Post by Filmstars in Mystery of the Malign Demo jam comments

(Sorry, screwed up the initial part of the recording, but I guess that early part is very straight-forward anyhow.)

If the itch version has more content, please let me know…

Still hugely enjoying the game. Your demos keep on only teasing the "truth" so I still don’t know whether the solutions in this game will be natural, or supernatural. Or both? In any case it seems very nice how some clues in that park seem to be less immediately relevant, while still intriguing.

You can see me somewhat brute-forcing the solution to the final puzzle – I think you are being slightly too autistic here, or need to phrase it better. The "Loud Bang" to my mind clearly belongs to the immediate time frame of the attack; since it seems to have ended the attack, from what we know? But it’s an incorrect answer. Meanwhile afaik the cotton in the brush we did not even 100% relate to the attack (the girl should tell us "oh yeah I have this torn piece of clothing"), yet it is a correct answer.

The world building is very cool, the dialogues are entertaining and neither too serious nor too funny. I don’t know what your plan is for the final release, but it’s very nice in these demos to be just thrown into the story, and we, the main character, are for some reason intrigued and concerned about what happened to this woman, and as a player one actually has no idea WHY that event is so concerning, one has no idea WHAT the protagonist actually suspects may have happened here. We just get the emotion from the protagonist and it adds to the suspense.

I see you caved in and made walking NPCs, I gotta say the previous solution of triggered teleports fit in more with the general spookiness, in my humble opinion. But it’s understandable.

Looking forward to the release.

edit: After reading the other comment, I remembered, I was quite annoyed with the slow movement and hurting my pinkie having to hold shift just to make it bearable.

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Gameplay Supremacy179 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for the video feedback. It's probably better if you understand that no player has a 100% satisfying process and that's kind of intended because it's a necessary part of the game's commitment to player freedom. Some players get to 95% satisfaction but it's not possible for any player to naturally get a perfect experience. The game always demands some work. A lot of your questions have answers in the demo if you think about them hard enough. Nearly every single line of dialogue is some kind of loaded sentence. If you think of the game as one huge onslaught of a thousands little pieces of information that combine into bigger pieces of information you will see that the game has a lot of hidden information that rewards not making snap judgements about something based only on its first layer of information. If there's a contradiction somewhere, it's put there to make you ask yourself what that means. A piece of negative information like confirming that something doesn't have a scent that leads anywhere can also tell you something. This is a game that's all about challenging your own assumptions.

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