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(+2)

A wild ride, a creative way to use the jam assets, and certainly a success in implementing gameplay mechanics in Ren'py such that it all feels pretty natural and intuitive. The biggest caveats are the presentation being obviously unfinished and the narrative conceit remaining a little abstract – the tone and the exposition are sort of all over the place in a way that makes the stakes a bit difficult to grasp. How undercooked the setup is definitely weakens the gameplay segment, even if it's still fun to go through.

Some further thoughts and nitpicks about that: keeping your items after you die is a good anti-frustration feature, though it means there are no big penalties to speak of. I took so many accidental screenshots while trying to navigate south with S (still bound to Ren'py's screenshot button). The free-roam level is definitely a cool feature, although there are some UX papercuts with the minimap – opening and closing it should really work with the same hotkey, and the indicator for which room you're currently is too subtle (could just have used a different color). Also, items appear to be scattered more or less randomly throughout the map, which feels less satisfying than there being clear thematic links. The game misses out on having a gameplay loop that motivates the player like "I need item X, I wonder if that could be in room Y". I do think the game mechanics support the nonlinear story with many different endings very well, though.

All in all, some messiness in the implementation aside, it's still a creative entry very much worth checking out.

(1 edit)

I had a different idea for the item search, but thought it would take longer so I had to resort to using randomness with weights on certain items, difficult if the player doesn't know what to look for and if they are even thematic at all and some rooms having none of the items which in the stream I was on had to resort to me giving the locations which sucked a lot and took away some immersion, I'll take note of the current map location indicator too, right now I'm checking the reviews and seeing what I need to improve on the game or any bugs and issues that happen to pass by