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Very cool interface you have set up here! There's a few glitches (the options in the character select disappear after you've selected them, and the text size shrinks suddenly on some passage changes) and the SPECIAL stats interface would benefit from fixed-position buttons/links instead of being inline with the text. I think having some modal dialogs will help when displaying explanation text, although I don't remember off the top of my head whether Harlowe has those built in.

I'm assuming you got the ending where Ghost decides he wants to give up the search. If you get this ending, the requirements are that you  focus on the photos of Ghost. Ghost decides that he doesn't want to know what happened to him because he's afraid of finding out what could have hurt him, and thinks it isn't worth sticking around to find out a second time. Especially since Celeste is with him, he doesn't want to potentially get Celeste involved in something dangerous.

There are three other endings you can get depending on what photos you take and choose to focus on. There's another ending  that involves leaving with Celeste, with different requirements to get it. All four endings are "correct" and none of them are meant to be a "canon" ending.

Hi! I can answer any questions you have. Anything in particular you'd like explained?

Pretty much all of my IF is in second person, so I can see how the second person actually has the opposite effect of what I intended in IF where everyone is so used to it that it's not anything new. I'll see how this reads in first person and works with Ghost's characterization.

NSEW + a compass given to Ghost by Celeste might solve all the navigation issues, so I'll see how that works out too!

VERY fun twist, and I like the photomanipulation with the characters. Most of my critical comments are just rehashing what previous comments have already said, although I do wish that the images themselves had been a little bigger so I could get a better look at them. They're such a nice bit of the interface, but they're so small!

The backstory development is a little lacking, but given that this is a sequel, I can see how some things aren't established in this story. I also would have liked an option to refuse when prompted by Clash at the end, even though it is established during Eric's discussion that doing so would be pointless. It would have added a fun layer of interactivity, even if the end result is ultimately the same. It might have even balanced nicely with the player's personality style.

Thanks! I'd like to fix the navigation issue since that's a consistent problem between players. Do you have any suggestions for what kind of navigation style? I've had some people suggest NSEW or a map, but both feel like they have their ups and downs with maintaining the feel.

I'll check what's going on with that top bar, since it shouldn't really be doing anything particularly special in fullscreen. I change it to be perpetually open or only visible on hover in that area.

Regarding the player's name, technically you're not playing as yourself. I hoped that writing this in second person would add to the disorientation of the player so that they would feel like Ghost, not knowing who he is and what's going on while discovering things. I may change the perspective or the descriptions in order to clarify that a little more. 

I may see how a NSEW cardinal direction orientation works. I did consider a map, but I didn't want too many visual elements in a game that relied heavily on text to convey images.

Thank you! I tried to keep the navigation direct while also being intentionally confusing to a degree. Would you say written indicators would be better, or something visual like a map?

The game needs to be run in full-screen mode for me in order for it to display the UI properly (I had the same issue as Franzinyte where starting the game causes it to be zoomed into the top-left corner, but I found the full screen button by chance), so getting it started was a bit difficult. The visuals look fantastic, and I love the watercolor effect. One thing I didn't like as much was how the interface would swap between right and left with the character's image and the text/buttons. I would prefer that interface to stay consistent

Hitting space seems to "restart" the typing animation for that screen, which I'm not sure was intentional? I also had some trouble figuring out how to move to the next dialogue section until I tried clicking the "continue..." text. I think the continue "button" might actually be taking up the entire text box, since I noticed that the border and background on the text disappears once the end of that line of dialogue is reached. The dialogue runs a little slowly, so I would have liked an option to speed it up or remove the typing effect.

There were several grammar and spelling errors, and some of the vocabulary choices felt odd (some felt too out-of-place for the time period you were going for). However, each character's voice was consistent and distinct enough that I could tell them apart by text alone, and that was really good! The story was a little difficult to get into at first though, and I would have liked more context or even a debrief the way that I'd expect an investigator to get before arriving on-scene.

Hi! I noticed a few bugs on the starting screen:
- "Error: cannot find a closing tag for macro <<silently>>" on either side of the UI at the bottom of the screen
- Some leftover development text on the codex page
Posting this here in the hopes that you can get these fixed before the jam deadlines. Hope to play this soon!

The first thing I tried to do was save scum right at the end to see what would happen and discovered I couldn't, which is an incredibly funny way of realizing that the game does prevent save scumming at decisions.

The twist at the end is clever narratively but also for creating a seamless NG+ that will lead players into exactly what they intend to do anyway, without starting from zero again. Very well designed.

