itch.io

yo, heads up you might have had a mixup between the files you uploaded and the game page you set up. audio's missing, titles don't match, game description doesn't match the game you uploaded here.

re: StapledMirror:

Noel is both frustrating (pride and evasiveness and helplessness) and relatable via the alienation along gendered lines, the alienation of being a worker/a student/a clown/never a person. i wish i understood a little more clearly what Arbor and Eileen wanted out of Noel other than an apology? i might have missed something about the backstory along the way.

I'm looking forward to revisiting this when it's complete! Finish writing!

thank you very much for reading. I read this feedback yesterday, and it was soothing to connect to someone - specifically the "if no one else sees, and no one else admits", which I think is a big piece I was wrestling with more directly in the back half of the story.

cheers, and be well!

fuckin awesome. the head like a hole midi at the beginning made me laugh. such a jarring song compared to how listenable the rest of the soundtrack is.

i like your exposition - its easy & direct, and then you fold in specific medical terms or poeticize moments as action starts to get more chaotic, which really works for me.

the colored pencil and marker drawings are really distinctive, and the collages absolutely kill, imo. by comparison the characters are heinous, and the imagery is unforgiving: didnt think i would get the shakes or the sweats based on the presentation, but you got me pretty good.

my pleasure, I'm lucky to have gotten to play it.

This was fun! A couple of the puzzles were frustratingly tricky for me, but i got there in the end.

Then the other day (I don't remember the exact circumstance) I heard a noise, and was scared by it, and realized it was my neighbor's cat, and then I thought of this game and was like "Oh, that's what it means."

hey i loved this. great job. you've got some serious chops and if i wanna make another VN, i feel like theres a lot that i might model off of this (your UI was really cool and understandable to me, the mix of NVL, ADV, and bubbles was really engaging, the warpy animations, among other things).

your color theory and sprites were great, your skill as an artist really shines - i liked the sounds, especially the background hum and buzz. really good ambiance.

I admire your ability to structure the narrative. Great framing quotes, It was really neatly told, and tightly paced. There's a lot of interlocking pieces between Sunny & Anita: fandom crusader vs. total conflict aversion, self-ignorance vs. self-flagellation, groomer vs. groomee. You really set up a miserable little machine between these two.

on some level i think everyone exists on a spectrum of how Sunny are they on a given day, in a given interaction. a cop gets inserted into every head and if its not policing someone else, its gonna police yourself. the rare glimpses of Sunny questioning herself or having any lucidity were pretty critical otherwise i think she'd be raw cartoonish villain. anyway, had me thinking a lot about times i had been vile to people purely to insist "my" own values on them, and likewise when people had done this to me. certainly in fandom, but definitely not limited to fandom. its everywhere. 

speaking of: the horsehair worm infection & the death of the internal dialog - this was one of the most compelling parts of the story to me and so i was just mulling it over constantly. as a viewer, i walked away wishing that you had done more here, pushed the idea farther, and that disappointment is probably a good thing. anita losing herself in work, and her intuition paying the price is just really riveting.

still thinking about the decision to kill sunny off, and the jaded late-20s twitter thread epilogue. in some ways it feels kind of like a victory lap for Sunny, and is that supposed to be for the reader too? the job at walmart makes sense; the grappling with the optics of having been abused by someone lower down the ladder is cool, but lightly touched on - there's more here to think about? where are the other Sunny's of the world, and how have they impacted Anita - are there rumors accusing Anita being a murderer? is her life being litigated in the public sphere? there's a dead girl - how does the local law feel about it? is there a power fantasy or a sense of justice we're supposed to feel here? i'm not sure how i feel about this way of wrapping things up - i kind of wish that this had been a moment to zoom out rather than zoom in.

anyway, great game, lots to think about, thanks for making it!

I liked this a lot. Your prose is incredibly strong especially through Act I. In Act II, you lost me a bit, but that might just be because it took me a few sittings to read through.

Meadow's narration is so good. I was really able to connect to being an animal, being misunderstood, that hunger and ease and slow-plodding violence and wanting to be alone. Your dialog and your descriptions were stellar. I found myself riveted through this part of the story, being dragged along by the ear.

