itch.io

Just played through this game and reached the ending. Not sure if there are other endings. The mention of “logging your timeline” on the end screen seems to imply that there might be, but I wouldn’t know how to find them.

I still don’t understand why it’s referred to as “Disconcordia” rather than “Discord,” despite referring to “Slack” by its actual name.

Maybe I’m not the right sort of audience for this, but I’m not sure what to make of the experience. You get interrupted during your investigation, and suddenly it’s over with a narrated ending and time skips and subtext that probably went over my head. My personal preference is definitely to have things more clarified and definitive, at least enough to let me know I got the intended experience from the game and I’m not still missing anything major.

I take it the point wasn’t the investigation after all, and that was a facade for the actual point which was to get an immersive taste of someone being discredited, expelled, and lied about in a community by awful people who everyone believes. But if so, it kind of hit oddly, because we didn’t actually get to know/trust Cassandra to make us care that much, and Cassandra herself apparently wasn’t even fazed by it. Plus the whole thing with the church was really weird and kind of out of nowhere.

The game itself is pretty impressive for a personal project, so kudos for that, but I did run into some issues:

1. I use the itch.io app and download and play itch games through it by default. Apparently the game relies being played in a browser though, in order to inspect an avatar to get the full image. Playing through the app doesn’t have a console or even a context menu by which the full image could be found. I was able to find it by searching the downloaded files for the game, but this obviously breaks immersion and can spoil. So you might want to clearly indicate that the game is meant to be played through the browser. I had to do the same for finding the email/password image.

2. I got really confused about “fire rate” and what a “0.2 fire rate” is supposed to mean. I kept assuming it meant 0.2 hits per second, especially because it’s closely related to “damage per second,” and because it was referred to as a “minimum,” and it made sense to think minimum = fewest hits per second. But it seems it actually means 0.2 seconds between each hit. So maybe the terminology could be made less ambiguous. This caused the already complicated DPS puzzle to be that much more confusing.

3. In the postgame, I’m stuck logged in as Shadowsmoke, and the logout command no longer works, so I have no way to access Tau’s friends or servers that Shadowsmoke isn’t part of. I was able to read through the Staff Area messages detailing the shady tactics used, and the rest of the Library server messages, but as far as I can tell these are just related philosophical/literary concepts and don’t involve anything more to actually do.

4. The end screen mentions a post game puzzle, but I’m unable to find it. The game files include an image with “Disconcordia Advanced” and “CBA” scrawled on it, but I don’t know where it’s meant to show up in game, and typing “CBA” does nothing. The only other images I don’t remember coming up despite reading through everything I could find were of “StratShotPlayer’s Comments” and of Slack’s interface, and I don’t know what to make of them.