Awesome game! I'm always looking out for more investigative games like Her Story and Roottrees so this really hit the spot.
The writing was great - the feeling of dipping into different internet communities and different ways people approach social media was really fun. I think the site outage is a great way to limit content in a believable way!
Using hashtags and usernames to explore is such a natural way to search through content, and I really enjoyed searching and seeing what would turn up. At the very start, I felt a little overwhelmed by how many things I wanted to look at next, but the available content was the right size that I quickly started to feel like I was mastering who was who and what was going on with the various dramas, which was great.
One of my favorite parts was how answers are entered using the collected usernames and hashtags as part of a natural conversation - nice and in-universe, and I found it very satisfying to inform my tragically unsavvy friends what was going on. 😄 The questions not arriving all at once was nice too.
Spoilery comments below!!
One of my favorite moments was the teacher and former student reuniting in the comments of a random post. Stumbling on unexpected stuff like that is such a great part of a search-based game like this!
Will you work more on the game? I would love to see a post-jam version! 🙂 One comment I had is I was looking for more of an ending to close out the game. (Like is that person's daughter okay? I didn't get absolutely everything so maybe I missed something.) I wouldn't have minded some final segment after I finished answering the questions about the individual dramas.
UI-wise, I wished I could drag and drop hashtags into the answer spots and into the search bar. And having my progress saved would be great so I can revisit and explore more. It would definitely be great to see a web build of it so I can recommend this game to everyone and they'll have an easy time playing!
Sorry for the long comment, I'm just always interested in cool games like these. 😄