Larkin's sequence was harder for me to connect to. The schoolyard fight was my favorite part here, since I had an interaction nearly identical in my own schooling to Larkin's here.

I feel like your work and mine have some similar DNA - both doing these color-trippy digital backgrounds and scattered use of sound - i like the music here.

As a demo is this stronger if you don't include Act II?

been thinking a little about ambiguity lately, and I really enjoyed reading this. thanks for making it.

:'(

I'm gonna freak the fuck out, I'm so honored.

With your reminder, I remember digging those up for you. I'm so glad to see hear that you've stepped into writing too.

This game review is a heartbreaker, and it fills me with all the more dread (and excitement) to play your game jam entry too.

I'm gonna read and reread this review no less then fifteen times, I promise you.

absolutely. I really enjoyed this, thank you so much for making it and sharing it.

omg, thank you so much for playing.

I have some fairly strong political opinions, that start coming thru right out of the gate, but someone in the fluxer during the first week of the jam summed it up better than I ever could: "nothing is revolutionary except revolution." It was embarrassing to read that when I was like 2000ish words into the story already, haha.

Still, it felt important to include and to help shape the themes of the game.

Cheers!

yo, great job. your use of color is awesome. i love the filters on your images too. the placement of the text interacts with the images well.

on the poem itself, im still mulling it over. its very direct but the word count is pretty low so theres still a bit of interesting fill-in-the-gap to do. these summers are hot and exhausting and in my friend group on especially hot days we say it gives everyone "random asshole disease", by ratcheting up the ambient rat trap stuff we're all stuck in - i caught myself thinking a lot about that at first as your poem took shape. 

i think the art and styling is beautiful. it would be cool to see more of your influence on the GUI. i think a soundtrack would kick ass on this for sure, just to help set the tone. overall im feeling "give me more", which, good problem to have as a reader.

the tension between blythe and claire is really good, tho imo you bring the gun out too early on in the plot.

this was a really fun read. i liked the ways dante and mew were so poorly matched, talking past each other, unwilling to meet each others needs but too deep in to quit.

the jealousy of the reactions to the real disappearance of brokewing and the failure to launch of the ARG, the feelings of ownership over art and internet spaces, and stuff. it was nice.

a lot of work went into the atmosphere here and its really pretty. ladygosssoft is a great spot, dumpgirls is awesome. i miss websites with straightforward, unstimulating layouts. the imagery puts me right where i wanna be, and the sound is often really great. this was fun.

:face_with_hand_over_mouth_emoji:

glad to hear that the anhedonic episode let up on you, and to my pleasure, your hedonic viewpoints are headily enriching to me.

i've gotten the sense that people really want an incendiary scene-devouring heater out of work after reading the opening salvo, but i think that the negative/schizo/anhedonic stuff that you're targeting was definitely more my point over all - creating ambiguity, negative space, and the protective layers out of mood swings, and lying the outward rage at the start, crumbling and going wet and cold by the end. 

i really appreciate you calling out the complementary nature of the straight culture/queer culture scenes. i didnt want to create an illusion that queer communities are somehow a paradise or whatever. i wanted to create a backdrop that would make sense for someone to feel "I tried to run away, but in the end I couldn't escape, cuz im still surrounded by people".

i dont think that sarcasm is exactly correct for the afterword, yeah. that was originally the idea as a joke, before i actually wrote the story, but when i got to the end, i decided "the reality is i just hold two worldviews. what if im angry and im grateful?" i think in this particular scene that there can be a lot of value in anger that gratitude can't really replicate - i think people are often too nice or too dishonest with their dishonesty, and i think that anger can provide a cutting clarity in those kinds of situations. but also i wanted to do the jam and i wanted to have fun. im really glad that in the end it really spoke to you.

you'll eat your reality check, and you'll clean your plate, and you'll like it!

joking aside, thank you so much for playing. hearing this means the world from you, as Not Bernadette Mayer was kind of a mindmelter for me, in a big way, as I've touched on lightly already. I have enormous respect for your craft.

