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A jam submission

KondiacView game page

Parser mystery investigation game
Submitted by Picarly — 8 days, 4 hours before the deadline
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Kondiac's itch.io page

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Comments

Jam Host

Hi

We have a ParserComp 2022 participation certificate that we'd like to send to you, for being part of the competition. 

If you'd like to claim it, could you please email the organisers at parsercomp@gmail.com?

Thanks!

Submitted(+1)

Maybe it's just me, but I felt kind of left out / pushed aside with no background or instructions as to how to play the game. It looks interesting but I never got any further than to the first page.

Developer

thanks for your feedback.

Yea I was afraid the game was a little too obscure.

When you say left out do you mean that the story is not clear or the gameplay? (Or both)

Submitted(+1)

I think a little of both, but mostly the gameplay I think. The story sounded interesting enough.

After the game had loaded I just jot a screen with a search box. No intro whatsoever and the little I had read from the Itch.io didn't help me much. I tried various commands but getting the "no results" response numerous times got a bit annoying.

Submitted(+1)

How do I play the game on a Mac? The exe file doesn't work for me. Are there instructions for play somewhere?

Submitted(+1)

What on earth are you supposed to do in this game? How do I get to the command-line input and the parser?

Developer(+1)

There is a search bar at the bottom, you just have to search keywords and press enter.

It plays kinda like “her story”

Lots of keywords that seem important don't work. How to be sure it's by design like that or it's some bug? Can you maybe publish some keywords that should work? Something like walkthru?

Developer

if it helps, a lot of the keywords are last names or namea of places (not all of them but a good portion)

Also, is it possible to reach the end of game, is there some kind of ending screen? Or we just play until we figure out what happened here?

Developer

there is no ending, it’s up to the player to decide when they think they saw enough to understand the story.

If I am not mistaking there is about 9 different pages.

So "Her Story" had a clear sense of progress, because things were numbered (I think?) and it was clear (I think?) when you were missing a video between two that you had.

I like the idea of exploring until you've seen enough, and the idea of piecing together a story from documents (ads, bank statements, news articles) is very cool; but it's very hard to know whether you've seen enough.  I found, let's see...a photo of the LSCC, a brochure for the LSCC, an article about a football player who entered it, an article about that player's disappearance, a page of other missing people (none of whose names turned up in a search), an ad for a butcher shop, and a bank statement about that butcher shop.  Is that everything?  No idea.

So...either the LSCC was killing people and giving them to the butcher shop to use as meat; or there was just a butcher shop in town, as there often is, and also some people with no connection between them all went missing at completely different times.  I want to draw a connection here, but it's very hard to do without knowing how much more there is to find, or how to find it.

Developer (2 edits)

Hi,

You were just missing a couple of things to do the connection.

From memory if you search “donation” after you see the bank statement it becomes very clear that your first impression is the correct one.

I play tested the game with a couple of people who told me the clues were too “on the nose” originally so that’s why I obscured things a little but it seems like I went too far in the other direction…

Deleted 1 year ago