Oh! Well like I said the art and design work was lovely, excellent to look at. I'm also kind of a sucker for human mimics, I find them deeply compelling in concept so I liked getting to see another take on that with this angle of the mimic exhibiting more humanity than the humans in the story do, that's always a fun bit. Like the majority of my desires with this one was wanting to see more in between day 2 and day 3 to get Helga to actually let me in as a reader since-- while I understand her guarding from Birdie it made it a little hard to get in Helga's corner while reading. Oh I also liked that it was almost kind of in this unique position of being sorta like... in the 'aftershocks' of a toxic yuri? Like Helga almost felt like collateral to whatever Birdie and her previous handler had going on. I thought that was an interesting idea even if it wasn't the intent.
Bawdy Brews
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Thank you so much! And yeah, you're absolutely correct!
- Mild-ish Spoilers, I tried to be vague -
Something I think was actually pretty instructive in that read is actually Avelina's actions the end where it's like... despite this 'thing' that's tarnished so much of her 'belongings', rather than disposing of it in a more normal fashion ie: ridding herself of it, her ultimate desire/decision is to actually just entrench it further in her control by discarding it in the mirror prison? More as if trying to punish Agnes for acting against her by confiscating a toy that she would mush rather keep to herself anyways. Avelina doesn't want to let go of Cecily any more than Agnes does, because she needs someone to gaze and worship her in a way Agnes won't or can't? She sucks, I hate her so much, thank you so much for enjoying our work and saying such kind words, aaaaaa
I'm still gathering my thoughts but I loved everything about this. The paired down covers added a kind of coziness(the most positive) to the whole thing-- I'm still listening to the menu while writing this, I'm kind of in love with how it feels to experience. (I would love?? An album release if you and Kyou are up for it? These pieces are just lovely..)
I recognize a lot of this experience as well-- the violation of another piece inside you betraying your thoughts and feelings before you feel ready, how much better they wear your skin, even the uncomfortable re-assertion of 'yourself' as soon as the moment presents itself because what else can you do when you just want so badly. I want to call this project comforting in the most positive way I can despite the toxic yuri context just because I can reach out and touch it in a way that's so unique and specific.
Thank you so much for sharing! (I also saw the way the sprites were constructed in the fluxer server and thought that was so! Clever!! I love the look of them, thank you for that too!)
I loved a lot about the presentation of this one! It felt kind of homey in a stifling way, the dusty images and the collage. Truly no love could be found here despite Locket's best efforts.
I also did like the interplay of Esther's more primal nature with the more social and specifically human codependent expectations put upon her, and how that eventually pulled back into the titular meaning. This project has an airy dreamlike nature, which was pleasantly surprising. It almost feels like a meditation on a relationship that has no choice but it devour itself. Fated surrender.
Thank you!
Difficult to find words to say on this one that haven't already been said but in a word: Electric. The beginning where it was mostly just imbalanced back and forth was gripping on the sheer sense of.. affective scale? Something I feel like not a lot of fairy stories play with enough is the sheer sensory experience of being That Small and how that amplifies the fear at play here, which I think this handled very deftly.
Then of course there's the game.
I'm not that good a chess player and the way that this game unfolds is.. a live wire. I found myself compelled to do 'the gamer lean' almost purely by the prose itself coming alive on the page. The mechanics of the rules and the amount of data expansion in the shift from what feels like Side A and Side B of this project is something else. That aforementioned energy of a more physical sensory experience is fully converted and supercharged into a cerebral one, perfectly honed in on the observing, processing and deciding all at once. A kind of shell-shock even starts to set in. The palpable overwhelm, the deeper understanding of what's at stake-- Pure, raw information expressed on page and experienced by a character voice that has never had to think this hard in her tiny life. I had to remind myself to breathe by the time the ending arrived, as though I were docking into the station at the end of a roller coaster.
On the note of that metaphor, my one sadness is how the ending just kind of drops down and grabs you. I almost feel like it needed just a little more time to fully set up? Of course that could just be a desire for more of the thrill or letting myself get so caught up in the whiplash of the ride that I couldn't see the end arriving. Either way, thank you for this!
Deeply topical! Required reading for everybody! Though I suppose with the context of Mr Ellison this kind of thing has always been topical/required reading, haha. Also loved the quotes! Was happy to see some familiar names!
I just finished so I'm kind of still digesting, but wowee! Pleasantly surprised at Anita's conversational interiority that was more examining and metacognative vs Sunny's immediate and confident thought terminations which felt like a subtle distinction in the prose despite the whole thing being kind of built around it. Also on subtlety, the design choices to evoke their respective bugs! Noticing Anita's glasses and 'antennae' ahoge against the first cg where you see Sunny's long braid, I was like oh!! A small delight in an otherwise desolating experience!
Thank you! I'm going to feel ill for the next week!