2 things on Time:

1. 2005 rules, you should tell stories set in 2005 if you have them to tell.

2. Getting old is crazy. Can't believe I made it this far. Thank God people don't change that much from one decade to the next and generations aren't really real.

this rips, i like your art a lot. music, woozy. writing dizzying.

My favorite entries of the jam this year are looking squarely at poverty, the impermanence of homes, othering, and how parents' ownership over their children under these systems compromises their mutual ability to connect. i put some other thoughts in the fluxer very flippantly earlier, before i had finished the game, and having finished, this story is quite painful. the violence aimed at: women, dark skin, fat bodies.

I'm thinking a lot about Blanche's self-flagellation toward the end and how it reframes the Scarlet section.

One element I wanna call out because it stands out to me,  how real and painful it is to see the skinny white girl, the only girl who deigns to hang out with Letty at school, shrug her shoulders when Letty tries to open up. How she says "Go to therapy" and wipes her hands of the situation. Ostensibly, they're both bullied loners, but Friend is reproducing the same hierarchies with Scarlet that have them quarantined them from the rest of their classmates. It reinforces how many other invisible layers of social support (mostly offscreen) have failed by siloing these two off via any number of mundane violences.

I loved the art, I enjoyed the sound.

To writing craft: you have a very gentle and direct style that's both easy to read and full of emotion, especially during exposition. On the other hand your dialog and mental narration was less consistent in my opinion, especially in the second half when there were a handful of important moments where a character would say something that felt kind of canned to me and pulled me out of the story. I think another editing pass through the Blanche section could make the VN go absolutely haywire.

Thanks so much for making this game. I really enjoyed it.

I'm glad that it was able to connect! I hope you have a good rest of your day.

this fucking rips

thanks so much for playing!

thank you for reading it, and for everything. the jam has been an energizing experience, though at this point I don't really know what, if anything, that it can accomplish politically/organizationally. hoping that more people get out and get connected enough to really start causing trouble.

thank you for playing. love you, be well.

this was heart-moulding. i feel like i've been left in the middle of a busy street holding a stranger's baby. im lucky to live in a world where you made this and i read it.

thanks for checking it out, glad you got something out of it. it's nice to hear that the intro hit hard. that part was supposed to be pretty angry, so good to hear it did the thing, hopefully didn't put you off the rest of the game too much.

hang in there.

thank you for playing. be good to yourself. self-soothe, stabilize, and when you're ready: talk about these feelings with loved ones sooner rather than later, even if you don't have all the words.

fun art, great use of sound, witty concept. the squish climax and the himejoshi body horror was very fun.

thanks for taking a look, i'm glad you unenjoyed.

theres some really evocative stuff happening here.

i like how the prose drifts from diaries at summer camp to religious psychosis, i like the main character hearkening to uriah, while apparently torturing & confining the autistic baddie - and the descriptions of that we get are pretty slick. i like the background image, the darkening of it over time, and the main menu image as well.

i wouldve liked to see more in terms of sound, color, text effects to make this pop on the multimedia level, and i wouldve liked to see this story talk about why these things are happening, who these people are, since at times i feel a little lost in trying to interpret it.

there's a certain romance to be had between oblivion and enduring it, although i don't feel much seduction comes through in this text.

this is very much a conversation between a persister and a pile of crushing forces: family, medicine, religion, etc. its tight, the metaphor works, the thesis is clear, it exists.

i do like the bitterness in the ending.

i wish a little bit more time was spent on presentation.

The color theory here is really excellent, with the peach tones setting the stage. This idea of two ends of a gradient, and the ways they overlap. The tension between the two characters. The semi-diptych poem. It adds a lot on top of this spiteful envious text.

I loved the silhouette tracings. I loved the placement of text on the screen, I loved how those two things interplayed, avoiding each other and becoming enmeshed with hostility.

There was a lot of artistic unity in this. So I was kind of disappointed that there wasn't much of a soundscape. Not a big takeaway, but notable for me.

that was killer. thanks so much for putting it together. fun lil meditation on loneliness, starting over, (re-)learning how to be a person - something I think a lot of us are doin these days. great job

wahoo!