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There Is Love In Me's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Narrative | #7 | 3.945 | 4.588 |
Novelty | #8 | 3.742 | 4.353 |
Stealth | #9 | 3.894 | 4.529 |
Ambition | #23 | 3.439 | 4.000 |
Kink | #30 | 3.135 | 3.647 |
Overall | #35 | 2.969 | 3.453 |
Play | #44 | 2.579 | 3.000 |
Harmony | #44 | 2.883 | 3.353 |
Horny | #44 | 2.529 | 2.941 |
Aesthetic | #55 | 2.579 | 3.000 |
Sound | #72 | 0.961 | 1.118 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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I really, really wish I had time to finish this one. But I want to get a review in in time, so:
I have a lot of feelings on this one. The writing, overall, is fantastic. I love the deep dive into these characters and their idiosyncrasies, I love failgirls, I love autistic nonbinary robots. It feels personal and indulgent and unapologetic, in all the best ways. The constant use of modern day furry and queer lingo almost went over the edge for me, but I believed enough that these characters are intentionally being, as one might put it, 'cringe'. The aesthetics of this all being played through text files and in the terminal is phenomenal and appropriate. And everything being locked behind puzzles as you explore into these characters' sexuality as they themselves explore it is a great bit of harmony. A++
Thank you so much! I’m happy you got a lot out of the work, which is definitely my intent, appealing to people who like technology and robot furry stuff. My big goal with the project was to represent myself, and to appeal to people like myself, and I’m happy you enjoyed it a lot.
I also feel happy because I did enjoy your own visual novel, which appealed to my own interests for androids and cute girls as well. It’s nice to get an appraisal from someone who’s own work I liked so much.
puzzles i was able to successfully solve: 000, 003, 005, and kind of 006 (i followed instructions.txt no problem but had to check the spoilers to figure out what in the world it meant by "the codes will fall in columns." i thought this meant something was supposed to vertically line up in the file...)
now i'm on 007 and i'm considering looking at the spoilers for this one too but i might just call it here.
if i had sorta thought more about it i may have been able to solve 001 and 002 but i just could not think of anything to try when looking at them.
and, for context, my brain was already kinda fried before i started playing. so maybe if i were more fresh i would have solved more.
i think 004 kinda tricked me. i thought that the "balance the budget" line meant i should try to group up the dollar numbers into two groups that, when group one is subtracted from group two, gives zero. this seemed like the right approach, as it's completely doable to split the numbers up like this. after adding them up, i them summed up the rows in the ID numbers column for both groups, and took their difference, and got a 4 digit code--and 4 digit codes had seemed very common up to that point in the puzzle.
but apparently the actual solution using the CSV file was much more convoluted than i had thought of. i don't think i would have ever thought to try removing the zeroes and then summing the digits in groups of 6... just doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would ever cross my mind.
not sure how useful any of that information is, but hopefully it at least provides some indication to you of what the puzzle's difficulty levels are, for whatever that's worth.
i really enjoyed the kinda jargon-filled writing and all the robot (i think that's what the characters are?) worldbuilding stuff. things like sticking wires in places, and transferring memory back and forth, and what not... it's good silly nerd stuff.
i did find some of the writing kind of difficult to understand (although, again, this may be due to my brain being fried). for example, when i first read chapter 2, i kinda thought nepenthe and aleph were siblings due to the lines about that. i think part of the reason for this is that, like, this is a sarcastic line from both of them, but i think sarcasm does not come through as well when reading a long text (that is formatted partially like a technical report) in notepad. everything feels dry and literal, at least a little bit.
of the puzzles i could solve i definitely enjoyed them a lot. my problem with these kinds of puzzles is always, like, i want to try the other ones, but i can't do that without going through the spoilers. but then of course once i do that there's really no way to come back to the other puzzle and try it again later.
i think having more hints would be at least worthy of consideration. e.g. puzzle 004 might have gone a lot differently for me if i knew i was looking for text. i think one thing to consider would be providing a little command line app that lets you quickly test different passwords for each puzzle, and this app could also provide hints (e.g. after you miss a puzzle like 5 times with a numerical answer it could say "not a number"). i think the ability to see where you're going wrong is what makes traditional puzzle games so much easier to make progress on than these kinds of puzzles where if you're wrong, you have absolutely no idea if you're even on the right track.
although, such a thing would detract from the beauty of a game that is completely cross-platform just by virtue of being nothing but text files and zip files. which i do think is really cool. so maybe just a longer spoilers.txt with more incremental hints would work better.
i loved the "Qt mark" joke.
Thank you for your puzzle feedback. My limited testing prior reiterated many of the comments you had expressed here. The “command line” app idea is interesting. If I recreate the game, I will include a hint system, perhaps with that theming. The “no hints” philosophy is a holdover from the game’s limited time budget, and also them not being very common in ARG / CTF games.
I had deliberately overtuned the puzzles to increase their difficulty relative to the game length, especially with puzzle 008 acting as a hard roadblock, with its alternative solution being rather cryptic. As far as I can tell, nobody who has played the game has actually solved it without using the spoiler file. I broadly consider this a success, but I understand that my puzzle design is inconsistent and could definitely use less “moon logic” elements.
