itch.io

I've reached the end of what's currently reasonably achievable in about 10.5 hours of playtime. I may throw myself at the currently-unreasonable grind towards crafting a Soul, but otherwise I'm "done."

My main feeling about the game as compared to other "discover the mechanics" incremental games, like The Candy Box 1&2, A Dark Room, or Universal Paperclips, is that there's just not quite enough to discover after Darkness. You know that much already, though, so just call that a +1. Don't be afraid to throw a massive curveball at the player's assumptions and/or completely change the main genre.

The Hermit, Strength, Temperance, and The Magician seem to be the only charms you really need to start grinding. The Emperor is an obvious first choice for housemaxxing, but Strength seems to overshadow Population management, especially if you also have The Heirophant. I really quite like the charm system, but they definitely spiral on themselves rather quickly.

I definitely agree with every point in the TODO list. I think that giving the Heart a tally of how close the other resources are to Infinity alongside food might make it more intuitive that you should attempt to max out all 16/18 resources to get the maximum benefit. Also, a button to exit from the game to the save selector would be nice, unless there is one already and I just missed it. 

10/10 game, can't wait to start a new save file on a future versions.

I'd consider trying it with short nonsense phrases written in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, of Keen and Minecraft fame. It was designed as a genuine font with the intention of players being able to legitimately read it, so it might work better, and it's already got a storied history of being used on mars.

I might have to take you up on that some time, since the main issue was that I was just having trouble working out how to configure them.

Thanks, I think it turned out well

I have no idea why it's resetting lines when clicking, it's not supposed to do that.

Thanks, I figured for cheap and fast art the "mid-school notebook scribbles" style was a good choice.

Truthfully the reason why the text pops like that is I was planning to use sysl-text, but after finding it impossible to work with I did the next fastest thing and just used love.graphics.printf to draw gradually growing substrings, so it doesn't take the final state into account when wrapping mid-scroll. If I do something like this again I'll definitely build a proper set of textboxes first.

That was absolutely lovely! I remember playing the original jam version or something close to it back in 2019 and being very sad when I ran out of content to explore, so it was a lot of fun sitting down and going through the finished game. It's incredible just how quickly you can get deeply attached to well-written characters (Natalie seems like someone I'd genuinely like to be friends with), and watching all their personal arcs unfold was almost more satisfying than the good ending itself!

I think my favorite part is the subtle differences in dialogue depending on circumstance. The way that for certain cutscenes and conversation paths you have different dialogue entirely depending on who's in the room and whether you've met the person before. As a writer and programmer myself, that kind of attention to detail always really wins me over to a game.
Of course, as a lover of music my second-favorite part has to be Purrgatory Blues :V

My only regret is that I never managed to locate that last snowglobe...

What a neat game! It's really interesting how a good strategy for laying out leaves naturally ends up with flowy tree-shapes.

Update:  yikes

I'm really digging this so far. The writing is fantastic, and the artstyle is pretty much exactly up my alley. I'm totally following along with new releases.

Not gonna lie, the ending got me all emotional, but I do have to say a decent part of my disappointment was just at the gardening being over.

You've got a real special game here. I might just come back to this every once in a while.