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Ferarum

Chat with a cute schizo in an abandoned cafe. · By Jonotastic

Is this working?

A topic by Nihil_303 created May 18, 2024 Views: 138 Replies: 1
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Alright! I have many comments about this game but they are mishmashed in my head right now so I'll try and talk about them as well as I can but hopefully they are at least somewhat comprehensible!

There's just so much going on in this game... At first, I thought it was simply a sexbaiting game with silly story (and look where that got me huh) but the conversations really drew me in. They felt so natural.  Talking to Jojo was like talking to one of my friends, one completely deranged character whose only driving force in the conversation is the gravity (or rather the "flow") of consciousness, one thought evoking another with no straightforward connection in-between them, basically schizo-talk even though I hate that term haha; and another character who's as far as I can tell can just be as deranged as the other depending on the topic. But obviously Sven isn't so far in as Jojo, allowing the player to relate themselves with him as a protag. Especially the part where Sven mentioned "struggling over a word or a sentence and getting distracted" felt really relatable for me and it also kind of supported the concept of stream of consciousness. Sven in that sense was the perfect protag for the game. Even the random subject switches was relatable. I was like "Damn, did the developer really discard any narrative continuity in the story and simply poured in a convo they had in their head?" Because it really felt like so. I was unsure where this kind of "story"telling would pull me, but it was curious, so I continued playing... And then the game hit me with this SUDDEN increase in quality. Smooth animations, 3D environment (which I'm not sure how you even made those. Or what brought you to suddenly include those sections etc? Not complaining at all because they were very well done and only increased my curiosity lol). The choice of music was really nice as well, each of the segments felt very close with the environment they were related with. Bonus points for that! (for the sound fx too)

Now comes the topic of meta-content. The scary stuff. Tbh there's just too much that I haven't discovered yet. I'd played the game before the newest update and I'd gone through the files script etc to see many cool stuff but I suppose new stuff appeared with the new update. So I'll check it through and through!

Is it reasonable to call this game an arg? I don't really like classifications like those personally! But it's just that there's so much content. So many rare secrets. Easter eggs. Even reading through the code I chuckled here and there seeing the meta commentary. Jojo brainwaves seeping in to the very fabric of reality. I love it.

The puzzle stuff was confusing, in a good way. Sven's completely unhinged thought process was so fun to read, how he read too deep into the oddities around. Although yes, I suppose he was right that things were quite odd with that weird entity (was it called Synx or something? I wonder what it means) and the looping hallways. I kinda want to see more of it tbh, the exploration/puzzle stuff, but that's neither mine or anyone else's to say lol

Anyway I'll probably go secret hunting again soon, I just wanted to drop this stupid appreciation post! I'm also waiting patiently for more more more updates, so please keep it going :) I was also curious whether the game has some sort of platform to talk about it, like a discord server? 

As a final note I apologise for this random blabbery and sorry if it was difficult to read lmao, just wanted to say I enjoyed the game quite a lot!

Developer

-Is it working?

It most certainly is! Thanks a ton for doing such an in-depth dive into Ferarum! It's seriously really awesome to hear your take on everything and it means a lot to me!! 

I'll start off by saying damn! Like you're right on target, word for word, bar for bar literally everything you said was dead center even the "gravity of consciousness" which we could be here all day talking about haha but no spoilers, I promise :) Jojo was written to be a perfectly imperfect human being, same with Sven. Sure they have long moments of clarity but they both sometimes get caught up in their own thoughts and emotions and they always need time to think, so as witty as Jojo can be sometimes she's also pretty par for the course; she can't do math properly, can hardly drive, loses track of her own ideas, stuff like that. Seeing perfectly perfect conversations in media pisses me off because people are supposed to slur and mispronounce words, people aren't truly perfectly perfect. So I'm glad you found the conversations (outside some of the schizo-babble lol) relatable! Also you're right, I've had a few complaints that the initial cafe conversation doesn't seem to go anywhere, that you're not really given a 'goal' to work towards and it's been a constant point of contention since Ferarum dropped so I'll probably revise it someday, otherwise yes I really did pour whatever popped out of my head hahaha. When it comes to the animations and models and stuff, they're all prerendered. There's no magic involved just a helluva lot'a rendering in Blender and hoping like hell it doesn't come out crappy!

Version 14 only has a few new scares (I think? Can't remember) so you're probably not missing out on much ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It's a good thing you're going through the files too, reading all that code is crazy commitment well done!, good players like you with a sense of discovery will ALWAYS be rewarded! That being said I'm not really sure what constitutes as an ARG these days sorry but if you feel like it fits the bill then so be it! 

Nah that's fair, I wanna see more exploration too to be honest! Infact, the Tornado of Mega Death segments were supposed to have an early form of that, hence the minimap and all that really badly written unused Consola dialogue. All I know is the walk from the lounge to Jojo's guestroom is pretty far and Styx doesn't play fair...

Appreciation posts are NEVER stupid, I ALWAYS take them to heart <3 So thank you for writing this all out!! There's currently no Discord server, I'm too stupid to figure it out lol.

Thanks again and keep up the sleuthing!!