There was a lot about this one that I enjoyed! The concept of exploring this relationship purely from the perspective of the unicorn, how that kind of purity and innocence on a natural level interacts with not just the deceits of human society but also the complexity? I think it was a very fun romp.
I also like that even when Aldith is pleading, it's loveless? It's still layered in bitterness and possession.. in a way she can only love what she can control? Elysande is only ever another tool in her satchel. Which getting to see that mechanically from the outside rather than being invited into her mind for it made it very... fittingly wrong I think, like it was an effective way to accentuate the wrongness of the entire situation. No couching in whatever lies she could tell herself about the relationship, or even if she had the impulse to? Like the perspective being locked to Elysande's view stripped a lot of the facade from Aldith in a way that made her powerful but still alien that I really liked-- especially since she's the human in the relationship that the reader kind of implicitly understands. There's a bit here about this sort of extractive relationship this kind of person has with nature or something-- there's a lot of symbolic subtext in the interactions? If that makes sense?
Sorry if I'm not expressing myself well, I'm thinking about it still but I wanted to leave a comment, wah. Thank you!
This one made me throw up my hands like people do when the football team scores a handful of times but also put me in the time-out corner for a long time after finishing, I liked it a lot thank you. Fittingly while reading this two-steps-removed-swashbuckling-adventure I felt like I was drowning, absolutely stifling portrait of repression so deeply accepted that you barely even feel the yearn anymore. I feel ill, thank you.
Please Sarah get out of there, aaaaaaaa
I really liked this one! I feel kind of ill equipped in the comment space since a lot of opinions I share have been said, but a little detail I really really enjoyed was the slow deterioration of the backgrounds. It's a small thing but the smudges, variable saturation, and eventual pinwheel warps before the flowers took over really kind of leant themselves to the house feeling more and more like a hazard, even if the idea was just that Daizy was hallucinating (more?).
I also uh, really connected with a lot of Daizy's internal world, thank you for that. The "strong inner narrators" line nearly jumped up and struck me, as well as how naturally the red flower's dialogue fit into the text, I didn't even question it until the third walk, very effective in how its all just kind of rolled in like a yarn ball, I think.
My chest is so taut, thank you. I'm not sure how else to expand on what everyone else has said but the hopeless masochistic(?? specifically thinking about when Rory pulls open her chest herself in the bathroom like *ouuuugh noooo*) tension so thick it couldn't even be cut with a knife was uh, devastating? I'm kind of at a loss for words with this one, good god
Also in the 'malen felt a lot like looking in a mirror' camp even down to the slow realization you were raised in maybe not... the best place. Thank you for hurting me but oooo boy does it hurt.
THAT BEING SAID I saw a glimpse of the demon mechanics in Fairy Unfortunate and was extremely glad to see them expounded upon here. Thanks for that too!
Extremely polished work here and I agree that there's some wizardry at work here with how you break ren'py in some very incredible ways. I'm kind of a stranger to a lot of these kinks so I actually really appreciated how candidly characters engaged with them? I always like reading people's experiences, feelings, and thoughts so this was kind of gonna be a hit for me no matter what. Felt like conversations with my partner on the way home from the movies :)
I was really eager to play this one through the month since it kind of targets my weak spot of potion brewing & I had a lot of fun with it! The biggest hurdle I think I would run into was the click & drag mechanics being a bit slow for a trackpad. Honestly it would have been helpful to have a kind of 'toggle' mode where you could just click things to assemble them or possibly just have a bit more time with customers in that regard. The other hitch I had (though I have no idea how to tackle it) is just that the fusions felt a little unintuitive? For the most part I was just interested in seeing what came up, but by the time there were 5-6 ingredients I was thinking it'd be super helpful to have a kind of rhyme or reason to how they worked, even if it was just color based. Some of them did! but for example I had a long line on the last day when someone asked for a light orange potion i hadn't made yet, the color & mix looked intuitive enough between the mer eggs & the catgirl (which the mixture even made sense for) but then when i tried the combo it was Wildly wrong & I had to scramble to see what else I hadn't tried. The worst exp I had with this exact thing was actually the second to last day where I just could not figure out the combo whatsoever and lost 4-5 clients, but since the game doesn't quite punish you, I didn't take it too hard. Just sharing my exp!
At any rate I like this one a lot, scratches a similar itch to games I used to play on newgrounds or yahoo where the loop is super simple but offers a lot of replayability.
I actually 100% agree with you that windows should be moveable during text, unfortunately my inexperience with Dialogic is to blame there. In a prospective re-visit I'm actually considering building my own dialogue system if it's within my reach so I could do things like that. Thank you for the kind words!
I would like to! I've been going back to my script notes and trying to think about what a finished version might actually look like since this is almost kind of.. just under a proof of concept? That feels a little mean but I said in another reply that this is kind of only half of the first scene so it feels kind of justified jdhsjkf, I'm just so relieved the vision of it came across well enough, wah
I'd like to! I'm hoping to also! Back at the start of Feb when I was young and ambitious, I'd actually plotted out 3 scenes to try and submit for this month-- so I do have material planned! I might have my work cut out for me though since I'm getting horrible, delusional thoughts of trying to split from using Dialogic in a prospective future build in order to have more control over text & interaction so it might.. be a while...
