A fun little Amnesia-like game. Makes me nostalgic for Amnesia custom-stories from back in the day. The checkpoints are a little non-generous for the fact that it is difficult to lose a monster once aggroed and the fact that they one-shot you. Would be nice to be able to like close doors on them or use distractions or something.
The game had a few typos too, although actually in the manual when it said "Laura Palmers" in one case I thought that was intentional at first since those old game manuals would always have little typos like that especially with character names 😂
Fantastic! Such great attention to detail. So many little references for Silent Hill, X-Files, Twin Peaks: The Return, etc. I also loved that you could pull out your gun on every single character lol. So cool and I can't wait to see what comes of this in the future (someone needs to tweet this game at David Lynch too until he sees it).
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To the devs:
There were a handful of typos in English, if you'd like for me to proofread the game in the future feel free to reach out and I gladly will.
I accidentally unplugged my computer (oops) partway through so was a bit sad that saving wasn't implemented yet, but when I was trying to speedrun back through I noticed the scene where you meet Harry cannot be skipped but as I was mashing pause and A and B eventually it locked up my computer.. that might be coincidence because I had just restarted, but not sure. I checked the log in AppData/ and didn't notice any Unity errors, so it was either just entirely on my side or it got caught in a loop or something.
The only other small bug I noticed was that when leaving Ronette's room I was mashing A to get through Harry's dialogue to get back to where I was and it opened the door to Ronnette's room again even though I wasn't facing it.
Edit: Oh yeah, the partially opened bathroom door is lacking collision too
Thanks for playing! The portraits themselves were all drawn by my friends credited in the credits, the only AI art is the intro/ending backgrounds (the blurry house and the truck in the woods).
Really great tension and build-up. The first tent was the scariest part funny enough. Really liked the driving sequence--being able to look around and at mirrors was cool, gave me some ideas for one of the horror game concepts that has been on my mind that involves driving. The ending was a little disappointing but it was still very cool overall.
Great video! Thanks for playing! There are two other monsters you can run into at the end as well and there is a way to find a key to the basement to get a small little bonus bad ending lol
The walking sound was intentional design choice in much the same way lowering resolution of textures and the game itself were intentional to give PSX compression vibes
Thank you very much! Originally I planned to have an outdoor sequence where you had to find the key-code to the lockbox to get the key and have the ending involve running back outside as you escape but I thought it might be difficult to have the outdoor area match the shape of the indoor area and decided to scrap the idea and have it all be in the house.
Haha, a lot of people don't seem to realize it. If you click on one of "the portraits" in the morning it makes it a bit more clear. I'm actually surprised since the "canvas" of "the portraits" really looks like "what it is"--I was afraid before-hand the twist might be too apparent but it seems to have worked well for most people.
Thanks! There is actually one more sort of ending if you find the way to get into the basement during the night that was added in the other day's patch too :)
Haha I mean I'd say I'm finished now. I intended to not have the basement and just have it be a red herring to build tension in the note (though in my mind the headcanon was always that it was just a room they didn't want you to go in cause AirBNBs always have closets or basements like that, but I also always thought it would have like some crawlspace that gave a way for the monsters to get in), but after so many people played the game and people kept wanting to know what was in the basement and I even saw a video of someone no-clipping to check behind it I decided to add a little something there lol. I do have an idea for a bigger scale followup but not sure if I will wind up doing it or not yet cause I have other projects.
You can do it at any point during the night, the key is well hidden and you must have beaten the game once ("Read Original Creepypasta" showing up on title screen to verify)
Thanks for the video! I had never seen that bug where the footsteps happened when you sat on the toilet, that's interesting, I'll have to look into that... although it seems a bit creepy too lol
Hey! Thanks a lot for your video! While I don't have an hour long version of this game, I do have another horror game and I went ahead and sent your business email a Steam Key for it if you're interested in checking it out. Thanks!
Thanks for playing The Portraits. The compression was intentional to make it more PS1-like. The Portraits were drawn by my friends who are in the credits, only the intro and ending background are AI.
