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El juego parece prometedor 🙂 Solo que los textos podrían ser más grandes. Además, acabo de volver al pueblo desde el Bosque de Algas y me he quedado atascado: no puedo ir a ningún lado y tengo que reiniciar el juego.

I was just clicking around trying to realize what to do. And by some accident I won :D 

Hi Gspr42,

nice game you have here :) Anyway:

Puzzle clarity:

I bought some alcohol and traded it with Barfly for some items. Then I upgraded my phone, but that’s as far as I was able to get.

I assume my goal is to reach the manor. I identified three possible clues:

• The delivery boy who goes there wants some Unica. 
  • It’s on the price list, but I can’t ask the barmaid about it.
• The vet will go there in case of an emergency.
  • I thought I might be able to provoke the dog e.g. using the cat sticker, but nothing works.
  • I also considered hurting the boy’s animal to trigger an emergency, but I have no idea how to do that.
• I was told to borrow the bicycle from the vendor outside, but I couldn’t find any option to do so.

As a 90s point-and-click adventure player, I tried everything on everything, but it led nowhere. At this point, I’m stuck and frustrated 🙂

Dialogue tone and humor:

I generally prefer shorter, more focused sentences. The current dialogues feel a bit long.

For example, in the intro: “What in the cloven-hoofed hell is that in the sky?” could simply be “What the…?” — same meaning, much shorter, and it fits the lazy farmer character better.

No character is unique. All use the same style.

I haven’t noticed much humor so far.

Navigation and UI clarity:

I’m quite familiar with the old-fashioned SCUMM-style interface, although I personally prefer modern one-click-for-everything controls 🙂

Also in games where many objects are just part of the environment, I usually appreciate an option to highlight all hotspots.

Then I encountered a few UI issues:

• Sometimes the command doesn’t return to the default Walk to, so I accidentally use the same action multiple times.
• About 3/4 of invalid actions give a generic “no” response, but roughly 1/4 do nothing at all. It gives me an impression like you do not have all the interactions under control and like the game is broken.
• Texts on the Credits screen are incomplete

Overall feeling:

I downloaded the game because it felt like you were trying to do something serious — and I still have that impression after playing. That’s also why I decided to respond in detail.

Personally, I feel a bit overwhelmed by sensory input. When I entered the pub and saw four interactable characters, I immediately felt this might become difficult: too many options, too many possible combinations, and too much dialogue, while still having no clear idea what to do next.

But keep up the good work, I’m curious to see where this could go

I think the main problem is that I’m not very much into reading a lot of English text, which is basically the core of your game :) I believe that if I were a native English speaker, it would be much more comfortable for me to play it.

For example, during the first case I flipped through the story book, got scared by the number of pages, closed it, and then tried to get up from the table and do something else or go somewhere, before I realized it was actually my task to read the book and solve the riddle inside. In the end, this task was quite fun, but a simple instruction like “Read the story book and put your solution on the last page” instead of just “Click on the story book to read it” would probably do the job and spare me a minute of furious clicking :)

In the second case, I was really glad that you have the option to skip the board game puzzle, but I had to confirm it like three times, aargh! :D I also appreciate the option to show all the hotspots, that’s very helpful. But you introduce the system of working with tabs like tasks, notes, events, and some screenshot feature, and I didn’t want to try to understand any new concepts, I just wanted to solve the case. Once I learned how it works, it was OK to play, but all this could be more… intuitive? Or maybe the second case could work as a tutorial, guiding me through every screen and showing all these concepts one by one?

During the third case, I closed the game multiple times and seriously considered not continuing and I always only tried once more because I didn’t want to give up. There was a lot of dialogue and newspaper reading, which felt overwhelming for me at that point. Why does the game not accept the name “Ellie Scott” when I already know it from the beginning? (Yeah, because I wasn’t reading the texts carefully, I know, but…) And realizing the last newspaper keyword to find the hospital article was also painful. None of the three hints assigned to it helped me, so maybe it would be worth reviewing the hint system and making the last hint a clear solution?

You know, these are just ideas, I’m not sure how helpful they actually are. You should definitely collect feedback from other players too. Maybe I’m just not the target audience for this kind of game and my frustration says more about my personal preferences than about the quality of your game :) Don’t give up!

Well, I gave it some time and finished the demo, and I can see a lot of work went into it, but the gameplay was kinda frustrating. At least I could skip reading the instructions in the second case. I HATE learning board game rules, that's why I play PC games instead, goddamnit! :)

You made it easier, but my wrist still hurts… :) Had fun anyway.