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(+1)

Alright, now's the time for a somewhat serious review. SPOILERS:

Gameplay: It's a short visual novel without any choices or anything really adding to the gameplay, so there's not much to rate in the first place. There's also no was to save, although with how short it is that doesn't really matter. It's very basic, but at the same time there's nothing there that seriously detracts from the experience. 2 stars.

Story: So, the game is about a group of young people who go out on a camping trip in order to spread the ashes of their dead friend Scott at a specific place per his last request. The main character, Kirby, was Scott's boyfriend. They characters some banter in their camp and then they get attacked by some guy wearing a horse mask who kills everyone except Kirby, who manages to flee to a nearby cave.

In the cave, he falls through a hole in the ground to the "Depths of the Earth" and twists his ankle. He tries to get out of the cave, but the horse mask murderer finds him first and fatally wounds him. Then the murderer takes off his mask and reveals that he's actually Scott and the reason he went after Kirby is because he blames him for his death? And Scott also killed all of his friends for reasons unexplained. And he blames Kirby for his death even though he's apparently alive. If there's any supernatural elements in the game, then there's nothing even remotely suggesting that.

Also, Scott wears a horse mask, a suit and tie and uses an 18th century military bayonet as his weapon of choice. That seems kind of random and doesn't mesh together very well. The dialogue and writing in general is alright, the characters do seem like real people (mostly). However, there are certainly too many flaws and the ending reveal just comes out of nowhere. So, 2 stars.

Presentation: On the graphical side of things, the game uses what appear to be very pixelated real world photos as backgrounds, with the RTP character images on top of the default text boxes. It works, but that's about it. A visual novel really needs multiple poses and facial expressions for characters and that's not here. There's some RTP sounds and music where it's appropriate, which work fine, but nothing great. So, 2 stars.

Creativity: I guess I'll add 1 star for the horse head accountant. And using pixelated photos as backgrounds is somewhat creative. Other than that, there wasn't really anything noteworthy on that front. So, 2 stars.

Horror: Is there anything scarier than a horse head accountant? Well, to be serious for a moment, the game isn't really scary at all, but there's an attempt to implement some horror elements and overall, it can be called a horror game, just not a very good one. So, 2 stars.

Theme: Well, at the end of the game the Main Character hides in a cave and the phrase "Depths of the Earth" is used a few times at the end. However, that's about it. There's no real creative take on the theme and it doesn't have much connection to it, other than that scene at the end. So, 2 stars.

For a game that was made in 6 hours during a livestream based on suggestions from people in the chat, it could've been much worse. It's actually not that bad, just kinda bland. Good job!

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YES! If I had time to actually work more on this I could probably have made something VERY different, but this was intended to just be a fun activity, so I will definitely take bland over bad any day LOL

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Yeah, I certainly get that, I had a similar experience in one of the first game jams I entered :D I made a game for  a game jam where the basic gameplay took me so long to figure out that I had to write all the dialogue and make all the cutscenes in just 2 hours so that I would be able to submit it at all. You actually streamed that one, I think. About a week before I finished the update that improved the gameplay and rewrote the dialogue, which I was actually a bit disappointed about :D

And to be fair, the dialogue in your game WAS good despite the time constraints, it was mostly just that unexplained plot twist at the end that made me decide to lower the rating. I also wanted to give you 3 stars for presentation, that one's more like 2.5 stars instead of 2. So, you can be sure that you did very well under the circumstances!

Thanks for participating in this game jam!