Hi! Thank you so much for playing the game and sharing your thoughts!
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I'm genuinely glad you found the game scary!! But yeah, it was conceived as the type of story that only gets worse and worse and worse as you go on lmaoooo like even Lewis goes from a character you can root for from a character... well, I hope he's still somehow touching, but I won't lie, even I have mixed feelings about him!! I also wanted the destruction to feel quite progressive too (as he also progressively kills his emotions, going from struggling to desperate to numb), and also to allow the players to see Lewis become more and more CRAZY loool; I'm glad it was dreadful, as weird as it is to say!!!!!
For the choice during the party, it was designed to be some terrible red-herring actually! I think it was pretty obvious that going upstairs with Joshua would involve some shenanigans but 1) nothing eventually happens 2) not sure about this, but i guess players might have expected joshua to be the one being too forward?? when in fact, joshua is just my autistic bisexual cutie pie, and Lewis is the one actually being more aggressive; and for the other choice, I did expect players to think "well, I'm avoiding an unfortunate time upstairs" only for what happens to be actually worse indeed; i was wondering if players would come back to see what picking the other option would do, since it's the only "actual" choice in-game, so i'm glad you did and shared your impressions about the two variations!!
And thank you for the nice words, I'm glad it managed to be a scary experience (I don't know if I felt scared writing the game, I was more confused as to why I was writing fanfic but somehow I did lol). And actually, I've been eyeing your game too (it looks like hurt/comfort, i love hurt/comfort and complicated gay feelings)!!!!!!! So expect me soon!!