So, thank you for reading the story, and for appreciating the QT mark joke /)
I like the idea of ARG stuff, but after work I am way to tired to actually hunt through text docs for passwords. I read the PDF though, that was nice. Well, I skipped some of Plushie Appreciation. There's quite a lot of world building. And the story had puns that tickled my heart, and ideas that warmed it.
Thanks for reading the story. I’m happy you appreciate the corny humour.
A very fun puzzle game to work through. The ARG nature ended up being a nice touch to the overall gameplay of the game. I didnt end up making it too far myself, but from what I saw, it was quite well written and a very fun experience. ~
Thank you for trying out my game. It’s nice that you had tried solving it to such an extent.
The puzzles are very cool! Its definitely satisfying to decode and input the password to find that its correct. I didn't have to look up the answer until I reached the one to unlock 004. The story is also very neat with the technology kinks.
Thank you for trying out the puzzles. I’m glad you found use of the spoilers file.
I didn;t get too deep into this game but it was quite an interesting concept! Taking a look at the PDF version it's clear there is a LOT of content still left, it's an outstanding amount of work for a single month.
It was not quite my thing, but I appreciate the novelty of this sort of ARG-ish experience. Really cool concept and a commendable amount of work, cheers!
Thank you for complimenting my ambitions. I’m happy to see people try new genres they wouldn’t otherwise consider, and I think this jam is a good platform for helping people do just that.
This is the first game I played in the jam, and I keep coming back and giving it higher and higher scores. It centers a lot of things that I have a great deal of anxiety and self-hatred around and it’s taken a lot of time for me to go back and recognize how strong the writing is to cause that – it’s not stumbling into this, it’s telling a story of a character with a lot of the same things going on as I have, and reminding me of how uncomfortably shallow most of my coping/masking mechanisms are. I’m going back to this now – I stopped early when I got too stressed out, but now that I have rated everything in the jam I feel like I can go back and give this the time it deserves – and give myself the time, patience, and compassion I wasn’t allowing for myself when I was feeling a lot of time pressure.
But yeah, I think this is excellent writing now. Maybe someday I’ll be more tolerant towards myself.
One thing that did throw me off early was getting distracted by a red herring in a very early puzzle – a reference to esolangs in the prose made me totally fail to recognize the answer right in front of me and instead feed the puzzle file into a Brainfuck interpreter which, if it skips unknown tokens, emits what looks like deliberately-engineered output in another “one character instruction” esolang that I couldn’t recognize! A friend and I spent a while trying to figure out which one it was, scouring the text for hints, before realizing and trying the obvious and discovering it to be correct. So, uh, that might not have helped my mood. And I’m still not quite convinced there isn’t some secondary solution in there, I suppose I’ll find out later on…
I really appreciate your honest comments. It was important to me to demonstrate that honest depiction of personal feelings and mental complexions, even when they persist in erotic contexts. Thank you for taking your time and engaging with the work when your personal feelings allow it.
I also like that Brainfuck puzzle idea, even accidental. If I create a remake, I will be happy to create more opportunities for esoteric puzzles, even if they involve more “nerd sniping” :)
I am immediately on board with queer furry kinky robot stories, yes yes.
So I don't like ARG-style puzzles. I don't have the patience or lateral thinking they require. However, in this case, I actually was motivated enough to try most of the early ones, and I got quite a few of the solutions, which is rare for me. This speaks well for the puzzle design. Thanks for including the spoilers file and a non-interactive version as well.
Between the deliberately complex vocabulary and writing style, and of course the puzzles, this is very much a work for Computer Touchers. People in that community who are also ARG fans should have an absolute blast with this story. It makes you work hard for it, but it's worth the effort.
Thank you for playing the game, and for appreciating the PDF version. I think you understand well the intent of my creation, and I’m happy to see that come through.
The breadth and variety of the storytelling and puzzles is very impressive! It's a bit of tightly wrapped package with difficult solutions, but you included passwords for the impatient. I didn't get too far on my own, but looking at the spoilers file, I noticed that there all sorts of different ways of finding the passwords which is very neat to see in a puzzle game.
The narrative deliberately uses lots of complex terminology, which is a decision that definitely fits the theme, but it distanced me a bit from the story. I am awed by the incredible effort that went into the puzzle design and writing even if they weren't really my thing, and I think that any players who can appreciate them will quickly fall in love! This game is highly specialized, but it fits the niche that it was designed for with surgical precision.
Thank you for your praise. I appreciate the acknowledgement that it is a niche title, which is something I had deliberately aimed for. It’s good that I had encouraged some people to try something they otherwise would not have.
An interesting game! I also didn’t get too far into the game, but I like the narrative and ARG aspects - though I think they could mesh together even more. To me, the puzzles quickly became unsolvable, and I was expecting them to weave more into the story, since the first actual puzzle had set up that expectation (for example, I thought the solution for one of the first puzzles would simply be the name of the cat plushie, but the intended solution completely flew over my head…).
Thank you for trying my game.
Oh, this FUCKS. I don't yet have time to go all the way in, but I love the puzzles so far, and the writing is great. The worldbuilding on display is wonderful, and I like the "visual design" of the characters- even if we only read up on them. It's all very sweet, too. There IS love in me. I'm floored by this one!!
Thank you for your kind words. I’m happy that you got a lot out of my story :)