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Great work with the updated version! 

*** For anyone who hasn't played yet, this will contain some spoilers. ***

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A lot of the little added things help a lot. I love the extra hint while looking at the journal, and I think that’s just enough to give the player a chance without making it overly easy. The added paint can & boards was a nice touch too. 

The bulked up storyline about Luna was great, and I loved the twist about her at the end! The little animation for her jumping into the room is perfect too haha. 

I think the whole denouement section at the end is great, and it really gives a nice feel to the finale. The tease at the end about Victor not being the only one is perfect too. I can’t wait to see what you do with the world going forward. 

One thing I think could help the finale that little extra bit would be some kind of ‘final shot,’ maybe behind the characters as they look out over the city, with some kind of climactic line. (I’m thinking something like the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, or The Empire Strikes Back, or any movie with a nice juicy cliffhanger.) But as it is I think the game’s ending still works really well, and it gets me excited to see more! 

Very glad I was able to be helpful with some suggestions! Will be following with great interest! 

Congrats on finishing third! Very well deserved. I'm excited to play the new version 😀

Really glad you like the game! Audience reviews were a feature that I’m so happy I had the time to cram into the game- I literally put them in there about 2 hours before the deadline 😅

Haha I never considered that but you’re right, I love that idea! That would be so much fun to go up against someone and compare story points. Thank you for playing and for the feedback 😀

Wow congrats! It’s rare that I can even get a 100 😲

And again I’m so happy you had the interest to play the game a second time! It means a lot 😀

Thank you so much for the feedback! I agree, I think some music/sounds could help a lot 😀 I’m so happy the game made you want to go back and try to beat your score!

As it turned out, I didn't finish the game in one sitting. Here's a quick video where I play through the ending, and give my final thoughts: 

The game has an extremely cohesive art style and really tight adventure mechanics. The world is very well-established, and I really enjoyed the way the overworld map is presented. The voice acting was also excellent! One thing I wish is that the 'monkey's paw' storyline came into play earlier in the story, since it only really shows up near the end. But overall this is an incredible package. Very hard to believe this was created for a 2-week game jam. Amazing work! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below. Hope that can be useful! 

I’m so happy to hear that you enjoyed it! The fact that you felt the pull to do another playthrough means a lot, and I’m glad you liked all the story segments (you’re right, they did take a long time to write haha!) Music and sound effects could definitely add a lot to the game, I agree. Thank you for your wonderful review and feedback! 😀

This is an extremely cohesive project from top to bottom. Mechanics, visuals, architecture, music and writing all contribute to a wonderful and quirky world that I'd love to see expanded even further. This achieves a very compelling representation of dream logic as well, which is so elusive to truly capture in art. Excellent work! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

Thank you so much!! 😀

Thank you so much for the review and the suggestions! As for the text crawl, maybe if you could press space bar while the text builds, to make it immediately show all the text in that block? 🤔 Do you think that might solve the issue?

Very glad it could be helpful 😀 Excited to play the next version!! 

Thank you so much for this incredible review! I'm glad the core themes and mechanics resonated so deeply. I wanted to make something that captured what the creation process really feels like- slowly changing and changing and changing things, eventually becoming so numb to the material that we're almost unable to tell whether it's getting better at all without outside feedback. ("Writing is rewriting," as they say!) 

The insights you posed into the metaphorical meaning of many of these mechanics are extremely astute. The fact that you cared so much about the experience that you'd want to deeply explore the meanings means more to me than you can imagine. Great suggestion about the reviews screen too, I think that breaking them into two horizontal lines would be a perfect solution! 

This review is amazing. Thank you!! 

This does an excellent job in capturing the frantic feeling of a missing persons case. The art is very strong, and I love all the ARG aspects. One thing that majorly affected my playthrough is that I don't have a Facebook, and therefore had a large portion of the game closed to me (you can't see friends, check-ins, etc without an account). Though on that note, it's worth mentioning that nobody I know has a Facebook either, so it may be a larger percentage of the player base than you expect who would run into the same issue. I think one thing I'd also look into is that the clock felt like it ran down too quickly- it seemed like every literal mouse click was progressing it. Maybe instead, if when you opened an app it would tick up by 10 minutes, but not tick up further until you switched apps. Or something like that? Either way, I thought this was a really affecting experience that had a lot to say. I got two bad endings, but would be interested to find out more about the other possibilities. Great job!

