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(+1)

Wow, thank you for detailed feedback.

The game works as follows: there are a lot of "regular" rooms with art objects, and there are a few of "special" rooms with key characters that give you quests. Each time you go through an exit from a room, a random room is selected from a pool of "regular" rooms. But each third room is selected from a pool of "special" rooms, which changes based on what quests have you taken and what stage is currently active. 

So, for example, you can stumble upon a room with a critic in search of a statue, or you can stumble upon a statue itself. Once you've led the critic to the statue and taken both his and the statue's quests, their room is taken from the pool of "special" rooms until you finish any of their quests (find four critics or find four materials respectively). Then, you have the choice to complete either the critic's or the statue's quest (you can't complete both, since they contradict each other). After that, the pool of "special" rooms will only contain a room that corresponds to the ending you've chosen. 

Overall there are 2 storylines, each with two possible endings: the statue's story (either help the statue escape, or help critics completely immobilize her), and the refugee's story (either get the key and let refugees into the vault, or notify guards and get refugees expelled from the museum). To find the guards you have to "follow the images of war", i.e. looking for art pieces that have war-related images in them.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you ) The main problem, as you have rightly pointed out, is randomness and the fact that player has no agency over where and when they will go. This was kinda the main initial idea behind the game (to make an impossible, confusing space that player can wander through indefinitely), but also, as you've made me realize, ended up being its main foil (taking away player's agency over a story flow). 

Thanks again for paying so much attention to my game! It's a dream of every creator to have such a devoted and honest critic as you :)

P.S.: thanks for noticing another bug. I'll look into it when I have time to do another patch.

(+1)

You're welcome. I'm glad I could offer useful feedback. I've been reviewing video games professionally for over 20 years and in the years leading up to the pandemic I spent a lot of time with the Cape Town game dev community learning a lot from their perspective (the Cape Town - and , in fact, South African - game dev community is really great). Plus, of course, I've now started using my knowledge to experiment with making my own small games.

Your explanation makes perfect sense and now that I know how it works (without having to look at the code to figure it out!) I can go back in and control which stories and endings I see, which is totally the opposite of what you intended but it will satisfy my curiosity about the narrative bits I haven't experienced.

I learnt something about agency that I hadn't thought about before so this was a good learning experience for me too.

(+1)

I'm glad you've found time to replay the game and find all the narrative pieces. This project is a lesson for me to be more careful with randomness if I want to tell a story.

P.S.: Greetings from the Ukrainian game dev community to the South African game dev community!

(+1)

Greetings back! We have an indie (and semi-Global South) event every December in Cape Town called Playtopia so if you or anyone else in your community ever comes this way that would be a good time to pick.