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(+1)

I found your game through your youtube video. Very nice aesthetic and it seems like it has interesting ideas, but I had to drop it halfway simply because of how verbose and overdone the text was. Examples include multisyllabic overmodified clunkers like "a stray soul utterly addicted to the phantasmagoria the box displays" and "the beauty of the seasons instills guilt in me for rebelling against their poetic appeal". Then there are redundant and cliched images such as "the laughs of women and children during the joyous summer months" (aside from laughter of children being a cliched image, given that joy is already inherent in laughter, do we really need that extra adjective modifying 'summer months' to spell it out for the reader?)

I think for this sort of existential/theory-driven loner fiction to work, lacking the entertainment value of a normal plot and a narrative, you either need to have excellent prose (e.g. The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa), excellent characterization (e.g. maybe the psychological style of someone like Henry James or Dostoevsky), or a mixture of both (e.g. William Gass' The Tunnel). Of course there's also what the VN medium itself brings to the table, but, as cool as the aesthetic presentation is, personally, for me, it wasn't able to overcome the faults of the writing. What I saw of the writing also reminded me of another game called Actual Sunlight which, while thematically different, has a writing style that is bleak and sarcastic but much more natural, witty, and controlled. I was also reminded of the comic book artist Chris Ware who is visually experimental and somewhat verbose, but has much better control of the writing.

My criticism aside, I think you have something pretty unique on your hands. One of the more interesting things I've seen in the EVN sphere. Hopefully your next ambitious VN project turns out much better on the prose front because clearly you've put in a lot of effort on the presentation and making the most of the resources at your disposal.

(+1)

I really appreciate the thoughtful and specific feedback. Elsewhere some others have voiced similar points of criticism, but yours is the only one that was both helpfully constructive and that was generously courteous. 

I've taken the criticism of the prose quite seriously as I've been working on my new project. Digital Seclusion was intentionally experimental in many regards, since there were things I wanted to test out first before committing them to a more serious project. Granted, the prose was not really one of the things I was experimenting with. But it's a point of weakness I'm focusing a lot more on now and hope to have improved by the time I release anything else.