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below. Hope that can be useful! 

I am floored by how visually stunning this game is. The cutscene images are gorgeous, and I love that the gameplay matches that feel. The writing and music also contribute to a sense of growing unease throughout. I wish the gameplay itself took more chances to integrate that feeling of unease into the mechanics, maybe by having the player uncover more and more unsettling things as they collect objects or solve puzzles. Also, even though this works perfectly as a self-contained story, I'm really interested to see more from this world. Can't wait to see what you do next! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

Love the concept and the dripping of storyline throughout. I may have missed the part where this is addressed, but it wasn't clear why the doctor had amnesia at the beginning. I also felt like the game was leading up to a big interaction with EVA throughout, and then when I got to the ending it didn't give me much chance to really interact with her. But I loved the twist, and the self-contained nature of the game. I'd love to see an expanded version! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

Thank you so much for the review and thoughts! It means so much that you were interested in playing a second time after completing the game- I was hoping the randomized elements and combination of upgrade mechanics would encourage multiple playthroughs. Really happy you enjoyed the writing too. Homer’s works are very important to me, and I spent a lot of time trying to refine every little piece of text for the cards and screenplay 😀 

Your point about the high-contrast ratio being able to hurt your eyes is a great point, and something I had not considered. In a future version I’ll look into how I can add a low-contrast mode and other accessibility settings!

Greece, the 8th Century BCE. Can the aspiring young poet Homer win his first poetry competition and begin his rise to fame?

Polish your text, work on performance skills, and collect customizable cards, each adding new elements to your poem. Each playthrough results in a totally different combination of storylines. What will your odyssey look like?

I created this game in 10 days for Adventure Jam 2023. The game takes 15-30 minutes to complete. It can be played for free on browsers.

https://thevoiceofnick.itch.io/young-homer-a-storytellers-odyssey

Thank you so much for the review and thoughts! It means so much that you were interested in playing a second time after completing the game- I was hoping the randomized elements and combination of upgrade mechanics would encourage multiple playthroughs. Really happy you enjoyed the writing too. Homer’s works are very important to me, and I spent a lot of time trying to refine every little piece of text for the cards and screenplay 😀 

Your point about the high-contrast ratio being able to hurt your eyes is a great point, and something I had not considered. In a future version I’ll look into how I can add a low-contrast mode and other accessibility settings!

Very glad the game made you want to keep striving for a higher audience rating 😀 The mechanics of that meter are something that took me a long time to get right. Thank you for the amazing review!

I played the rest of the game today, it's amazing! I'm very excited to see more of this world you've created. Here's what my playthrough looked like this second time around: 

Wow I’m so happy you liked the game, and that you wanted to go back and play again 😀 Picking moments from the story and adapting them for the game was a really fun challenge. I was also rereading the Odyssey as I went along, and kept coming up with more new things I wanted to put in 😅 Thank you so much for your wonderful review!

So happy you liked it! The parallel to us going through our mad dash during the creation process was a fun thread to write about 😀 Haha I’m glad you also liked the Level 1 cards. A lot of those ones are my favorites because I was able to really just go as absurd as I wanted 😅

This game has a wonderful world and personality to it. I would love to see so much more from these aliens and their fish-out-of-water assessments of Earth. The platforming was solid, and the writing was great. One thing I would recommend is making the double jump animation feel a bit more weighty- like the character is propelling himself upward more on that second jump. Maybe you could even get a bit of in-universe feel to it if the character was wearing a booster pack or anti-grav boots, and there was a little boost of smoke that came out when they did the double jump. I hope you continue with this project though, it would be so much fun to see more levels where they interact further with the human world. And possibly even at some point if they met some humans! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

I love the character art, monsters and effects. I think right now it feels like the combat is missing a step- currently, if I move or jump I can't attack. But if I was able to attack while moving/jumping, that would allow me to really get in, strike, and get out while fighting enemies. Also, a Symphony of the Night-style backdash could be really useful! Really looking forward to seeing where you go with the project, I loved the story outline on the game page! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

This game is an extraordinarily complete package. The writing and voice acting are uniformly excellent. The soundtrack is great too. There's a bit of an equalization issue sometimes where the voices dip a bit too low below the music, but of course that's a small thing under the time constraint. (After all, my game doesn't have any sound at all, so who am I to talk? 😅) I think the graphics are really well-executed, and perfectly evoke the LucasArts era while still creating its own unique style. 

