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Steven Casteel1 day ago(+1)

Overall: Strong atmosphere but the interactivity is too thin to feel like a game yet.

What Worked Well:

  • Title Screen: The music fading in with ambience is a nice opening. The main character is striking, the horizon line works well, and the E.C.H.O. typography and coloring are good graphic design.

Areas for Improvement:

  • Ape and Godot Icons: Clicking them on the title screen doesn't do anything.
  • First Scene Interaction: I had to click all over the screen before finding the right app to tap which let to a moment of frustration.
  • Chat Text Formatting: When there are two long sentences in a reply the spacing gets weird. The chat layout could use a polish pass in general. Worth asking an AI to outline best practices for chat app text layout and then have apply them.
  • Actual Gameplay: The game ends back at the title screen pretty abruptly. As it stands the player is just pressing the left button a bunch of times, the middle button a bunch of times, or the right button a bunch of times, with no meaningful consequences either way even though your description says this is part of the experience. Some actual participatory gameplay elements and player agency/consequences need to be added for this to feel like a game.
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Lenobe1 day ago(+1)

Thank you for such a detailed review! The chat layout definitely needs some polishing.

As for the gameplay: each reply in the chat increases one of three counters - Aggression, Neutrality, or Loyalty. After 10 messages, the player is directed into one of three final dialogue branches with the AI, and the ending is determined by whichever counter is highest. In the future, I plan to add more branching and some visual cues, like coloring the buttons depending on which counter they affect.

The chat icon on the phone screen already has a hover effect, but it seems too subtle - I’ll make it more noticeable. Regarding interactivity, I’m still thinking about it. This is meant to be a short visual novel focused on the vibe of a single conversation at a critical moment, and I don’t want to lose that atmosphere.

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Steven Casteel1 day ago(+1)

The chat button being the only hoverable thing made it feel more like a static image than an actual phone with apps.

If all the apps could be hovered, then presumably you'd be able to click on them too... and that means something would need to happen when clicking them all as well which would be a bunch of unnecessary work.

So, I dunno. Maybe there is another way you can get into the app that is more convincing world building? Like you are actively in some other app, like playing a snake game or something, and it pauses and the AI app notification scrolls in from the top?

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