itch.io

I mentioned this in my other new comment (now that I played the game more), but the main problem with Shadow Comprehension is actually that I had missed the actions that led to giving more of it, leading to me assuming that they weren't present in the game at all. I still haven't found more than 32 total in the entire game, and by now I believe I actually *have* seen most of the game... and all of those except the exam one are like a minute from the start position.

If the game gives me a reason to believe that map knowledge is actually worthwhile (for the primary goal I'm aiming for which is "getting shadow comprehension"), then I become way more incentivized to look for it. But when literally every action I do doesn't lead to getting any more, I have no reason to keep looking.

It probably doesn't fully help that mapping things out in my head is hard and I can't actually remember which actions I haven't checked for any actions behind them yet. If I knew which actions I had to check it'd be a lot easier to devote a run to just checking that action... though of course this only helps in the event of most unchecked actions having something behind them. The reason why I stopped checking a lot of them was that most of the options I was checking early on were leading to long action chains, and trace amount of stats don't really matter and they just never were leading to anything better. Making the game explicitly communicate which actions you haven't checked for followups is also a strong motivator that that is something that the player should be using as a progress metric.