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i looooved this! i was just going to do one playthrough and next thing i know, i've played for two hours trying to get all the endings (which, i haven't yet, but i will eventually). i'm really surprised at the amount of depth this game has with unlockable characters and everything, not to mention all of their little typing quirks feeling so true to life. wakaba was my favorite she's so silly...

god that was fucking awesome. congrats on finishing it!

really cute... I love the visual direction you went with for this and getting to see the conversation from both sides was cool :D

so beautiful and painful. i loved it.

fanart is completely fine to post! You don’t have to ask permission. I unfortunately don’t have an instagram but if you post it and would like to link it so I can see, that would be awesome. Thanks for playing 

hi! i am sure there are ways to implement volume sliders, but i didn't for this game and don't really plan on doing so retroactively. at least not anytime soon. the music isn't copyrighted or anything but i know youtube's systems are kind of silly regarding those things. you can really only mute the music entirely or turn the game's volume really low. sorry about this!

Answering your other questions below the cut:

the 'essence of community' is not a physical item-- it will not appear in your inventory. They're just progress flags related to one of the game's endings. So, yes, you can complete Chapter 2's secret quest without having completed Chapter 1's, you just have to figure out how. The guide has hints on the bottom if you want them.

hi! Thank you for enjoying the game. I’ll go into the spoilers below the cut!

After killing Mother, you should be able to pull out the scissors in her chest. There’s only one tile you can interact with to do this, if I remember correctly you need to do it from the top. Afterwards a white door should appear near the top of the room (takes a few seconds for it to show up) and you should be railroaded into the ending from there. If you still aren’t able to trigger it, please let me know! 

thanks for playing!
1) yes, it is possible but a bit difficult, though it does not lead to much else other than extra dialogue because it is mostly leftover content from an earlier period in development that i didn't want to scrap. maybe someday i'll patch the game to make it a bit more substantial.

2) also yes! i haven't made a walkthrough for the fourth ending in lieu of keeping some mystery alive, but i leave some hints for it at the very bottom of the official guide page.

i loved this game. the presentation, in all its simplicity, seems like it took a lot of effort to pull off the way you did, and i really enjoy it. the unconventional character sprites are really cool. repeating the same day numerous times, each loop bringing a new understanding to each character and the way they treat the others... lines that seemed innocuous at first suddenly being given new meaning when you see them as someone else... this is a story that makes me want to chew on it. Osthola was my favorite, i think, but i ended up loving all the characters a lot by the end. overall a really great job, i'm excited to see what happens in Phase 2.

this game hurt me in a special way... i really enjoyed it. fictional situations like this always seem nightmarish yet tantalizing to me and this story captures that very well. great job

i enjoyed this bittersweet little story a lot. the visual direction is pretty simplistic but i think it serves the overall tone really well, not to mention it kept things nice and readable. making some of the lineart animate was a really neat touch, and i loved the little text wobbling effects too. despite not spending much time with them, i can't help but feel for Angel and Addison... the final moments between them were very sweet.

ano1 was one of the main games that inspired me to start making this one, so hearing this makes me especially happy. Thank you for playing!

I do really want to put the OST up for purchase at some point, I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I'd also like to include bonus tracks and things like that-- I also just got preoccupied with life stuff as most developers do. When I get around to it I'll make sure to put an announcement up on this game's devlog. Until then, I do have the base files found in the game thrown on my soundcloud!

such a great visual novel. all of the little flourishes done in regards to the visual presentation immediately had me charmed. it seems simplistic at first but it feels so Purposefully Done at every point. the writing is also great. the first half had already gripped me by being, well, incredibly relatable, but the ways in which the delusional side of things slowly crept up on me has kept me thinking about this story on and off since i played it. great job

this is a very charming little VN! the meticulous ways in which the characters' smallest of quirks are described really resonated with me & endeared me to them. the sudden contemplative tone paired with the flashback scene really pulled me in, too-- i genuinely wasn't expecting that. I'm excited to see what the future holds for Rictus and Icasia :)

thanks for playing <3

I'm glad all the endings feel satisfying to you. I didn't want to correlate "best ending" with "true ending" in this game, so I tried to make them all exhibit different facets of the same core idea. Especially since I know most players will probably only go for one or two of them. Thank you for playing!