I would!! love to do more!! I mentioned in another comment that I've been going over my notes & scripts as well as starting to take a stab at filling out more sprite sheets as soon as time allows since there is kind of something I'm trying to accomplish here even if it's just self-discovery. I'm so touched that it's been so well received (and you're so nice!! about the art!! waaah)
aaa finally trying to get around to replying to everyone-- part if that friction is because this is an inciting incident! I've actually been going over my scripts & notes to try and see about finishing my initial 3 vignettes post-jam and maybe doing some more. Honestly the best way to think about this one is almost like.. half of a prospective chapter 1, so it's missing a post-event scene that I had to cut for time reasons. I've gotten a lot of very nice messages though that make me believe in it more than I did by end of February tho, so I'm kind of motivated to continue with it. I'm glad it hits that space of 'having to sit with it',-- tbh if that'd 'part 2 of scene 1' had made it in, it would have been operating in the same spot, so I'm glad it transmitted ( ; v ; );;
WOW this was a lot. I'm always a sucker for the rpgadventure/rpghorror style walk-around-and-do-puzzles type games so having one be turned horny was kind of like the genre aging up almost? 10 endings feels like a bananas amount of writing for a game jam but it works and I'm very impressed. I liked a lot of the botanical worldbuilding as well, i felt like I could tell that's a passion of yours to some extent (and one that's shared! I love that kind of stuff!). Figuring out the window's correlation to a puzzle was also a delight, i found them conspicuous from the start and was so pleased when that paid off.
Main pain points were that some of the puzzle hints were just a little obtuse, the first one that got me was actually the second cauldron demand where i wasnt sure if potent/honed was talking about the amount of time it was honed (implied with the lover's drop) or the intensity (which was the actual answer). I think that one's okay though since it encourages follow up playthrus. More pressing though was a kind of paranoia that literally any indulgent act could lead to a punishing ending which, while probably enhances the atmosphere a bit, actually stalled me off from getting the final ending for a hot minute. Which again, not a dealbreaker, it just kind of made the experience have a bit more friction for me. Also on the replay note, having an option to skip the intro would be a good future add.
I'm also figuring this was a time constraint or possibly because there's so much focus in the text, but I would have loved illustrations for the endings even if they were sketched and even if there was only 1 per ending to just sort of strike the mood. Honestly bc there's not, I do think this game got a higher stealth rating for me, but I liked so much of the writing I kind of wanted the art to shine with it? if that makes sense?
Kind of nostalgic actually, I liked how the game didn't take itself seriously at all. I agree with Lupanar that the background and foreground were sometimes hard to tell apart-- most specifically in levels 2 & 4 (bg is too bright in 2 & there's some dark lines in the bg of 4 that can be confused for maze lines). Had fun with this one tho!
Had a hard time with this one since I'm not the best at precision platformers but I did what I could. I like the character design a lot and was pretty charmed by the look & setup. I also think a map would have been helpful, as well as being able to switch which person is your current checkpoint? Would probably be a good vector for revisiting the intimate scenes as well.
Thank you!
I kind of? Adore this??? It's so cute and the way everything comes together is so great, I feel like I could sink a lot of time into this. I spent a lot of my playthrough trying to figure out how I would try to describe what a good time I'm having and the word that kept coming up was just 'charming' which doesn't feel nearly as strong a word as I need for something like this. I love that your deck is just?? your little guys??? Like i know there's 100% kink undertones here but I'm so enamored with just going around with your like 15-30 little hype guys that give you powers. I'd keep maxing out my 'hand' and every time they'd all just jump up and cheer which I'm figuring was just the item skill triggering while my hand was full but I kind of don't care? I love that they all keep jumping and i love the denizens of an abandoned world banding together to try and fix it through love and freeing more guys to join the club. Absolutely jubilant game, 11/10, thank u for making this.
Kind of implied by my title in-game that there's supposed to be more vignettes-- i have a narrative planned and what i put up ended up being just a kind of proof of concept. I had at least 2 vignettes earmarked for this jam, but when i had to cut it to one, i bumped up the mechanic exploration planned for vignette 2-- which i do think was a good move all things considered, but i would like to flesh out my idea more and go some places with it. There's also at minimum 3 other characters who are planned for this and maybe a couple others I'd like to flesh out, which only 2/5 got to show up +1 didn't have a design up this time around so I'm like well that's not fair, is it
I kinda bounced off this one but that's ok, I'm just not the target audience for it. I also kind of struggled with being able to tell whether or not I was doing good or bad but it kind of seems like that's not really the point of this one, if that makes sense, it seems to be just about enjoying the experience and getting better. Cute!