'Forest of the Deer God' is a straight up spooky text-based adventure game. It's got a simple premise of a paranormal investigator gets lost in the woods and a spooky deer god shows up, and he wants to investigate it. What follows is hours of wandering around a spooky forest, a spooky cabin, and unveiling the mystery of who the deer god is and just what do you plan to do about it? The aesthetic and vibes of this game are on point, perfectly capturing that old school retro text-based adventure game vibe. There's some super fun jump scares, and going in blind, it's very much an apprehension of wandering into the dark. There are several puzzles in this game, the hint document is very helpful with figuring out the solutions. It does get a little disorienting with all the directions being cardinal directions (maybe somehow making it so once you learn the room location, it's replaced in the options? might be tedious but would help with retracing steps and exploration especially for one of the major puzzles). The story and lore itself is pretty straightforward with a few tongue-in-cheek twists, so it services the game nicely. The feat of programming a full text-game is the impressive feature of this visual novel, and if you've got a few hours to dig into it, it's quite a satisfying to beat the game.
Viewing post in Forest of the Deer God jam comments
Thanks for taking the time to drop a review! Glad to hear you liked the game's atmosphere, it was actually pretty fun to use the natural "darkness" of old computer setups to help build the vibe of wandering through dark places.
Navigation being confusing is an understandable criticism tbh. I originally made the game with the intent that the player would sketch out their own maps & notes as they went along, but if this hadn't been a game jam project then I think I'd probably try to implement some kind of auto-map system into the game if I could since getting lost seems to be a recurring feedback issue.