One suggestion I'd say is that the story needs some kind of denouement. I think many of Megan's lines during the climactic scene could be moved to take place after the action is over, so there's something players can do to 'come down' after the excitement of the ending, while getting answers about the world. And it would be nice if there was something to tie a ribbon on Luna's story as well. (Maybe she's Megan's dog who ran away?) 

Once again though, this game is very impressive, top to bottom, and I'd love to see you expand this universe further! 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

I’m very very happy to hear that you enjoyed it so much! Yes, no spoilers of how it’s working behind the scenes of course, but tuning the way the game handled the stats and difficulty was really important to me. Thank you for your review, it means a lot 😀 

Very glad that you enjoyed the game and the writing! Yeah, it was definitely a lot of late nights in front of a giant Google Doc. Just a lot of organization to keep straight where everything was supposed to go haha 😀

Thank you for the feedback, and I'm very glad you enjoyed the game! I'll look into ways to customize the deck further and add a little more player agency 😀

Wow I’m honored that you would say that! Thank you for playing, I’m so glad you liked it 😀

I love the subversion of platformer mechanics in this one. There were a few points where I had to go outside my usual comfort zone with platformers and do much riskier jumps (or look in different directions) to progress. I think you might want to ease the player into the idea that you're playing with those conventions though. For example, I thought it was fun that the game asked me to make a blind jump almost at the absolute beginning, but you run the risk of players simply not realizing what they're supposed to do when faced with an impassable chasm like that. Many of the more technical 'one more run' kinds of platformers like Super Meat Boy or N+ start out with levels that anyone can complete, and slowly start introducing subversive concepts until you're thinking outside the box along with the game. 

I'd love to see more from this game concept though, with even more of the crazy-technical platforming segments, or subversive objectives (maybe going through an invisible wall, or jumping off an edge to progress, etc). Proud to say I did make it to the end of this one, and it was a fun challenge! Thanks for making the game!

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

This is an extremely cohesive game concept from top to bottom. I love how well the visuals serve the storyline and vice versa. Voice acting was also excellent. Considering the tactile feel, I'd love to see even more usage of photos and other aspects of surveillance documents. Maybe for example, if the images of the scenes you watch looked like surveillance photo/video? Or the images you can choose to identify the informants would be little thumbnail-sized images like you'd find in a file photo. Very evocative visual concept as it is though, and thank you for making it! It was very powerful storytelling, and a really novel way to use the adventure game medium. 

I actually recorded my playthrough. If you want to see my impressions as I played, you can see it below (timestamp for your game in the description). Hope that can be useful! 

Thank you so much! Definitely going to look into sound for the next version. I feel like there's a lot of fun stuff I could try with that too, based on how good his writing/performance is each night 😀

Thank you for playing! I’m glad you enjoyed the story 😀

The page looks great!! 😀

Thank you for playing! I'm glad you picked up on the visuals emulating blindness 😀 I agree, I think sound effects could help a lot. I'll work on that for future updates! 

Thank you, I'm excited to jump back in!

Haha yes, I ended up spending a lot of my time in Google Docs for this one, just writing and refining all the different levels of card stories and screenplay stuff 😅 Thank you for the great suggestions and comments! It's interesting about the your experience with the poem getting worse. I wanted there to be a random element to the performances, but some playthroughs I felt that too, where it seemed like it became overly stacked against me. I'll work on the tuning of difficulty for the next version! 

Also I'm glad you felt that it can teach some Greek mythology- I wanted there to be a bit of real educational value in there behind the comedy and gameplay!

I'm so glad you like the art style of the game! This was the first of the games I've worked on where I created concept design mockups very early in the process, and then allowed many of the game design decisions to be informed by those visual targets. I wasn't sure if it was going to pay off, since I thought it might cause scope creep, but I was pleased as well with how the look turned out! 

Thank you so much for the kind words, I'm excited to keep going with this concept and build the game into something bigger and better 😀