itch.io

What a wonderfully executed little game about working as a mechanical turk in the era of LLMs. Definitely a game that makes good use of the medium, and makes incredibly good use of the talent at work here to complete in 9 days!

Although, on a technical note, this game is the only renpy game I've played with severe performance issues on my dev laptop (even when downloaded). The line 

show black at MoonMotes as test

seems to be the worst offender-- having a button in the preferences screen to turn off that shader (much like the scanlines) would be appreciated.

Yup, this is with

camera: 
  perspective True

When I didn't have that enabled the image just disappeared when I tried the front and back positions.

This is super useful! I definitely will be using this for some of my next projects. 

I was poking around a bit and found that transitioning between different depths of positions caused some unexpected behavior. For example, the following causes the character to jump off to the right and then ease left instead of easing forward:

show eileen at scene_right_far
pause
show eileen at scene_front_right_far with ease

But the following works fine:

show eileen at scene_right_far
pause
show eileen at scene_right_far:
    ease 1.0 zpos 200

Am I missing something or is this a weird artifact of the way the positions are set up?

I really enjoyed the visuals here, they really helped contribute to the atmosphere.

HAHAHA YESSS sickos.png !

This was such a fun collision of robot and tournament tropes. I was thrilled every second

This is so good. 

This is peak science fiction, a work that uses the lens of the future to talk about contemporary societal/technological issues just as much as it talks about bigger picture ideas such as the human condition. 

And oh, does Terminal/Shell_ do a good job at that. The conversation between the two leads alternates between character study and "The Measure of a Man" debate about what qualifies as human. And once we get a view into the rather opaque feelings of the programmer...

The attention to detail with scripting is also very appreciated-- the back and forth between user and program in the first act really added to the charm just as much as Polyco's cute expressions.

this rules

Everything here works together so well. I really liked the intertwining of photography with Haani's illustrations-- the way the disparate medias all blurred together really helped convey the nature of the noise attacks and did a great job of supporting the script.

Parts of this cut really deep, I cried quite a bit. Beautiful game.

Absolutely gripping game that had me glued to the computer from start to finish. This game just has so much to say about mid aughts anime fandom, questionably homoerotic friendships, the dance of relationships expected from this genre, and the painful awkwardness brought about by the interjections from a Nice Guy (and the catharsis of it all when the erohorror kicks in :chefkiss:)

👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀👌👀 good shit go౦ԁ sHit👌 thats ✔ some good👌👌shit right👌👌there👌👌👌 right✔there ✔✔if i do ƽaү so my self 💯 i say so 💯 thats what im talking about right there right there (chorus: ʳᶦᵍʰᵗ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ) mMMMMᎷМ💯 👌👌 👌НO0ОଠOOOOOОଠଠOoooᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒ👌 👌👌 👌 💯 👌 👀 👀 👀 👌👌Good shit

I also really appreciate the sicko attention to detail, with alternate CGs for different injuries from the first choice.

Looking forward to part 2~

I had to chew on this one for a bit before figuring out what I really wanted to say about it, and truthfully I'm still not sure if I can completely put it into words, ahaha.

I really appreciate the level of attention given to wetlab work; I fully realize it's something that's probably going to be windowdressing for most readers but I find it nice when the author clearly knows their stuff (contrast: "and then they solved the equation").

The depiction of April's dissociative state is really well-handled and contributes so much to the vividness of the VN. The dissection scene and the depiction of Bri on April's bed are going to be what I think about when I think about this VN.

Unrequited yearning for an idolized mentor-figure 😚👌

This was a fun little VN that did a really good job of capturing the vibes of a classic sci fi short story.

As someone also on the periphery of a lot of these cultures, parts of this were just too real. Haunting and reflective.

Taken together, everything here works so well to add to the atmosphere. The noastalgic backgrounds, the charming pixel art that integrates surprisingly well, the deliberate plodding of the story towards a conclusion that we all saw coming but is nonetheless dotted with horror and body horror along the way.

For being such a deceptively simple game on the surface, there's a lot to dig into here. Even after I got all 3 endings I found myself going back to glean more and more details about the world and Kataja. Excellent work.

auuuuuuggggghhhhhhh I'm still seething. This was truly a tragedy in the sense that there was no other conclusion that was going to be reached once the ball was set in motion. infuriatingly realistic. and yet the sex scenes were incredibly hot.

alright I also need to chime in about the ending being excellent. really what ties the whole thing together (I loled)

from how people were talking about this one I was expecting it to be really brutal, but I found it just, well, banal. Upsetting, certainly, but in many ways more pathetic than anything else. (I don't know what it says about me that I found Maddy genuinely funny...)

