itch.io

Congratulations on creating this game: it's quite thoughtful and profound. Looking at itch.io, it seems few games have expressed experiences of tinnitus and hearing loss, so this is a really unique authorial voice. The visuals correspond nicely as an allegory to the narrator's distortion of perception.

I think of art games like Dys4ia where the interactive elements of the visual novel enhance and reinforce the meaning of the experience being conveyed. I think you did a good job at integrating those elements into the game. 

I am not familiar with neurological tinnitus - I have some from hearing loss - but was very interested in how the narrative does not fixate alone on the physical experience but how tinnitus has psychological impacts. 

The prose really elegantly captures the distress of having uncertain sensory input, which carries into the game's feelings of self-doubt, hopelessness and decay. Not sure if these are informed by personal experience but there's enough here to suggest a good literacy of how these things carry lifelong legacies. 

In terms of feedback, as you asked - I think the key things that stand out are balancing surrealism with narrative. It can be hard trying to find ways to ground strange or dreamlike sequences - such as the room escape segment - with the earlier flow of the narrative; I interpreted it as a sort of transportative mental break but this wasn't clear.

The player choices at the ending have several paths, with the 'good' ending reconnecting with the motif of the paper cup and learning to live in spite of tinnitus, which I found quite nice. The 'horror' paths are darkly effective too. When players have one choice at the end of a long linear path, they may frame their experience by reference to that ending. It is interesting that two players may ultimately interpret the meaning of this game much differently by the tone that the endings suggest. 

Great work. I hope you can continue to create interactive stories like this. It's an incredible medium and you have a good voice for this sort of thing! 

Shocked this doesn't have any reviews so thought I would add a comment that this is great work creating a puzzle game using negative space as the hook. 

I liked the interplay of the black-white spaces and how the areas weren't quite perfectly symmetrical to make navigation part of the puzzle solving. I think the puzzles work best when the inverted spaces require the player to consider different movements and solutions in the black and white sides of the game. 

If you want to build on this idea, have a think about how the puzzle design could exploit the fact that the player may need to multitask doing completely different objectives or avoiding different hazards to meet the same goal in both spaces.

For a jam game there's plenty here. Also the visual design is super cute and simple - not very often you get to see the spritesheet in the background of the page! 

Great work! I had fun playing this!

I'm glad to see the SimTunes reference because this was reminiscent of mucking around and creating little spatial soundscapes. Always a pleasure. 

As a music toy / generator, I like that this is much more chaotic and atonal. SimTunes follows predictable rules, and this does too, but here you've got dozens of critters interacting with the grid and causing it to slowly decay. Beauty and melody is here but sometimes the best tools are those capable of being broken. I spent much longer on this than I expected I would! 

I enjoyed playing your game and thought the idea was ingenious - I sincerely hope you consider creating a post-jam version. 

I think that having an organic sanity/scoring system that rises and falls with the performance of keys is intuitive and helps ensconce the nuts and bolts of game mechanics in the performance of playing the piano. But I get that long-term play might need something more. 

Agree that melody could be an opportunity to build the musical aspect of the game experience - perhaps harmony and discord could be used to reinforce the player's sense of success and failure states? 

Sometimes the simplest concepts resonate - pun intended - so I'm glad you got a lot of positive attention through the Ludum Dare. I liked this. It was very thoughtful take on the rhythm action genre. Great work! 

Congrats on publishing your first project! Hope you can build on the game. It's really cool to put something together from complete scratch and will set you up really well. Here for the 1-bit aesthetic and scanlines. 

Cool experience! I think the assets and sprites complemented each other really well for a survival horror game and it's pieced together excellently. Monochrome is perfect with the dimly-lit interiors. The enemies that skulk out of the dark and only show their true colours when agitated by a weapon is a fun horror behaviour. Their hitboxes can be a little tricky if positioned right over the player given the directional nature of attacks, I think. Having quite a close-up perspective draws more attention to the interesting environmental sprites, but it does mean it's easy to get lost in the eerie bowels of this creepy facility. 

Congrats on making a first game! 

I never thought of the possibilities! I use a WinXP machine for trackers to make music, but never thought of the potential of using old software. I hope you're able to keep on with these ideas and breathe life into old software. Can't imagine there are many people left that still use it!

Wrestling with BASIC to figure out MSX emulation is quite the feat for a 3D game. How did you find the experience? The refreshing and slow loading of the elements of the maze is very nostalgic and creates a striking effect. Awesome stuff.  

