10/10 Would Meltornate again.
One of the best narrative games I’ve played in a while.
My Playthrough: I really dove into this one. It all felt really nice, the introduction, the art, the vibes and the “tutorial” stuff was just perfect to explain everything. I began writing my own notes on my Ipad, but got stuck after opening/reading about 25 documents due to some bugs that are now fixed. Even after the “smoked salmon” update I still felt a bit stuck, I found the whole investigation quite difficult. At one point I had every name written down on my notes with some info on each of them and still couldn’t figure out where they went on the family tree, just some immediate relations (who was related to who). But I like difficult puzzles, I must have taken about 8 hours total to finish the game.
Plot: SPOILERS Absolutely phenomenal. Profound. Creative. It was 4am, I hadn't gotten anywhere in a while, but I read “See the World” for the 20th time, and It clicks. I understand then ketini's point of view in the letter. I finally figure out Floren's part in the story. It really touched me and was also the big “Eureka” moment for me. What a tragedy, damn you @somethingcinnamon, you had no right to break my heart like this on some random wild jam game. There was definitely a bunch of ambiguous stuff too, I wasn’t sure who the twins were or covethin’s genes were until I accidentally guessed them near the end. I would like to get some closure even on side characters, for example I have no clue who Aditin is overall.
Game Design: 1: A few more “Signatures” at the bottom of some documents would be nice, especially if you plan on continuing this game, rereading a document and not remembering who had written it definitely took a lot of time. 2: Increasing the desk document capacity just by 1 or 2 might help make it more fun, (a messy desk is a fun desk hahaha). 3 The total number of documents I found were 44, but a few more documents to confirm some ambiguity would have been helpful, In fact I believe this might be the best way to moderate the game difficulty, If you are having trouble just open more documents to get some confirmations, without this option I got frustrated at times. Anyways these are just observations.
Similar Games: This reminded me immediately of “The Blue Prince” and “The Painscreek Killings”. If making a game in this style was your goal you nailed it. The aspect of finding out the family tree of a character (not only if they are a mutant or not) was very cool, I especially enjoy when some info is given in traditional letters while some info comes from “Death Records” or other types of more official documents. It gives it a nice mix with a feeling of getting confirmation of some intel that seemed ambiguous or unsure before.
Congrats on the game. Hope to see more in the future.