This is a fantastic—well done!
Stewart C Baker
Creator of
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Thank you for playing, and I’m glad you found it to be realistic! (Although of course not glad you have to deal with that in real life–it’s no fun!)
I used to experience extreme social anxiety when I was younger, and while I have worked out ways around it, I’ve started to realize it still affects me in more ways than I sometimes think. The game speaks to my own experience of similar situations, but I admit I wasn’t sure how it would play for others.
This was interesting, and unlike pretty much anything I’ve played before.
I wasn’t able to quite understand who all the named characters were–sometimes they seemed to be different names for the same character, and sometimes not. I’m not sure if that’s because of the 4 hour limit, or if this was a tie-in to another game (or series of game). Some of the dialogue made me think the latter, but maybe not?
I speak Japanese, and did appreciate the wordplay!
It’s actually an Android package file, designed to run on any Android device. I was able to open it in Bluestacks, which is a free Android emulator for Windows and Mac: https://www.bluestacks.com/ (But Bluestacks is kind of large, as an FYI. It goes through a gig or so’s worth of “downloading” screens after you install it.) Once you install Bluestacks, just click the “my games” button on the main screen, which is shaped like a heart, and it will give you an option to install from a local APK file.
You sould be able to install it directly on an Android device, as well, if you have one but you’ll need to enable installs from unknown sources first: https://support.google.com/android/thread/107226949/how-do-i-allow-download-from-unknown-sources?hl=en (This is generally a bad idea to leave turned on, so I’d recommend turning it off again after playing this, if you go this route!)
Thanks for letting me know!
This should now be fixed, I think. The bug was due to my misusing two if statements instead of an if/else statement on one choice, basically, which resulted in no choice showing up at all sometimes when you hit that point.
I couldn’t find a second place where it ended abruptly–only one! So I think the second time you actually got to the ending. I did my testing in the Ink IDE and totally failed to realize it didn’t show “End of story” after exporting. So I’ve tweaked the ending to make it really clear when you’ve hit the end.
This was highly entertaining, and reminded me in some ways of Epitaph (one of my all-time favourites). I particularly enjoyed the tone and tenor of the commentary after making a decision, which I thought was pitch perfect.
I was a little confused about the percentages after each choice, especially at first. Even once I figured out what they represented, I still wished I had a clearer way of determining my scores in the various stats. Even if the stat changes stayed on the screen a little longer, that would be helpful—at first, I actually thought I was seeing things because all I could spot was a flash of red at the bottom of the page.
In some cases, I wasn’t sure why items were at 0% and still selectable instead of being crossed out with the relevant stat being “already in shambles.”
Other than that and a few typos, I have no suggestions for improvement here. Nicely done!
I really love the concept of this piece!
My only comments are technical and mostly involve the font and color choices.
As you continue to develop this, you might consider adding options that let the player set the font to something that’s more standard. I had some trouble with the default font. Color-wise, the purple/yellow worked okay against the blue background but when links were toward the bottom of the screen in the pink section I really struggled to read them.
Another tweak that would be pretty easy to make would be to add more paragraph breaks. Long paragraphs are less readable on the screen.
Thanks for submitting your entry! :)
An innovative use of choicescript for sure! I didn’t manage to survive the apocalypse, alas.
I had a bit of a hard time getting past eating 66 cans of food in a couple of seconds, but I guess it is appropriate for the “arcade” feel. :)
From a design perspective, I had a bit of a hard time reading the text. The bright orange background was really distracting for me personally, and I didn’t like that I couldn’t override it or change my font size with the Choicescript settings menu.