Nice Hypercard style monochrome collage photography. How good is Bowery Electric? It's cool to use experimental games as a medium to bring imagery to music; I'd not thought about doing something like that. 

Thank you for including DITHERJAM in your jam directory for your followers - it's very appreciated! 

Thanks for creating the proof of concept for Hero's Engine. I thought the approach of creating a Myst adventure game using legacy software is really cool and has a lot of potential. How did you go about finding and putting together the game from this software? 

Thanks - yeah, I made a call on trying to double down on a very specific aesthetic and focus on the presentation of that, and it seems to have worked well. Tried to make the font, image dithering, speech synthesis and glitch/bg sound feel just right, so really appreciate it! 

That's awesome - thanks for playing. Glad to be your first foray into text adventures and parsers! These were all the rage...a long, long time ago. 

I have plenty of faith the post-jam version will be pretty damn good. Planning to do much with the background story?

Yes, the themes are a bit full on and I hope the warning was sufficient. Im glad it left a strong impression; it's very hard to gauge the effect of something especially when you're writing about things that are serious and risky. Thanks for the kind words!

A devious and grotesque idea that's perfect for horror. I can see the challenge for the player is figuring out which if the equally gross-looking options are the ones that they should go for - it turns into a bit of a roulette. The mechanics are quite thought-out and I like how there's two health systems in place, but also additional properties such as poisoning to add to the challenge. The real thing that shines here is the text that describes the foul effects of eating the final feast. With some clearer guidance, set-out stages and maybe a bit more of a strategy element, it would be cool to see where this game goes! 

Good on you for co-ordinating voice acting to create a cinematic experience! There's some funny exchanges and in-jokes with the Portal gun and allusions to the stage getting dark. The water gun is a funny idea and the character's reaction to it is golden. The Portal comparison, whilst not immediate in terms of mechanics, does come to mind in terms of a well-scripted, voice-acted game with puzzle mechanics. In terms of level design and puzzles, definitely recommend thinking about how the designs aid or get in the way of the flow and how they make sense in the context of a level. For instance, I wasn't too sure how to proceed with the switch and button setup in the first puzzle room; I assumed I had to find multiple blocks - sadly not the non-interactable one in the same room - to weigh them all down or there was a relationship between them I didn't quite get. Nailing this stuff takes time and it's shocking how much you were able to setup in a week for something very ambitious and imagining a much bigger scope than the space of this jam. I hope you're able to refine this into the game it absolutely has the potential to be. Would love to revisit this one especially if you can share a bit of guidance on the puzzles. Great work! 

Very accurately captures the trials and tribulations of being in customer support and having to put up with people that have no idea what they're doing. Some of this delivery is very funny and absolutely would be the kind of trivialities people would call into tech support for. Fun twist at the end! I think there's plenty of ways you could merge this with some gameplay mechanics if you were so inclined - why not multitask and have to field calls whilst keeping an eye out for the guy behind you to ward him off? 

This sits squarely in a genre I'm very fond of, which is analog horror games where the player's attention is divided between their computer and their immediate surroundings, creating a strange diegetic effect. It's a shame you ran out of time, but there's plenty to do with this idea. I like the theme of a game that reveals it may know a little too much about the personal life of its player, as the fantasy bleeds into reality and the monster becomes obviously present in the space of the player. The mechanics could easily require the player to react or do things in the real world to interact with the outcomes on their virtual quest. The possibilities are endless! Great work with what's already here and hope you continue with it. 

Nice and simple room escape game. Feels like a classic Flash escape game with its cleanly-drawn interiors and item-based puzzles. I'm glad I didn't have to double-cross the bright red eyes staring at me from outside! Good work! 

Once I understood the mechanics, I think this is set up well for a horror concept and has a lot of potential. There is an ingenious element to the game as players have to observe the scene and monitor subtle changes or hints that differ after blinking. Perhaps some changes could be not signalled by the buzz as the difficulty increases as time progresses! I hope you keep on with this, it's a neat concept! 

The visual design is a deliciously grainy lo-fi vibe with a green filter that oozes personality. I'd love to have more background to the game understanding the atmosphere and setting it's going for, particularly the reveal upon escape that it's in a frozen wasteland - is this an Arctic hut where food has run out? 

Fun theming around a creepy chapel with books that document a great evil. You have a good design of the interior to work with and have set up the interactivity and V/O to convey the story. Plenty of a platform to build upon the experience - I hope you're able to continue it! 

