Don’t say “it’s annoying to ask”. If you believe yourself to be annoying us by asking, we are far less likely to answer. If you’re going to ask, make it clear that you deserve an answer. Otherwise, you simply seem like the sort of person who gets annoyed easily by questions, so you are unlikely to accrue many answers.
Okay, so for a game developed predominantly by a team of two this is very impressive in how sophisticated its design is, leaving just enough room for the player to control the level of suspense while working within cinematic confines. The story itself is charming in its adherence to certain tried-and-true, though not yet trite, tropes. I was amused by the faithful rendering of anime tropes, both in the characterization of the dialogue and the personification of the visuals. The premise of starting the game in an idealized dreamscape and then plunging the player into a nightmare was very effective. The protagonist’s candid attitude serves to facilitate a fluid transition, on multiple accounts: Not only does her apparent mastery of both the physical and metaphysical domains place the audience in a posture of authority OVER the dark developments, allowing the setting to unfold naturally and casually, but also her creeping descent into madness presents a very striking counterpoint by the end. Mechanically, as well as in terms of illustration, the horror is flawless. So let us talk about the horror in the writing:
At times, the prose is fearsome, yet at other times it is frightful. The employment of clichés, while it works in establishing the genre and keeping the audience engaged, ensuring that we adhere to your advice to play the game in one sitting, falls apart by the end as an Enigmatic Antagonist is introduced. For innocent young schoolgirls to be corny is one thing, since it illustrates their native naiveté. Be that as it may: the significance of the Occult Daemon lies in that it passes mortal understanding. This is illustrated very effectively in one principal scene, which to my mind was the finest in its execution: the interim between the lighting of the candles and the burning of the hair. I took the liberty of exploring the familiar map at this point in the game, and I was impressed with several stylistic alterations, most noteworthy of which was the absence of the supporting characters, the broken light switch, (a token dream symbol,) and certain questions which the protagonist voiced, which I had previously pondered, about the Mysterious Door. The reason that these alterations work lies in the fact that the familiar, mortal world has been EVACUATED, leaving the protagonist as the solitary vestige of Humanity. The fear of being alone is one of the most primal fears for communal animals, so this alone(ness) was enough to create a suspenseful and foreboding setting.
However, at this point, several changes to the environment doomed the writing. The first of these lay in a novel map. Running was disabled, so I presumed that there would be nothing to run from. By the time that I returned to the schoolhouse, the whole thing felt like a child’s nightmare about leaving home to go to school for the first time. This quaint, nostalgic sensibility was reinforced by the apparent randomness of the classroom numbers and the extremely narrow corridors, yet what killed the mood were the notes. Up until this point, notices were posted to establish an omnipresent school bureaucracy whose absence said more than its presence; the girls fear the Faculty and Administration as a potential source of retribution, so all of their threats center around it as though it were a ghost story.
While it is creative to use such notes as a means for communicating between the Daemon and the Protagonist, this places a weight upon those slips of paper that tears right through them. Left alone, Kat has only one Other with whom to communicate, and the manner in which this Other is presented must be flawless. If we are to experience Fear, the Other must be menacing above all else, meaning that its Intent is alien to our own, its Nature must pass our understanding, and its Power must be overwhelming and unpredictable. These three virtues are exalted in the visual design, but they are absent from the prose. The dialogue between Kat and the Daemon feels campy and lame, only because of how much it pales before the setting of the stage for its arrival.
What comes out of this is nothing more than a defiant adolescent striving to defend her individualism from a confining force, oblivious to the irony of the fact that her very defiant individualism was what doomed her to this prison, the latter of which functions as the perfect and most visceral allegory for the former. By contrast, her interlocutor is transparent in its intent: to contain her, observe her, torment her, and then finally to annihilate her. It is OBVIOUS that the antagonist is some sort of a predator, and by this point the clichés alone prove this, so for the predator to identify Kat as its prey is unnecessary. A redundant antagonist who must state the obvious mirrors the fears of the protagonist a little TOO well, tempting me to wonder: can this Daemon become my friend? He certainly doesn’t seem to be hiding anything up his sleeve, after all.
One of the greatest frustrations I’ve encountered as a writer and designer looking to develop video games lay in finding programmers. A great many computer technicians have been possessed of the illusion that, as coders, their ideas ought to take priority over the ideas of novelists, philosophers, artists, and poets. Part of this emerges out of the extreme individualism of a competitive industry; some of it is literally programmed into the nature of the code. It has been made clear to me that the desire to do it all yourself has become a sense of entitlement, precluding team efforts from coming to fruition or even from taking root. The presumption that a coder can also develop and actualize Great Ideas implies that those who come by other Ideas ought to be regarded as adversaries, and if they do not possess the technical know-how to develop those ideas within this medium, they are dismissed as lazy or pretentious. Is this not ironic? The pretension to begin with lay in this: that a brain which spends an entire work-week coding is NOT the sort of brain that produces poetry. One is a very literal, Aristotelian discipline; the other is Platonic and Inspired.
By this review I do not mean to knock your game in the slightest. It is only when something so proximately approaches any sort of professional perfection that I feel tempted to spend two hours playing and reviewing it. I hope to help you push the boulder off the edge to its final refinement; you are already so close to finding a formula that will make this a groundbreaking innovator in multiple genres. I am already deeply impressed with the synthesis of mechanics. A game that feels so postmodern should be developed under the supervision of an oligarchy of specialists. This is why my chief recommendation for you would be to hire several staff writers to proofread and revise your prose. You could make something that works as well as a Stephen King novel here. You already have the Vision; it’s only a matter now of cross-pollinating between different media.
In case you wish to expose any recent versions to a new audience, it is still not too late to sign up for Dream Jam. I am sending you this invitation because of both the quality and the relevance of your game’s content and subject matter. Good luck delving deeper:
https://itch.io/jam/dreamjam2020
[({L.J.)}]