Glad you had fun! Yeah, it certainly turned out more mazy than I had wanted, but that's one of the results of the time constraint. Did you by chance figure the ending out? I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts. There's a lot to figure out at the end, and most people don't get it, or they only get a small piece of it and think it's a really simple story. Let me know what you picked up, and we can talk through it!
SPOILERS BELOW!
My initial (see edit below) interpretation was that the "right-side-up" world was first moments after death, literally leaving the world behind. The...something...chasing after the character felt at first representative of not wanting them to move on. In retrospect, it felt a lot like Jacob's Ladder, but that might also be due to the street names from Silent Hill and how Jacob's Ladder influenced that series so much.
So getting to the "upside-down" world at first felt like ascension to a higher plane or something, but after finding my way back into the building, that changed. I remember feeling like it was part 1 - Escaping and part 2 - Confronting. I felt like the character had to return to his death to confront what he did and ultimately move on, whatever that entails.
The weirdest thing I thought after playing was wondering if the creature was trying to chase you away from the end, or into it,
May not have been the meaning you were going for, but that's what I took away from it.
EDIT: Something was niggling me, so I went back and watched the ending again, and suddenly noticed something that literally gave me goosebumps (and still is as I type)
It was a pregnancy test. Two lines. Holy crap. Wow. I'm going to try to go back and play it myself again so I can look around the last couple rooms some more. It looks like a murder/suicide love triangle maybe, but I obviously overlooked a lot of stuff when I played.
I love hearing from fellow deep thinkers! Thank you for sharing, especially in such great detail. I would say that you were getting there with the original post, and then the edit took you very close. Definitely go back and look closely at the details in the last two rooms. If you follow them in order, I think you'll be able to piece it all together. If you can tell me a sequence of events, or what you think happened, I'll fill in the rest.
I'm so happy to hear that you got goosebumps from my game, especially after your first time through it! Effective storytelling is only as good as one's ability to comprehend it. And I made the story pretty cryptic. But I'd like to think that the end result, though only understood by a few, is more rewarding to discover than a story completely accessible to the masses. I made this game for people like me, so it's always great to see responses like this, and know that those people are playing my games. Bigger games, and deeper stories are in the works as we speak!
Again, thanks for sharing. Really looking forward to hearing a final interpretation.
