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(1 edit)

I've played through the whole game. The level of detail and the quality of writing remains incredible throughout and really ramps up in the final years of the war. I spent more time in year 10 than the other 9 years combined (or so it felt). Anyone who stops after year 1 is really missing out, ha ha! There were a few bugs (the artist would return an error after the first time, and many of the "where are they now" descriptions just didn't appear) but they were drowned out by the sheer quantity and quality of work. Your intention -- to create the sense of weariness and nihilism of a general of an endless war, making mistakes and building regrets that we have to just push on through to bring this pointless war to a merciful end -- was absolutely fulfilled.

Speaking of the "where are they now descriptions" -- man can I APPRECIATE a lengthy and detailed epilogue, especially after such a lengthy and detailed game depicting such a lengthy and detailed war. There was a real sense of closure.

I have some criticisms, but I'd like to prepend them with the statement that this is my favourite game out of the whole jam. It's the best written, the most fun to play through, and certainly the one that demonstrates its author's historical and mythological knowledge the most. As for ways I think it could improve: Give us a "stats page" where we can see a summary of each of the key players! I had no idea who 70% of the characters were. I knew Menelaos, Achilles, Patroclus, Odysseus (my favourite), Hector, Alexander, and Helen, but the rest were new to me. You give them a summary at the beginning, but there are just too many to remember.

By how you've set out the game, I think switching to a different system like choicescript (perfectly fits your format and also includes a handy stats page) or a visual novel system like Ren'Py (as I think it would really benefit from extra visuals and some of the QOL features of a VN framework) might help the game achieve its best form. Then again, Twine can probably do all of that with the right macros and bootstrapping and whatnot. I think you've got something really special here that deserves to be the best it can be.

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Thank you so much for your kind words!  I'm so glad to hear you enjoyed it!   I'm sorry about the bugs; this is only my second game, so I don't exactly know what I'm doing yet.  (And I learned a lot in-process, which I had hoped to go back and apply to the early years after I finished all the writing, but then Years Nine and Ten took forever to write, so I ran out of time...)  I spent most of the last day of the jam just playing and replaying, looking for bugs to squash, but with so many different combinations of events, I couldn't find them all.  :(  I'd like to be able to fix them up, though.  I'm not sure what you mean by "the artist", but as to the endings, which ones failed to appear, and what scenarios had you gone for with the characters whose fates didn't show?  The conditional statements dictating those passages are convoluted nightmares, I'm sorry to say, and some of them depend on checking the history instead of just looking at variables, which made checking if they work a particular nightmare, because I couldn't just use my variable-control testing page to just jump right to the end and check on different permutations.  (I really should have just added extra variables...)

I'm not sure what choicescript is, but Ren'Py is definitely one I've been thinking of learning; I definitely want to remake this in a different engine that will make things like stat pages (and, for that matter, stats period) easier to incorporate than they would be in TWINE.   I may update this version with a glossary including basic info on all the characters and some of the key archaeological, mythological and cultural concepts and terms before that, too.