! I really enjoyed watching your playthrough on your stream! (I'm ApoplecticJackalope from Twitch, my usernames are all over the place for this jam, haha)

I'm going through our Dialogue System right now to clean it up, in retrospect I think I can make it a lot simpler. I'd be happy to go over Ink and how we implemented it with you sometime if you want!
Ink does a great job of separating narrative from your code. If you find that adding and branching text is a slow process or confusing process I'd definitely check it out. It's like markdown for branching narratives.

Echoing other reviewers here: Very simple premise that was very spooky (been done before, but your execution worked!)
Potentially increasing player movement & look speed would help with the frustration folk were feeling trying to navigate the maze to find 5 objects? I know one of the Metro games had a similar enemy in a library. Rows of shelves broke line of sight pretty well and created suspense and terror because you didn't know how quickly they were coming for you or if they'd be around the next row.

You could also decrease the range that the enemy pursues you at and have more in the map, so you don't have to walk backwards the whole time but still get the "could be around any corner" effect.
Or maybe just keep one and teleport it ahead of the character at a certain point?

Great work for two days though! I've got a low threshold for horror, so I noped out after 2 keys, haha

I had a lot of fun playing this! I really enjoyed the writing, the commitment to the bit, and the depth of the puns. You really nailed the humor on this one! I was ready to fall on my face with all the memory questions, haha

See you then!

3rding the timezone question!

I'd love to tune in your going through Porko's Quest!
https://itch.io/jam/narrative-driven-jam-2/rate/1032035