Thank you for submitting Doomsday For Dummies to the Branchy Studio Narrative Jam. This was a standout entry in terms of writing quality. The voice is sharp, consistent, and genuinely funny. The escalation from nudging a remote off a table to a full supernatural confrontation is expertly paced, and the moment where the blood starts flowing backwards is exactly the kind of tonal shift that makes comedy and horror work together. The burned-away faces in the photo frames are also a great piece of environmental storytelling, raising questions without a single line of exposition.
On the switch system: after reviewing the full structure of the game, there is more going on mechanically than it might first appear. The player controls two types of indirect actions (moving objects and controlling electricity), and the roommate genuinely adapts his behavior in response: he starts carrying a flashlight, tapes the light switches, and prepares for your interventions. That reactive character logic is exactly what the jam was designed to encourage.
The most interesting moment structurally is the Persistent variable, which tracks how aggressively the player uses the electricity switch. When it reaches 1, the narrator’s tone shifts to snarky. This is a switch changing meaning, not just visuals, which is the jam’s core design principle. That instinct is exactly right.
The main area to develop further: the Move and Elec variables accumulate throughout the experience but do not yet drive many conditional outcomes beyond that one tonal shift. The two different Day One endings (Glass_dead and Annoyed_win) show that the branching architecture is already there. The next step would be letting those accumulated stats alter how the roommate behaves in earlier scenes, not just which ending is reached.
We would love to see Day Two. The bones of something genuinely great are here.
You can find other submissions feedback on discord server in this channel: https://discordapp.com/channels/1383776038013763619/1490280560902275082