itch.io

That's awesome, I can't wait to see the game develop :)

I can't tell you enough how excited I got playing this game. It kind of reminds me of Papers, Please, where you're doing very monotonous tasks but are uncovering some dark story from little details.

Personally, I loved how disorienting the space feels. The archives go up to ~880 instead of a nice number. I feel like I'm constantly forgetting what I've already opened and what I've already looked at, your game forces us to slow down. I think that's really really cool. 

Also, I'm someone that loves to be organized and I think that's one of the really strong parts of your game, the re-arranging the documents on the bulletin boards. It's really fun to go "oh, what if I put all of the name tags next to their pictures." and then pretty soon, you start to see the board come to life. You look at a piece of evidence, have no idea what it means, and then LATER you read it again (with new context), and it starts to make sense. 

I found, I had to stop blindly reading the Dates, Names, and Locations and actually try to understand the story to progress.  "Ok, Frank in 1978, there is no Frank in 1978" and then "ooooh, Frank is Frank Nugan". This is brilliant.

On top of that, you do a great job making a world. The fun music in the  investigation room, the boarded up windows, the lights buzzing in the archives. I immediately felt like I was in a new world.  I can see this game becoming a cult classic, really truly. It's such a novel idea.

Suggestions

-Notepad. I have a notepad next to my desk anyway but I would love one of those old-school notepads that detectives use in movies. I don't really love having to use an actual notepad to play.

-Pins. I found I didn't want to use the pins because it connected a whole document to another whole document. I'd love if I could connect a red highlighted name "Hand" to a document that mentions hand. Honestly, maybe it would be better if you could place different colored pins anywhere on the board or document instead of just at the top of a document. 

-Trash can. If you're not planning on it already, I would love to throw away some of the evidence, which brings me to my next point.

-Red Herrings, when I looked up someone's name it was either there or it wasn't. It would be amazing if sometimes you found evidence that was a red herring that didn't help your investigation at all.

-Big Suggestion. I'm not sure what your plans are for the rest of the game, but maybe instead of 1 big mystery, the game is divided into many different mysteries. You have your Level 1 mystery, a ladies cat got stuck in a tree kinda stuff. All very straightforward. And then when you get to level 3, the plot is a little more involved and there's more red herrings. You could release it in installments like the TellTale "Walking Dead" games. "A Hand with Many Fingers: Episode 01." That way, you don't have to finish the entire game before releasing content.

Altogether, a truly amazing game. Thank you so much for making it