Both the character writing and the torture-basement writing were super compelling here, I didn't want to put this down the whole time. It was a bit funny to see some bits in the torture basement and go "wait I remember talking about this in the discord server" though, ahaha.

This many original cgs and sprites is also wildly ambitious for the scope of a jam game, kudos.

oh my god eleanor why did you turn her down at firstttttt OUTTA MY WAY GAYBOY I'M BOUTTA GET IT

Ohh I had to chew on this a bit before writing something here. This is so good. I really liked how this explored how the body of the robot would interact with the sense of self and how to perceive the world, and the final ERROR sequence is heartbreaking. 

I'm definitely going to be thinking about this one for a while. 

Short but cute. I really appreciated how the two robot designs reflected what their intended 'purposes' were.

Just as gritty and gross as it needed to be, with visuals to match. Excellent.

I don't really feel like I can say much on the story other than that this felt so authentic and raw. 

You did a really good job supporting the writing with just enough visuals and sound to help tell the story. Small things like having the car dashboard in front of the character sprites are a nice touch.

Ohhh as a perpetual fan of robots, this is such a gem! Between the tone of Skip's thoughts and all the minor details about how she innately *has* to advertise for her parent company, you really nailed the assignment about how a robot is a tool to serve a specific Purpose. The overall presentation is tied together really well, too. I loved it.

Waiter, waiter! More relationships between women who can only communicate through violence!!

This was cute, I really liked Eleanor's characterization.

Oh my god I love the visuals so much here. The backgrounds are all so rich and detailed with attention to lighting and perspective... between that and the excellent sound design (I had to double-check that the sounds weren't coming from my own decades-old rig), this story is really more than the sum of it its parts.

This was cute! Well, in the sense a story about being trapped at the whims of a machine-integrated person could be. I felt like the tone and setting were very well established, even in the short length it had.

Simply beautiful. The direction, ui, and music choice all work really well together here to deliver the cryptic vibe. I really liked the use of 'choice' screens to show Elpis' conflicting internal thoughts (that she seldom actually voices)

What a wonderful game! I really adore games where you root through diegetic computer systems to learn more information (ex: Uplink, Hypnospace Outlaw, most imsims, etc), and this is an amazing example of how that can be done in the RenPy engine. In particular I found the use of the main menu and persistent variables to save progress to be really clever design decisions. 

The way the story unfolds is also really rewarding, I appreciate the use of different types of media to help paint the whole picture. 

oh my god this is so good. The vibes are immaculate and channel the retro feel really well while also highlighting the alternating the cheery and offputting moods.

At the moment I'm only familiar with some of the 'required reading', but I can very well see and appreciate the influences at play here. (There was only one way this story could end.) There's definitely something insightful to 'you see people on their phones reacting to an instagram post but not what the post is' being analagous to 'you see a man reacting to a conversation on a payphone, but you cannot hear him because you are outside the booth' in absurdity.

As a small technical aside, the linux build isn't set up properly, but can run with a little elbow grease-- the .sh file in the root directory and the ones in /lib/py3-linux-x86_64/*.sh need to be given execute permissions (`chmod +x`) <- this is primarily for any other linux user who comes across this

This is absolutely gorgeous. Like many others, I was drawn in by the stunning mixed-media visual style, but I grew to be equally captivated by the story that stitches itself together as all the pieces come into place.

Super cute! Love seeing this genre of take on capitalism and bodily autonomy through the lens of self-loathing and personal relationships.

Ah you're right, that would be a very simple workaround! 😅

I think it might be worth some kind of note about this on the main page for this plugin-- it took a bit of troubleshooting for me to deduce that the plugin was breaking for dialogue in my minigame engine (where it's called with renpy.say) but not in body text (where it's invoked in the standard renpy way).

What it says in the title:

pc "Test, test. Test!! test." # works
$ renpy.say(pc, "Test, test. Test!! test.") # does not work
$ renpy.say(pc, speechPauses.add_speech_pauses("Test, test. Test!! test.")) # works

As best as I can tell, this is because renpy.say ignores the config.say_menu_text_filter setting. Is there some parameter I can pass to get expected behavior, or am I stuck wrapping everything said in a python block with speechPauses.add_speech_pauses?

Poked around the graphics settings a bit and sprites would show up for a split second (?), but no luck. Ended up getting the windows version to run through Wine instead. Wack.

The linux build of this appears to be broken, when I play the game the majority of backgrounds and sprites don't load in, leaving just white text on a black screen.