itch.io

I appreciated being able to hold down to shoot water, which is a nice quality of life feature for a digging game. However, the collision of the water digging of carving out circular blobs out of square blocks was rather wonky, and the underlying tech and performance feels unstable at times, with the game freezing up at times.

The controls felt very difficult to use and steer, but the video transitions were very effective in creating feelings of anticipation and dread.

Very impressed that you implemented a mirror system and used it to help convey the story. Pacing was well done. I very much enjoy short and tightly focused experience type games like this.

Solutions for those who got stuck:

1. The number of concrete bricks
2. The colors of bottles on the sink
3. Use the shovel to reveal the cigarette, then follow the numbers on the grid, as mapped to the can, nails, and cigarette
4. The number of lights in rooms with paintings, ordered by the number of paintings in each room
5. Use the colored circuits on the switchboard reveal the numbers on the monitors next to the vegetables, order by the vegetables next to the door

Main criticisms (places where I got stuck for a long time):

• Nails are way too hard to see at first, which makes the grid very confusing
• Having the two paintings separated on opposite walls in the switchboard room makes it hard to realize there are 1/2/3 paintings and thus an ordering, so it becomes faster to just brute force check the last digit on the final door

The story ending was very good, I just might have to steal a variation of the concept. Biggest gripe was just the projector puzzle.

Very fun and clever game mechanic. I might just have to steal it for a future project.

Respect for making this a gameboy game, though it's a shame that most people probably won't set up an emulator to try this.

I wish I could just hold down the button to dig.

I really don't enjoy timed puzzles, but that's just me.

Is there an end goal or end state? I found and collected two biscuits but couldn't find anything else.

Couldn't get the mouse cursor to get captured, which made turning very hard.

Got here and couldn't progress any further, so I'm assuming this was the "end" of the unfinished game. I'm also guessing this was going to be our dating-sim romantic partner?

I got lost and then fell out of bounds

This was way too abstract for me, sorry. I had no idea what was going on or what to do.

Thank you so much for trying it out. I'm genuinely surprised you streamed it again. I chuckled at the occasional "sorry to the dev" comments, but as people in chat were pointing out, you were right: the older iteration was pretty terrible and your trashing it was necessary to help make it better.

Thanks for playing and apologies for making you suffer through it

I watched the stream live and immediately after temporarily took the game down to rewrite large portions of the story. If the other comments are not as harsh on the story, it's entirely thanks to your stream feedback. (Obviously I am not asking you to try the updated versions or even look at this game ever again.) I'd never heard of "beyond 2 souls" before your comment, so I had thought "ghost resents someone for wasting their life because it could have been their life instead" sounded like a cute story idea, but seeing as how it's a cliche that's been done before, I'll go figure something else to do. I previously joked to you elsewhere that the dad was the self-insert character in response to the stream comment that the girl came off as a self-insert, but the twins are not based on my own kids, so I'm perfectly fine trashing them and figuring out a different story entirely.

Thank you for testing! Will definitely address the visual readability, tighten up world consistency, fix saving issues, add more puzzles, and do some rerouting to make the progression feel natural and not so forced at the chase sequence. In retrospect all the exploration should have been done before the chase instead of treated as an optional "post-game," or at least if there is to be post-game content it should not become visible until after the mainline content is finished.

Apologies for the somewhat abrupt and disappointing ending. The demo is a proof of concept cut down from a larger idea involving way more locations (the original idea was that after leaving the house the player would use the transit pass to take a train to an office building with its own giant sprawling research facilities, and just keep going from there), but maybe it's appropriate to consider the concept proven enough to start building those other locations (and their respective puzzles). I'll see how much I can get added by DD65.

I'm going to be stupidly optimistic and take this as encouragement to complete this.

You are a hero for all the in-depth points. Will eventually incorporate all of that (and some of the easier ones have already been added in the latest build).

Thank you for playing. Will work on fixing the text displays.

Even in its current state, this is already the best game of DD64 (and of DD50 and DD52). Mostly just needs to fix the visual bugs already mentioned in other comments.

For more abstract higher level feedback, it can get mentally exhausting after a while going through puzzle after puzzle. Maybe there might be a way to pace things somehow with more breather areas or ways to teleport between puzzles, because my current coping strategy to getting tired is to outright stop playing and come back later, which probably isn't ideal.

And not to put too much pressure on the writer, but figuring out the right lore for the game could potentially mean the difference of whether this turns out to be "just" a great game to an all time classic.