Well written and designed to instill anxiety in the situations it puts you in. (That scenario when someone from your childhood instantly recognises you while you're left squinting at them awkwardly trying to be sure who they might be.) The ending kind of seemed to jump out suddenly until I figured perhaps it was never a real haunted house after all and a lot of this was in the reader's mind as the way they were perceiving things as they try to navigate the stressful situations they need to go through to their appointment?
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Haunted House for Social Phobics's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Spooky Greatness | #28 | 2.741 | 3.300 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
While there was a bit of dark humour, the ending was pretty poignant. Interesting choice that you can never actually logic your way out of a particular anxiety. To me, it felt ambiguous whether the various unfortunate coincidences and locations I wound up in were the result of a malevolent outside force, or just inside my head, which I guess is a pretty good simulation of social anxiety!
Short anecdote: I realized quite late in life that the discomfort I felt regularly was in fact a simple manifestation of a social phobia that I never fully resolved, but which is much easier to manage now that it's been identified, and I've found the words to verbalize it.
While playing, I totally recognized myself in the stupidity of not asking for help, even if it means making the situation worse. I found the narration realistic and well-written, so thank you for that!
Thank you for playing, and I’m glad you found it to be realistic! (Although of course not glad you have to deal with that in real life–it’s no fun!)
I used to experience extreme social anxiety when I was younger, and while I have worked out ways around it, I’ve started to realize it still affects me in more ways than I sometimes think. The game speaks to my own experience of similar situations, but I admit I wasn’t sure how it would play for others.
I'm wondering if there's a bug in this game; it ended very abruptly both times I played (but at different times--in my second playthrough, I was able to progress past where it ended the first time) in ways that didn't seem intentional. Wanted to let you know in case!
Thanks for letting me know!
This should now be fixed, I think. The bug was due to my misusing two if statements instead of an if/else statement on one choice, basically, which resulted in no choice showing up at all sometimes when you hit that point.
I couldn’t find a second place where it ended abruptly–only one! So I think the second time you actually got to the ending. I did my testing in the Ink IDE and totally failed to realize it didn’t show “End of story” after exporting. So I’ve tweaked the ending to make it really clear when you’ve hit the end.
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