This was fun! It was cool being able to explore in 3D, and the environment looks pretty good.
For your first game jam, great job!
A couple smaller issues:
- The lighting, while it does fit the setting, made it hard to read sometimes
- For me personally, the camera speed felt a bit slow when rotating it and it would sometimes go a bit crazy
I like how we can also talk to the victim, who makes a groaning sound - that made me laugh. :D
Thoughts about the story: (spoilers below)
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First off, I like the initial setup about the other characters and who might've done it, based on the dialogue clues.
While I'm not against the twist of YOU, the player character, being the murderer - I felt a bit cheated based on what I discovered in-game during my playthrough.
I found the debtor's note, the note under the victim's bed ("trust no one, not even yourself"), the poison in the Viking's room, and the poison and matches in the MC's room. I assumed the MC was being framed, either by the other character who shared their first initial (i.e. random fluke), or the victim's brother, who would have known about the debtor's notice - and could have used that opportunity to kill his brother, frame the player, and become the sole inheritor of the castle & kingdom.
I just *happened* to pick a character name that shared the first initial with another character, so when I saw the "Debtor's Notice," I figured that was referring to the other character, assuming a fair play mystery (which has an implicit assumption that the detective is the not the murderer).
I don't like how a player can have an easier or harder time depending on which name they choose for themselves. e.g. If we enter a name starting with 'A', there are what, 3 or 4 other character that share that first initial? Versus picking a name starting with a letter that doesn't overlap at all with the other suspects, like 'Z'.
When I found the note saying "Trust no one, not even yourself", I did have some suspicions regarding the player character, so I went and checked the player's room and found suspicious evidence there... which made me think that the player was being framed for the murder. Just as the player planted evidence in Bjorn's room, another character could have done the same thing to frame the player character.
Also, not sure if I ran out of time and missed something or just overlooked what was there, but were there any clues during the game itself about the significance of the matches? I only learned about that after making my guess, and then the game's like "Oh btw, those matches found in your room? Yeaaaaah, they were really important to the murder", which was a complete surprise to me. Did I overlook something?
IMO making the player character just a "guest and friend," rather than a/the detective, would've made the twist feel more fair to me.
Anyway, despite all of this, I still enjoyed the game. Thanks for making it!