No length requirements! Make your story as long or as short as you think it needs to be 

thank you! I'm glad you had a good time with it. The fourth ending is intentionally pretty tricky/out of the way, but I recently made a guide page that has a few hints at the very bottom if you'd like to try and find it: https://starbage.neocities.org/HalOPE/guide

thank you for playing!

hi, thank you so much for such an in-depth comment! Stuff like this truly makes my day. A lot of the stuff in the game is intentionally up to interpretation, I don't like implying there's a "wrong" way to read things, but I'll try to answer your questions as best I can. 

Community’s gift was something that kind of just came together, actually. The scissors as an item came before the siblings existed as characters (I was in the middle of developing Chapter 2 when I had come up with them as the main "reveal", and I think it shows a little bit). I came to really enjoy the scissors as a symbolism of "cutting free" though, and began to lean into it a lot. It's why Mother has such a strong web/thread association to her (as well as the white Interlude areas). That is to say, I didn’t originally put as much thought into it as it might seem. It was kind of a happy accident. i really love this reading of it though.

As for Regret, the compass pointing away from Mother's confrontation is intentional :-) if I remember correctly, the earlier versions of the game didn't have this, so it was partially added as a hint for one of the endings. But I also wanted it to be a way for some of Regret's desires to shine through. They care for Hope even if they're kind of spiteful about it at times, and I thought having that show through the compass would be a fun detail. I'm really pleased someone made that connection!

Thanks again for playing!

thanks for playing :-)

yea go ahead! 

thank you so much, im glad you enjoyed your time with it <3

oh wow, that's really flattering!!! Thank you so much

I'm glad you are enjoying so far ^^ I put some guidance below, but you're free to ignore if you'd rather figure it out for yourself.

After visiting the ghost house, there's another location you need to go to, to find the other ghost NPC... said location isn't accessible from the start of the chapter though, you have to open it up.

(And, for a more direct answer):

You have to open the red doors directly right of Lorena's house. If I remember correctly it goes something like this

North of the church, interact with the bug and get the drawing, show that drawing to the human artist, take his watering can, give it to the invisible girl who stands next to where the frog was. you can use the item you get from her to open the red doors and progress further.

thanks for playing & taking the time to record :-)!

the front and back of each character is just two different sprites I placed next to each other. You can see the gap between them if you look closely!

That is extremely flattering.. thank you so much for playing <3

thank you sooo much <3 I’m glad all of my games were able to catch your eye!! It means a lot to me genuinely 

really cool little experience; despite how short it was the heart put into it shines through very much. i loved the clayish art direction and the music a whole lot :-)

thank you for playing <3 I appreciate the kind words 

OH MY GOSH!!!! I love love love how you incorporated so many little details of the game into the piece, the composition is so lovely T_T 💕💕it really feels like you captured every key moment! I love it, thank you so much!! 

Thank you for the kind words as well, I'm happy you were able to be inspired by something I made!

thank you for the kind words! Im happy you enjoyed your time with it 

thanks for playing! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

(spoilers below)

 I don’t know that Regret was inspired by anything in particular…? Maybe there were some characters I was charmed by at the time that I can’t remember now. I think I just really like characters who are a bit mean at first but secretly have a lot of love in their heart. Since family relations are a key theme in the game, their complicated feelings were kind of inspired by some personal experiences as well. The original iteration of them was much nicer but then I decided that was boring, lol

thank you so much!

Really cute concept and execution :3 I especially love the poem at the end!

I really enjoyed this game! I was able to find the six main tapes (along with some of the secret ones) and see Ending 1. Something about the lowpoly aesthetics and inherent mystery of the dream world really gripped me. This is a game I am going to ponder the symbolism of for a while. May even poke around again to get the other endings at some point.

I think my only big issue was that after I got the ending, the game asked me if I wanted to reset my progress. I pressed no, but it shut down and my progress was gone anyway ^_^" other than that, everything was very cool and solid. Good job!

thanks for playing! :D

thank you for leaving such a thoughtful comment!! I appreciate it very much :-) I hope you have fun getting the other endings as well

Hi. For the three normal endings, they should all be accessible from the final save bench of the game. If you've already found two by going upwards, try going a different direction instead :-)

The fourth ending has some specific requirements you needed to have met before reaching Chapter 5. I've yet to make an official guide on this, but some players have found them already and posted walkthroughs of it!