I just played it a few minutes ago and got softlocked by the part where you have to try out the shampoo. How did you get around that?

The game is a bit strange. The time it took for the first event to fire, the man yelling it agony followed by darkness, took a bit longer than expected. The darkness itself is over done. I don't get why a flashlight isn't in this game either. I took a screenshot of a dark area and tried adding brightness back to it only to find the dark walls were actually black so it leads me to question, did you adjust the lighting or did you just use black textures for the dark areas? If it's the latter of the two please use a lighting adjustment. It is was too hard to navigate the map if you can't really even see what you are running into.  Speaking of that, you move in slow motion, why? I get that you may have slowed the player down to prevent any mishaps with the first jump scare to prevent being able to see it unload when you shouldn't, but can't you just speed up the monster on the 2nd floor so the player could also move faster? Also the fluent gameplay stops after the event with the corpse and the lights breaking. It took me 30 minutes after that point to find where I needed to go to end the game.

There also isn't enough ammo to even deal with them all properly. The fact if you didn't go back to the save station to save, if you have the credits that is, makes it annoying to die to.

Cannot play this game due to a weird error:

"An error occurred during installation

rar: an entry cannot be decompressed (Darkness Prevails/Dark/Content/Paks/Dark-WindowsNoEditor.pak)"

I've never encountered an error like this before on any other game I've downloaded using the Itch App.

Reposting because people keep video dumping.

The game is great. There is one rather bothersome issue though. When you get the Power Source item and a Norman shows up if you shoot it, it spawns 20 Normans making escape impossible! I'm not sure if this was some sort of weird penalty for shooting that particular Norman or a glitch but it makes that section really hard and a bit more horrible than it needs to be. Hoping this gets looked at and not buried by comments or video posts in case this is a bug.

I recently changed my username, about 10 days ago. I've heard  have to wait a week but it still won't let me change it. I know it's a week cooldown. The issue is I cannot change it after a week vand I'm trying to change it back and really don't wish to change it again. So what can I do?

Edit: 51 minutes later the option is now enabled... thanks whoever did that. Issue resolved.

How your game stood out: The game's topic is what stood out to me the most. There are not many games on mental health and I can't recall one that is based on the devs own experiences aside from your game. I got interested in following the project because the concept isn't recycle. It's all original. You even made the "limited flashlight battery" mechanic unique to the game even though it's been used in many other horror games. 

What made me follow your project: The part of the game I played left me wanting more. I feel a desire to know what else happens or will happen in the game. You left so much open.

Favorite Horror Games and why: Condemned 2: Bloodshot, I hadn't played the first game of the series, and Resident Evil (series). I love Bloodshot because it's an action/adventure detective game with a horror game atmosphere. The visuals on the game are great although a bit over the top at times, during one mission I had to stop and physically put my head between my knees in order to stop myself from passing out due to the strange narrowing vision effect that was on screen which was depicting the character that I was playing as was passing out and it ended up almost making me pass out too. The story was crazy but easy to follow. The game mechanics kept the game thrilling. It was an overall thrill ride. I also love the Resident Evil games because in recent years they've started to branch off the linear story from game to game that they had done in past games. Examples are RE7 taking place at a "Hills have Eyes" themed ranch with mutated owners kidnapping you. RE8 takes place in medieval castle ran by vampires in the modern period. They seem to be expanding the RE universe rather than focusing completely on the Umbrella Corp's experiments and the zombie mutations that resulted.

Patreon Page: If I'm able to help fund any way I can, I don't have much, I would be happy to donate to a Patreon for this game. I think the Easter Egg thing is a wonderful idea and incentive., however I would support it regardless of the incentive.

Okay I gave you my thought before I had the video ready. I still need to edit it before I upload it. I prefer to give my thoughts ahead of publishing the video because what I thought of the game is more important than my let's play of it. I'm not just doing let's plays just for kicks. I'm doing them to show off games while having fun. As well as working with game developers like yourself. I can't do that if I'm just uploading let's plays with no regard for the creator of the game. Without you, Diary of Broken Dreams wouldn't even exist.

Edit: I didn't know the flashlight represented depression. I guess I should have picked up on the with the "you are a fraud" writing on the side of it.

I wrote this on the Reddit post but I'm not sure if you will see it so here goes, I just finished playing the game a few minutes ago. It's good. I love the fact there wasn't the usual "run around in the dark getting scared by everything" trope even though there were times where a flashlight was needed for progression. I'm hoping you are still working on this. I'm aware it was "finished" for a game jam but I'm hoping there is more to the story. Parts of which did resonate with me. My wife struggles with suicidal thoughts and I've had to talk her out of wanting to end everything on multiple occasion. I cannot relate directly but as someone who has a loved one who is going through it, I guess I can indirectly relate. I decided I'm placing suicide hotline numbers in the description of the video on my channel, I'm looking up most of them because I don't know all of them except the US number. This horror game didn't scare me. It touched me and I hope there is more to come of this.

As Socksmakepeoplesexy pointed out, it's safe.They didn't mention how to fix it so you could play the game though. If you got a blue box stating the game is harmful (which it isn't Microsoft just doesn't know what it is and is protecting you like an overprotective, close minded parent lul) you need to unblock it by going to properties. Right click on the exe file and select properties. Then check the box next to "unblock" and click OK.

Sounds like the game is frozen because the Royal Advisor shows up with the first 2 seconds of starting the game. Which version are you playing, web or exe? I've heard some games don't play right on the web on the website or app. Try using the exe version. That should work.

You can go under 0 with all three categories. I can sort of understand why you would want to go under 0 with gold as it's easy to do that irl with money in a bank but why is it possible to do it with the population? Seems like a bug to me since it's not possible to have -1 or less people.

