[Comment has spoilers]
I really liked this a lot. One thing I found particularly impressive was the pacing of the gameplay experience, which I would divide into the following sections:
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- 1. Act I - tutorial section, manages to teach mechanics and convey effectively to the player the level of difficulty and methodical deduction expected of them. Figuring out all the names while not having to deal with all the rooms yet.
- 2. Act II - getting increasingly confused before figuring out the twist and the numbering, I figured this out halfway through the act, but even if you're stumped you'll definitely have it figured out by 12. Once this is sorted out it becomes more fun to revisit old scenes and understand them differently
- 3. Making steady progress forward in time. (While also leaving some tantalizing mysteries behind that you can't yet solve.) Pushing through here might eventually get boring but then...
- 4. Barrage of deaths (18-23) - it really feels like this section has a lot of forward story momentum. Very sad and dramatic feeling as everything descends into chaos.
- 5. Getting to the finale (25, 26), slower pace, sadness.
- 6. Once you've gotten here it feels fun to go back over the old scenes some of which you haven't read since the twist. Somewhere in here think I figured out the lateral jump about the scene with person 12. But generally the game rewards playing methodically and fleshing out all the scenes by elimination. I think this avoids the trap some deduction games fall into where towards the end you're just bored of reading the same scenes over and over looking for a needle in a haystack. This is also where I figured out the contagion mechanism. There was also a nice mix of randomly finding new scenes, and finding tricky scenes I knew I was missing which felt satisfying.
- 7. The lateral jump about timeslot 25, you understand you're missing something here by the beginning of 6, but finishing 6 helps you narrow down which remaining references are relevant and gives your thoughts some time to ferment. And by the end there are 5-6 clues pointing you to the right place. I think the additional clues the author added here are really helpful.
- 8 The lateral jump about the narrator and finding file 98. I wasn't able to figure this out without some peeking, and would have appreciated maaaybe one more clue. (Maybe 21-CH-3 should be marked as containing an extra reference? Maybe a second dream mention in 00-final-note?)
I'd be curious to hear how this matches or doesn't match other people's play experience!
I really liked the title. The number of times I was stuck, and typing 'help' did in fact get me unstuck felt very clever. ❤️
I also found it funny how often I would enter a filename I was pretty certain of, it wouldn't work, and later I would enter the 'same' filename again just to double-check and it worked. Felt like https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-10-04