Holy moly... Molleindustria is still around and making bangers? I haven't heard that name in 15 years!
Great game as always!
Nogodsnomasters
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A member registered Feb 05, 2019
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Love the vaporwave 2000s aesthetic, it makes me feel nostalgic af. The music is also perfect. The puzzles are just the right blend of clever enough to puff my ego, but not hard enough to make me get frustrated. And the story is really moving, and sad. RIP Liz. I feel sorry for her. I also appreciate that the horror wasn't too unsettling, and no jumpscares.
I love this genre of low-res surreal indie games with banger soundtracks and memorable characters.
Great game! Love the mechanic, the story is compelling. Simple to play, difficult to progress and intriguing enough to make you want to finish.
My biggest gripe is the way evidence is grouped. The "anchor" piece (the piece of the main thread) that the next group needs to connect to seemed arbitrary for a few groups, which pieces constituted a group seemed arbitrary, and the current group not completing if it was connected to any pieces from upcoming groups (or the wrong anchor) was frustrating. Sometimes, two pieces of evidence would be more related to each other than they were to the rest of the evidence in their respective groups. Overall, this gave it an unnatural feel, like the protagonist suffered rapid-onset amnesia if she saw something of interest but didn't already have a crystal clear picture of how pieces connected back to the beginning post-it.
I understand this system is to enable a linear plot progression, and to allow the player to connect pieces within a group any which way without letting them just connect every piece on the board and have every plot-point trigger at once. I don't think a linear progression is necessary nor fits with the "cognitive map" style gameplay that evidence boards inherently are, not sure what could be done about the latter problem. Perhaps every single piece of evidence should have others it is required to connect directly to, and not worry so much about being able to bundle it into arbitrarily connected groups.
I mean, that's fair--I didn't realize this was a jam game. As for my guesses to the questions I asked: I don't really have any, that's why I picked those specific questions; I don't have evidence from within the narrative itself to base any guesses on, anything I offered would necessarily just be based on my familiarity with sci-fi tropes from other media.
To get more in-depth: the player is never told what the device does, we know it interfaces with ???????? and the lack of cell-localization could be catastrophic because ???????? and creates a stasis field that affects everyone, even itself which may be how it has frozen everyone in place and stops itself from ???????? so you need to shut down power to the entire facility; we also know that it trapped David in the network. That's actually a pretty detailed description of what it does, I should have asked what its purpose is. Why would this outcome ever be desirable? Or what was it supposed to do that it failed to? Making a few assumptions that are not entirely based in what the player is provided, we can fill in the blanks above: if we assume it provides an interface between the brain and computers, we can also assume the "cell" in cell-localization refers to brain cells. That might also explain David's motivation: digital immortality as a cure for a fatal illness. But it still wouldn't explain why it causes everyone else to be frozen in place, why that would be a side effect or even desirable outcome of uploading your consciousness to a computer, nor why he is drawing the player character down into a pit from which there is seemingly no escape; if he's to be believed, why would he trap us down there with him? If he's not trustworthy, why should anything he says be taken into consideration when piecing together the story?
fun game, the momentum and physics are near perfect and feel natural for a platformer. There were only a few criticisms I felt compelled to share, to make it even better:
1. being able to move while eye-beaming would reduce the amount of frustration of being off from the targets by a few pixels
2. The camera is annoying when you screw up: if I face backwards to reuse an eye-beam target in multi-screen-long horizontal rooms, suddenly I'm cut off from seeing where I'm headed. This gets more frustrating when going back to a static-cling wall, and now pressing in the direction I'm headed will most likely make me drop from the wall.
3. Had to fullscreen my browser on PC to see the whole screen, it was almost impossible to play without being able to see the top and bottom. My workaround was to just zoom out, but that won't necessarily work for everyone and it made the precision of the eye-beam even more frustrating.
4. SPOILER WARNING: I don't get the story's ending and I'm not sure that's my fault. What does the device do? Why does David's illness motivate him to use it? Who is drawing all the robots there, and why? Yes, I read the PC screens and info-posts, even the ones off the main path. I wouldn't say this is necessarily a problem with the story unless it was supposed to be self-contained.