Wanna say upfront that I appreciate your thoroughness and dedication to your craft for taking the time bothering with this, and i hope it isn't too frustrating that i'm a bit uncertain on the order i did things as i was kinda just poking around everywhere and seeing as much as i could find. If i had to guess i think the most likely thing that screwed things up for me is that as far as i recall when i went to the kitchen and saw the sparkles over the cabinet i went through two interactions before they disappeared, picking up the chalice and making the fried rat (the 1st one, i believe) . I may have not talked to carol again until after I'd completed the feeding rat mission(s). Also, and i don't know if this would affect things at all, but i know i probably took longer than most people to exorcise the toilet phantoms. I didn't realize i needed to get the hairpin blessed and died once for that, and then gave up for a bit when i got it blessed and still couldn't kill them cause i was pressing "enter" instead of "z". I only came back to them after either completing half or all of the rat feeding quests. Hope this helps.
DarkwingDuck77
Recent community posts
ok, if that's the solution then i think i definitely encountered a bug, and I'm not just talking about the spiders (which technically aren't even bugs, but i digress). Whenever i talked to Carol after getting the girl to her the only dialogue i got was about having a girl's night and them having a less transaction-based relationship, nothing about a sacrifice.
for the life of me on the web version i haven't been able to find a way to get the sacrifice for the deer to appear. Originally thought it would be the girl from the crash but she's non-existent after taking her downstairs. Then I thought it was supposed to be the webbed guy in the basement but realized it's not after completing his music selection side-quest. Tried going back in the forest to see if maybe there's something i missed, only for the rudolph discovery to re-trigger and then hard-lock me out of re-entering without the son, whose dialogue wouldn't re-do the second part of that event.Seen in other comments something about a cab driver, but he hasn't appeared for me. Gone through every option i could think of, so I'm thinking I've probably encountered a glitch. Partly because when I click down in inventory for tasks/hints the character says i should have everything i need for the resurrection but when i click on the chalice it says i need blood of the sacrifice.
Wanted to send a message to the creators of this game cause I encountered a game-compromising issue that i believe other's have left comments about, though i was eventually able to work around it. Specifically it's the "fatal error" message you get after starting the game, that leads it to shut down/become unresponsive. At least for me, it was solely tied to the "shadow" quality in the games graphics. If the shadow quality was set to low, the game was playable for me even if all the other graphical settings were set to their highest, but even if I set all other graphics to their lowest setting, the game would soon crash if shadow was set to medium or high.
Overall this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but for me, setting the shadow to low, also produced a strobing effect that turns the playable character's skin gray at about half-second intervals (I know this would only happened for low setting shadows because of the few times i was able to make it past the opening cut-scene with higher shadow settings before the games inevitable crash. also it didn't affect her clothing and hair). Besides the main character this strobing effect didn't occur on any of the other visuals of my play-through so far (i stopped after reaching the first few chemical gas aliens) apart from a few specific body parts on the women stuck in walls (from what i remember 1 finger, the first girl's vagina, and i think the second's nipples), which was super strange.
It's just a theory but it may be because only the main characters body and some body parts of women in the game were tweaked in a manner that most of the games other assets weren't. My guess is computer's more optimized for games don't experience this issue, as my own computer only has 8gb of ram, but I think choosing between strobing and crashing wasn't what was intended when a low shadow quality was implemented.
Besides that, the game's quite good. My only other major complaints are tied to motion precision. I found all the platforming (anything involving jumping) to be frustrating, even when setting all graphics to their lowest settings. For instance it seemed impossible to get to the card in the ramp room after lifting the platform unless your character also eventually picks up a jet-pack. And because my experience with motion wasn't snappy, it made the combat too difficult (though it was appropriately forgiving). I think it was good game design to draw attention to the first enemy you encounter that you can take down in a way where you see it before it sees you, but it wasn't as good that an enemy who's essentially a ball of gas with legs isn't a one-shot kill, especially cause when running the game on my pc, I wouldn't get a second chance to line-up a shot before it had exploded in my face. This gets worse when subsequent enemies are hidden behind corners and doors, and eventually led me to not have any faith in combat as a real option, which really kills the games tension.
Besides that, the only other nitpick is that the main character seems to be an alien herself with how unphased she is by everything going on. I know that there are people who find excessively chatty protagonists to be annoying, but in this kind of horror game, i think it deserves a reactive protagonist, who'll frequently make comments to themselves, to reveal their character and really sell how terrifying their situation is. And for those who find that annoying, you could include an option to limit or turn-off those types of comments.
Anyway that's it. Not sure if these comments sections were made for essays like this, but hope some of what I said helps.