The character lines having small font made it hard to read. I have a pretty big laptop monitor but the choices at the bottom of the screen and the clicker upgrades were all kind of cramped at the bottom, and I could only see at max one clicker upgrade or two dialogue choices at once.

Thank you for all the feedback and the error catching! I've fixed all the errors so far.

I'm hoping to use more dynamic presentation to emphasize some moments, so I'm glad to hear that it comes across well!

I liked the focus on the protag's guilt, and the sorrow of burying a dragon, something that isn't "meant" to happen at all. One one hand the lack of options was an interesting way to show that there's no real other method, but after a while it got a little annoying because it was the same mechanic of subverting expectation, except that my expectations had already been subverted and I was already aware of what was going on.

I managed to get a high ending despite fumbling several times at the end, which was interesting, but probably had something to do with getting consistent good results earlier.

I really like the art style used for the images, it makes the characters really attach to the locations in an interesting way.  The UI is set up really well to make the most of the background images as well.

Thank you! I'm really glad to read this because all of the things you've praised here are all things I was really worried wouldn't come across well LOL I'm not much of a puzzle maker so the puzzles were a difficulty for me to make not too hard but also not easily brute forced. In an earlier version you could just sit there and click all the options and make it through within four attempts or so per room.

Getting the visualizations across was the hardest part of writing this for me, making sure that the settings would come across to the player the way I imagined them. The surroundings are heavily reflective of the state of Celeste's mind so it was really important to me that it be easily visualized.

I'm definitely pushing to make more Twine games in the future, including a possible remake of Bring Back! I hope you like those games too :)

A fun game with simple controls, the music is bright without being annoying or grating, and it was actually easier than I imagined it would be. There's some issues where the upgrade overlay can overlap other towers and make it impossible to click, but that seems more like a tower placement issue than an overlay issue.

Thanks! I'm glad it was successful in getting you to think about your decisions before you made them

Thank you! The photograph backgrounds ended up being a time crunch requirement, but I'm glad it worked out visually

This is a physical game. You're meant to print these cards out and play using it as a deck.

Thanks! I had a lot of fun making this version since a lot changed between v3 and v4, I'm glad that it delivered on the emotional impact the way I wanted it to!

Thank you for featuring my game and the Twine jam!

Yeah, this game leans far more heavily on the "fiction" than the "interactive" part of interactive fiction. This game originally had a lot less exposition (you jumped into room puzzles a lot faster) but also a lot less content, so adding the content bloated the exposition.

If I ever rework this again (I doubt it because I've done that too many times now!) I'll think about adding more puzzle elements earlier on.

Good.

I don't have much to say critically about the writing or the content, it's solid and it's good and it effectively uses the medium for maximum impact. The dream sequences were formatted really well, and your font/bg color choices helped a lot with the description of the dreams.

A few of the links confused me because of how they were described, since I was under the impression that clicking an italicized link would navigate away from the passage and not go back to that passage, rather than some being purely for extended description and would send you back to where you came from.

Some UI issues: the white text works okay against most of the background, but the brightness of the windows makes it hard to make out text that's overlayed there. I'd suggest finding a different background image, or making the text background a solid/semi-transparent color.

I've been running in loops around the house, which I assume is inevitable since this is a demo and not because I'm missing something (or maybe I am? who knows). The sudden descriptions of footsteps and breathing in passages I've visited before did give me a bit of a jolt, but I'm admittedly a scaredy cat. Images or sound in the final product will help the atmosphere I think.

If you'd like some more in-depth critique:

Since it's RE-based I'm not surprised to see all of the viscera, blood, and unidentified grossness, but I think maybe there's too much? Some of the choices felt like they were there just to reinforce that the house looks and smells gross, but that's already very well described. Visuals that are seen no matter what work well, but translated directly into text that you need to click in order to see, it ends up creating a distraction.

You made me care about a character I knew nothing about within the span of [checks watch] two minutes, so congrats!

This is interesting as a short piece. It does feel like a mini-game to promo a bigger work, or as one part of a bigger game or ARG. The slow dawning of realization coupled with the brisk cutoff of the end was a good combination.

Some suggestions:

• Have the sidebar stowed, it takes up a lot of the screen without much use.
• The audio adds to the feel, but this specific track is kinda grating. A different sound might work better.
• A bg that's just an image of a phone rather than something that describes the pocket dimension (the Silent Hill style of text overlayed on an image of a letter to denote that you're reading it, kind of thing). While the current bg isn't distracting, it's a representation of the location rather than the phone call itself, and since the player doesn't know what the pocket dimension is, using a different bg might fit the theme a little better.

yeeep, it is! thanks, I fixed the image link