Some fantastic squick, especially the part where the esophagus comes out the guy's mouth. The story is smart, and I like the working-class protagonist and the intrigue. But I really feel like this wants to be a short story and not a game--there's no branching, it's written in prose and not dialogue, there's a lot of big blocks of text, and there's a relatively small amount of art. If it was just presented as a short story, all these things would be strengths rather than weak points.
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The Endless Together's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #2 | 4.673 | 4.673 |
| Candy!! | #3 | 4.636 | 4.636 |
| Monsterous! | #3 | 4.727 | 4.727 |
| Scariness... | #6 | 4.636 | 4.636 |
| Halloweeny? | #9 | 4.727 | 4.727 |
| Fun | #14 | 4.636 | 4.636 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Log Line
A Maid in a mansion at night meets a beautiful young lady with grand ambitions.
Content Warnings
Violence, swearing, psychological horror, blood
Team Members
Hag - Writer/drew the Sprites
Cammy - Programmer/scene comp/BGs
bug - Music
Comments
That's fair, tho this is actually a fairly well-known genre of visual novel. It's mainly known of in the west via the When They Cry series of Higurashi and Umineko but there's plenty of others that use the same format. The specfic term for a VN with no choices is "kinetic novel" in most western circles? but a kinetic novel is also a visual novel. Or a sound novel, sometimes, though also a visual novel. The argument being that bgm, background and music are used in the same way videogames use them to enhance a story.
I really enjoyed this game. It had really great writing.
The general plot structure worked well for me. I liked the partition in different days.
The backgrounds were perfectly fitting the mood and there was really lot's of them.
I really enjoyed the different expressions of the sprites and I liked how this game plays with the distance that they were standing apart from each other, sometimes further apart, sometimes closer by. I was not 100 hundred percent sure if the art style did fit into the general dark mood of the story but it could be that this was done on purpose to provide contrast, so not sure.
Sound is really important so I was happy to see that it had some ambient sounds and fitting music.
Bonus points for using Renpy which is always a solid choice.
Things that could be improved:
Here the sprite looks like she is floating in the air. Might be good to move her a little lower. It was not an issue in other scenes.
The text could use some distance from the top, maybe make it more centered. It is personal preference of course but I have received myself feedback on my games that players don't like reading text too close from the top.
Also having a slight semi-transparent box over the text might help readability.
Generally, it is a pity that your nice looking sprites are often hidden by the text. While the NVL style does fit well with your more long-form big-paragraphs style, you might want to tryout other layouts. Either classic ADV style or something games like say in Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Heart of the Forest do:
So basically, a text box on the left while still leaving space for graphics on the right. Most people prefer text that is not wider that 70 characters, so that would also help with readability.
You could also experiment with different fonts that capture the mood of your game better though it is better to not overdo that.
So generally nothing major for me to criticize.
Thank you for making this game!
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