Congrats on making your first Unity game! Love the set piece and concept of investigating a trashed office late at night and trying to figure out what has gone down. In terms of the design of the space, I think you did a good job of making it look very natural and put together. It wasn't clear what I was collecting in terms of objects, but the mechanics are there and definitely can be expanded. I hope you enjoyed making the game in Unity and hopefully it's a good step on to bigger and better things! 

Ohh this is very creepy. The grainy interiors and open-ended environments reminded me of something from the Half-Life era and I thought they provided plenty of atmosphere. As said in the other review, the space was labyrinthine enough to high-tail it and avoid encounters to focus on progression. Nice job! 

I think you got further than you think with creating this and I hope you're able to continue shaping it. I like the station assets and they work well with the atmosphere, and was pleasantly surprised by the work put into the Dead Space style exosuit navigation outside the station, with metres and buffs to manage oxygen and what not. I think a really cool exploration style survival horror could be formed around these mechanics, just needs a little more flavour and context to make the game come into its own. Good work! 

I was not able to save the girlfriend, but the time loop idea has promise and could form the basis of really cool gameplay where you're trying to find the right combination of actions to prevent it from happening over again in a number of cycles. Hope you're able to refine it! 

Hey, so far so good. It's quite the achievement and ambition to do a detective game on Clickteam, so I think you've got the blueprint of something really cool. Interviewing witnesses and having a time system is not an easy thing to implement, and I think you could definitely find ways to integrate these into an involved game. Maybe the detective interviews could form part of a logic puzzle to help identify the odd one out in the murder? There's plenty of ways you could go about it - I hope you are able to continue with this idea! 

Hey, all part of the charm, and I had a fun time playing it :) 

Hey, I was able to play the game okay! There's still a lot to go, it looks like, but you've demonstrated some skill in being able to set up the boat, craft some dialog and scripted sequences, which isn't an easy thing to do! I like the approach to the tasking by setting quests at the top right of the screen. It'd be cool to flesh the ship's exterior and interiors more to help convey the setting a little better. Hopefully you'll be able to continue working on this!

Nice setup for a survival horror where all the elements are in place, but might need a little tweaking post-jam. The 'attack' stage survival mechanics could have a bit more combat, and there could be some elements in the hospital to encourage exploration and progression. But that said, you've created a really moody and impressionable environment - wards are just naturally creepy. I like the alternate color scheme when the attack happens. On track for something really cool here! Nice work. 

This is a really cool idea, and I love the concept of consulting a dark manual to find the methods to successfully exorcise the demons haunting the camp. I can see this being a really cool setup where you are presented with weird and wonderful hauntings and have to carefully make sure you get the exorcism ritual right. As reviews have said, it's a little imbalanced at the moment and the action combos are a bit off for what's instructed in the manual, but this is an awesome premise and I hope you're able to follow up on it! 

Love a good industrial interior and exploring it in the dark was quite ominous. I appreciate the inclusion of some switches and keycards to introduce an interactive element to exploration and progression. I like the premise on the jam page, but think that some background and environmental storytelling to help tell the story rather than creepy text on the wall could help convey it a little better. That said, the confrontation with the killer at the end is very creepy! Good job! 

Dig the spooky models used for the jump scares. The player character really can't just sit down and relax in this house, huh? Good effort for a game made in such a small window of time! 

Hey, it's good to see a Ren'Py game in the mix, I think this is one of the only ones in the jam. It's very fleshed out and clear that you've put considerable time and effort into the prose, setting up the interplay between Poole and their developing relationship with the killer Charity Kase. Of course, things get complicated when the two realise they share a personal history and both have much stronger if more uncertain an interest than they first realise. Ends up being satisfyingly odd and gory. I found Poole's reaction in the end ambiguous and wondered how he was able to reconcile the person he knew with the murderer and maintain that interest, but the story did capture that internal conflict. Very Hannibal Lecter but a bit flirtier. I imagine the word count was massive on this behemoth so great work putting this together for the jam! 

I demand to speak with this guy's manager, but then again, it looks like they replaced this store's staff with robots. Fancy not having milk at the mart! Shameful! At least I got some of that soda though! I thought this was a funny game with a cheeky scare once things end up in the back room. Good work!

It's a good start! As you say, any progress is good progress. I wasn't quite sure what to do, but you've set up a lot of great things to build on, including movement, a map and a time limit. It would be cool to interact with more things and have a clearer goal in mind! Hope you're able to build on this! 

Short and sweet, but oh those things are CREEPY as hell. I am weirded out by them from the get-go. As others have said, appreciate that this game is not about jump scares but reveling in the eerie feeling of constantly being watched by the faceless maids, eyeless as they are, ever-watching and turning. Great work!