Thanks! Unsurprisingly enough, I also think a lot about this kind of thing and I'm glad this exploration was satisfying to you. I'm especially happy to hear the pacing worked well for you because I really worried about that.
Emery Joyce
Creator of
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This was a nice mini-database game! I enjoyed the process of reading the film synopsis, reading up on the context, and then going back to the synopsis to form a theory of what the film was about - and then reading the "critical reception" article and seeing that mine wasn't any of the theories mentioned there, which just underscores the sort of amorphous nature of the film and the question of how much it matters what anyone intended to put in it vs. what the audience took away from it.
I haven't had time to explore all the possibilities yet, but this was intriguing! It's cool to see a game where your choices don't shape the outcome, but rather the reasons it occurred. I missed the footnotes at first, but after seeing the comments here I went back to look for them, and that also adds a layer.
Edit: I do find the right margin cuts off the text a little for me (usually just one or two characters, so it didn't really affect intelligibility), but if no one else reports this problem then it's probably just an oddity of my browser.
This was an intriguing small story with a well-executed twist! This is maybe a weird pull but it reminded me of the folk song Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight.
I would like to suggest, though, that you use paragraph breaks instead of single line breaks. Some passages were really not easy to parse visually, especially once I started expanding text.
I really enjoyed this! The setting is intriguing, and the situational nature of the verbs is an unusual way to do a parser/choice hybrid game that makes it feel like it has a good variety of verbs while limiting combinatorial explosion. I also like how ambiguous some of the verbs are; it leads to some surprising moments as the player experiments with them.
Glad to have answered the question for you! Since the major comps don't place limitations on updates anymore, it seemed like it would be weird to be strict about it in a comp that's supposed to be more laid-back in general. If people abuse the ability, we'll reconsider for future rounds, but it seems unlikely that that will happen.















