The striking and minimalist visuals and the beautiful blue is the first thing that caught my attention as I booted it up, and it's abstract nature kept me intrigued as I played it to the end.
I think the the entire team did a great job! It's hard writing for a game of this nature; heavy descriptions helped with empathising with the MC's plight, the first person point of view, and understanding how the MC moves around the environment and perceives with their senses due to way the character is set up. The writing does its best to do all of this without extending it's welcome.
Dread was something that the game played with — with its choices that it presented the player with, the sound effects that made me feel uncomfortable, and the entire premise and set up of the game. The music was dramatic and quite emotional, great work Runner!
Since the game is Demo I'm sure there's a lot that the team would've implemented, but didn't get a chance to.
The effort is clearly a well-thought out one — congratulations to the team!
Viewing post in The Snowperson [Demo, Winter VN Jam 2021] comments
Thank you very much for taking your time to write a detailed review! I love hearing about a player's experience in general, but it means a lot for the team to receive such kind words. I wish I could pen a response befitting your review, but since it's another variance of gratitude, I will respond to your last paragraph.
What basically boiled down to was that I wrote a plot outline for the original story concept with the route branches which is worth slightly over 10K words if it were a fast-paced style of writing. This also demands more assets because of more locations and scenes. I realised that it would be stressful to squeeze all of it within a month time (technically we already started planning in November and the plot was already fleshed out by the end of that month, but the main bulk was to be created in December). So the scope was significantly reduced that it would demand far less for everyone involved. Truth is, it's especially a breather for me, because I'm bad at multi-tasking and did not recruit more members to take over my tasks. Therefore as a mutual agreement around the start of December, we decided on a demo to only cover the initial parts of the story and take it easy.
I did say in the game that I wished I covered more story content in the demo. This happened because the original word count planning did not match my actual writing style: the events in the demo were meant to be conveyed in about 500 words but I already side-tracked with unplanned descriptions. Wanted the next scenes to actually hint towards the existential dread theme but this never came up because I still had to put the VN together. But since the intro is already so long, I'm not even sure if the full game can even fit into the ~10K words as I thought.