I really liked the idea of using dialogue choices to communicate in code, and figuring out a new way to communicate with both codes at once was satisfying. Being reset to the start of the sequence with every mistake was very frustrating, however, especially when the choice you made about which code to use didn't show on screen like the other dialogue choices made by the player did - I kept forgetting which code I'd picked and resorting to guessing, which made the consequences of failure extra frustrating. The story is a little confusingly vague as well. With some fleshing out of the plot and some quality of life changes to be more forgiving of trial-and-error I think the code mechanic has a lot of potential, and something I would like to see a game centred around.
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Referendum's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #2 | 4.667 | 4.667 |
| Theme | #22 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Narration | #28 | 3.083 | 3.083 |
| Overall feeling | #32 | 3.083 | 3.083 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Hi, thanks for this feedback (especially your specific frustrations)! I've updated the game with a few fixes & tweaks to hopefully improve the experience, mostly around replaying (you can now skip to any previously seen scene after failure), but also by showing the player which code they've selected, which you mention. Plot is still very vague, though. 🙃
This is a great concept, and I liked a lot about your presentation. I had technical issues with the phone interface , though. The text bubbles kept overlapping each other rather than appearing separately and scrollable.
Really liked this, smart and Kafkaesque. Took me a few goes to get the hang of things, and I'll admit I gave up before the end after getting quite far through and failing... But certainly original and engaging.
A fantastic time twisty tale where everything is smartly put together. Clever, stylish, but challenging enough that it felt more like a puzzle than a story.
I got myself in a couple loops and tried a few strategies, but probably won't see the end of the story without some written notes and several highlighter pens. But unpicking everything will be an evening I look forward to
Very original entry. I really loved the idea but I too would have enjoyed to speed things up to skip directly to the codes (because I failed A LOT) I should have wrote down the sentences somewhere maybe
I found the idea behind it interesting, but it was difficult to use the code when I didn't know what options were coming up afterwards. Made it more frustrating than fun, at times - in that I was trying to do the right thing, but a previous choice stymied me. That would have been fine, but it sent me back right to the beginning each time and I couldn't speed through by clicking, I had to wait for text to load. I think all this needed to rebalance this towards interesting from frustrating was a skip or speed up function for already seen scenes.
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