Writing: I like the story and the characters. And I like how the humans don’t know much about mer and the mermaid doesn’t know that much about humans either (or at least doesn’t know much about what humans are like nowadays.
And it kinda feels wrong to stop someone from returning home from the island, but I kinda had to get someone between the mermaid and the deep blue sea (or however you say that in English).
Theme: Supernatural? Check. Scary? Check. Why do I always want to write a whole paragraph about this?
Audio:
Nice music, and nice voice acting too. The sound effects are good too, but when they play at the same time as voice lines you might need to make sure they can only be loud at times where there isn’t speech. I guess config.emphasize_audio_channels might be the easiest solution to this.
Another thing about sound effects: the sound on the main menu loops every few seconds but the way it loops sounds really obvious. I think it sounds like a sound is cut off before it finishes, and that happening every few seconds is a bit distracting. Maybe there could have been a longer segment looping, or something edited to loop in a more seamless way.
And sometimes the voice acting gets slightly different from the text, and some of the times it doesn’t seem intentional (I think there’s some sentences that play in the wrong order or something like that).
I get that it’s hard to insert the names of characters if they’ve been picked by the player (well, the names that the random button picks wouldn’t be hard to have audio with and stick it into the start of sentences… putting them at the end of sentences is harder… but possible if Ren’Py works the way I think it does).
I paid so much attention to the VA that I find myself re-listening to the music. Good thing there’s a music box in the extras.
Art: I like the art, both the backgrounds (some of them are even animated) and the sprites and CGs. Good, but not flawless, and some flaws were obvious enough that I think I should point them out:
- I think the line that ends with “figure out what I really am.” is partially hidden behind the menu clam.
- I think there’s some place where one of the characters is talking but the sprite shown is a character that isn’t supposed to be present.
- I think I got a sequence of events where the MC gets some clothes, then wears them, then suddenly isn’t wearing them (and I don’t think she went into the ocean and back in that sequence… or did she? I could check but I should probably spend the night sleeping and not checking what exactly the text said in that part of the story, sorry), then suddenly is wearing them again.
Seeing as some of the backgrounds are animated, I wonder if it was because of time constraints that some of the others weren’t. I mean, the campfire could have been an obvious thing to animate, as could waves hitting the shore on the island. But yeah, still really good backgrounds.
And the character sprites and CGs were great too, although they didn’t perfectly match the style of the background.
Fun: It’s pretty fun to try hunting for different endings, although I do want to finish writing feedback on this VN so I can continue checking out the other ones and write feedback for them too, so with lots of combinations of actions to try an a limited time it actually gets sorta tiring.
And one of the endings (a moment of weakness) got me an error, apparently something animation-related:
Full traceback:
File "script.rpyc", line 5078, in script
File "renpy/ast.py", line 1443, in execute
renpy.exports.with_statement(trans, paired)
File "renpy/exports.py", line 1682, in with_statement
return renpy.game.interface.do_with(trans, paired, clear=clear)
File "renpy/display/core.py", line 2752, in do_with
clear=clear)
File "renpy/display/core.py", line 3315, in interact
repeat, rv = self.interact_core(preloads=preloads, trans_pause=trans_pause, pause=pause, pause_start=pause_start, **kwargs)
File "renpy/display/core.py", line 3674, in interact_core
new_widget=layers_root)
File "renpy/atl.py", line 462, in __call__
raise Exception('Parameter %r is not known by ATL Transform.' % k)
Exception: Parameter 'new_widget' is not known by ATL Transform.
Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1
Ren'Py 7.4.10.2178
siren 1.3
Fri Oct 14 23:10:14 2022
I’m not on Windows, I’m on Linux, but I used Wine to be able to play this VN, and I guess it identified itself as Windows 7.
What I liked most: The voice acting and choices.
What I’d suggest getting better at: maybe spend more time on avoiding programming mistakes (like the crash I mention above, or the voice lines being assigned ot the wrong text).
Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not trying to write the feedback in the speaking style of a character, I’m finishing this less than half an hour before midnight in my timezone and I’m a bit tired. And also I think I noticed more how the characters spoke with their voices than how the writing made them be (which could also depend on which choices I make).
And yeah, I want to finish writing this before midnight, so I guess I won’t try to get all the endings before finishing writing this. So sorry if I missed something I should have mentioned here, and sorry that I’m not going back and checking exactly where some of the things I found odd happened. (I see someone else mentioned VA getting out of sync with the text, so maybe their comment can help you find the lines where that happens).
[Edit: Apparently you can’t string mutiple voice clips to form a sequence, like assembling words to form a sentence. Ren’Py’s documentation mentioned a feature that seemed like it would allow that, but it’s only for music and sound effects, the only way to apply it to voice clips is to play them on a channel that isn’t identified as a voice channel. Sorry, I wasn’t aware of that limitation.]