Or maybe the dev needs to make the errors that can be made by choosing the wrong choice harsher in order to make the game more meaningful?

Great game with a decent scare. My only urk came from the tutorial at the beginning. Most games on here use E to interact so why inform the player they can? I mean I get it since some games actually use a different key though couldn't it have been less jarring to have a "Press E to <action>" prompt appear when hovering the retinal over an item you can interact with or a door you can open? Other than that, very spooky game. I hope you make more like these. Doesn't have to be the same style either. 

Part of this game is in another language. Was this intentional? The title screen and in-game menus are in a different language while the dialog is in English.

This game was definitely inspired by P.T. The only thing I was disappointing was the fact it was so short, that and it being very dark in so dark in some places I couldn't tell where I was going unless I walked backwards while facing a lit area. I did find one bug or maybe it was a feature? The way the game was in total it's hard say but one of the stairwells was invisible. Was this intentional or part of the spooky nature of the game? Regardless of any flaws this games was scary!!

This wasn't a failed game. You may have ran out of ideas but this game was not a failure at all. It had all the things a horror game should have and they were all executed perfectly! I just wish this was a full game rather than a concept but I understand why you stopped, having "make up as you go" ideas probably would have killed this game if you went that route.

I noticed this game got updated recently with no news as to what was changed. It's alright no need to know that if it's something minor though I wish you guys could have added a way to delete save files.

That's sad because I really thought you had a demo of the game I could try out to see if I liked it before committing to buying it.To fix your issue I would include the PDF with the main game. Seems odd for it to be by itself since it's a guide book for the game.

The demo... is just a pdf guide book? That's not a demo of the game at all.

So you saw my review already?

2/5: This game has great graphics and an excellent soundscape but horrible game play! The first section wasn't that easy to get that you needed a key to get out of the first hallway. After that it seemed to be really easy to get turned around. No checkpoints make it frustrating especially if you end up getting caught at seemingly random. The game looks and sounds good otherwise, yet unfortunately great graphics and sound can't make up for a boring and frustratingly difficult game.

This game was intense! I can't wait for the full game, well I can realistically wait for it but ya know what I mean. Even though it was short for a Demo it set up a pretty interesting story.

An input issue? The only input problem I had was during the short intro. Did ASDW keys not work?

Note to Dev: This game is incorrectly tagged so you can't download it from the Itch App.

A very short game but it was scary! Would have been nice to have a bit more background as to why the player was that deep in the woods though.

What do you mean? There appears to be only one version and it has that keyboard issue.

Would be nice if you could restart though, wouldn't it? As of yet there appears to be no way to erase your save file nor find where it is stored on the device you played it on.

Error when trying to download the Itch.io App version. No game type is select-able, when trying to install the game drop down is blank.

The Windows download version is... I'll pass. The game does immediately switch over on controls to gamepad as soon as touch a button on that that's plugged in so that's cool. I noticed you gave the player 999 to work with at start. I can see why too. The difficulty is way unbalanced. Honestly if you planned to give the player that many lives at start, why not just make them infinite? Also the lack of checkpoint in the first section makes it a pain when you die to the first boss. I'd rather play the original version of the RE:8. Sorry.

Prior statements were my personal take on the game. Please be aware people like and dislike different things.

Agreed. I'm hoping the developer can, or will, do something about it. In my opinion, players of any game with a save feature should be given the ability to erase their saves for whatever reason.

The save file is not there for the Windows download. It's disappointing that you can't erase the save from within the game and the save file appears to be in a very odd place, which is equally odd because this was made with Game Maker Studio which sandboxes a lot of stuff like save files by default.

This game is cool. Totally reminds me of Yoshi's Island. The only issue I have is dying and not realizing I had only one hit left. I would be nice to have, as a toggle-able option for those who don't like it, an audio alert of some kind that you are down to your last HP. In my opinion, it's not a game breaking thing to not have the alert. It would just be a good quality of life improvement. I also just noticed there is no way to delete save progress.

This was awesome! I thought I downloaded the wrong game at first since it looked so cheerful in the beginning but it quickly gets dark!

Great atmospheric horror game! I like how the use of backtracking actually drives the story along instead of just adding an additional element, like an Easter egg or item to collect. Wasn't a fan of the pitch black part. The fact it lacked on screen narration, unlike the rest of the game also made it impossible for deaf players to understand what was going on at all.

This was really cool! I really like how you put the intro title appear in game instead of making a cliche title screen. The jump scares were perfect and not seemingly random like some other horror games I've played. Towards the end I did notice it was progressively harder to steer was this intentional to make it seem as if the bike is breaking down or a glitch?

 I'm aware you are using a non QWERTY format keyboard setup by the fact I have to press Z to move forward instead of W. That is acceptable but what isn't is you never informed the player who, like myself, has a QWERTY format keyboard of this difference.

The controls, or lack of documentation concerning them on the game page, really killed the experience for me. Sorry.

Game is not in the right format. Error: "Cannot read property of build undefined." Can't install on Windows 10.

This made me almost pee while playing! I never thought a 2D game could be this horrifying! I also like the "effect" you added near the end, not saying what because I don't want to spoil anything for anyone else.

This game was rather narrator heavy. I really had no option to explore. Plus it was rather difficult to react to this, yes I was attempting to record a video of it, when the narrator seemed to talk 90% of the time. I link games and even movies based on stories, however I feel the medium be it a game or a movie should move the story too not  just a narrator.

This game is difficult to play with a QWERTY keyboard. I suspect you didn't design the game with that keyboard in mind? If possible, could you make a way to switch between AZERTY and QWERTY in an in-game option menu?