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good debut game! i love the art... esp the opening cg where lydia shows vi her face through her phone. great framing. i love cgs that emphasize the main character's perception of the world and the people around her.

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 i don't normally seek out visual novels with lots of choices, but this game uses them well for its short story. lydia restarting vi over and over again in an attempt to bring her into total submission each time she begins to show her own desires/choices... culminating in the horror of the true ending (and the fact that you can't play the game anymore after that...)

the character sprites and the ui for this is delicious... love the callback to classic 2000s bishojo games (the music too carries that feeling across well.) super-solid prose and dialogue too. love miyuu and chinatsu's push-pull dynamic and how it's unclear if they'll improve together or repeat the same mistakes they made last time.

good stuff all around!

i played this yesterday morning and im going to be chewing on it a lot. especially nadja's experiences early diagnosed experiences as an autistic girl. her mom refusing to acknowledge the diagnosis, down to the "my child is normal! she's not failing in school" rhetoric

but also your depictions of the us's agonizing descent into fascism, and how it directly or indirectly haunts people like nadja and marie — whether literally (the nazi chernobog cult's sacrifice haunting them both) or metaphorically (marie's disconnect with the world around her as she 

and her mental/behavioral struggles are dismissed as 'white trash' behavior — and nadja's own struggles with an ignorant foster care system and marie's abuse towards her) the cherry on top of it all is seeing how its set in 2016, right before the presidential elections. great stuff.

thank you so much! as the person who handled the drawings, i'm glad you liked them all

thank you for playing!! congrats on getting all of the ends

awesome minimalist presentation in the ui and art. i really like what this game did with the classic renpy menus, putting all of the options and saves into one tiny window. really adds to the claustrophobic and lonely feeling overall. 

the main story is solidly written. i noticed quite a few typos, but the quality of the prose itself is strong. i got a good sense of who emerald hernandez was by the end of the story. also seeing toxic yuri from not one, but two relationships was something i didn't see coming. love the exploration of emerald's long, but failing marriage with her wife.

i think my most major critique (aside from being unable to click through the pauses) is that i wish i could've gotten to know sierra on the same level as emerald, esp since in the last third of the story, we are in her pov

otherwise, great work! excited to see what you do next

gorgeous art, but that goes without saying. i love designs that combine machinery and viscera... but also the shapes. actually the first thing i thought of while looking at them was range murata's older character work (esp from the 1990s-2000s... like the art he made for wachenröder) love how the mini-cgs are used too. the little frames remind me of orthodox icons lol (idk if that was intentional but given the general christian aesthetics like the nun habits, maybe...?) 

on the story front, i thought the central relationship between desdemona and magdalena was interesting in the way that it explored purity, consent, and repression. i think the most effective parts were when i was brought into magdalena's POV, with how she doesn't understand — mentally or emotionally — many of the things that desdemona does to her or tells her... and probably won't for a long time (at least, in the ending where she takes desdemona's place.) definitely comes across as disturbing and violating as intended. also the fact that most, if not all of the in-game choices/inputs are from magdalena's pov.

on the writing front, i found that the pov switches between desdemona and magdalena were very sudden. it's never signalled within the vn — and while desdemona and magdalena have distinct voices, its still jarring to read a magdalena pov scene and then suddenly read about desdemona thinking about her repressed sexuality and her anxieties over the concept of purity. i think even a fade between scenes could be enough here — giving the reader an indication that something has changed. likewise, i found the endings (esp the "yes" ending) abrupt. i think the content of the endings are solid, but their pacing felt strange. 

nonetheless, a lot of cool and interesting ideas at play here! i love apocalyptic SF settings and i think you're gonna go places here. thank you for making this game!

beautiful little vn. i was a big unicorn fan as a little kid, so this story spoke to me from the get-go. 

i love how your story explores its associations with purity, and how the concept of purity can be used to hurt and isolate people — including those who're supposed to embody it (like poor, poor elysande...)

i think the part that jumped out at me most, though, was how the theme of purity applied to aldith, with the way that she talks about the gendered pressures placed upon her by her family. discouraged from expressing sexual attraction (even though her father can do as he pleases), pressured into a heterosexual marriage and having her life's work shelved for the role of a wife and mother, her frustration with elysande as a being that's essentially a christian purity detector... its details like that that add a lot of nuance to her, even though she's very much the villain of the two.

great work! thank you for making this

thank you so much for the kind words! that means a lot to me... i'm glad my presentation and art could inspire you.

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. 

yeah... absolutely. i was also vile when i was younger (and less well-adjusted), and that behavior usually stemmed from feelings of a) peer-pressure (if i didn't show my distaste for something vocally, i'm not being critical right!) or b) general anxiety about being seen as 'evil' and 'unsafe' in the fandoms i participated in. i lost quite a few friends over this behavior. 

even now, i still have times where i slip into behavior motivated by those feelings — but as i've grown older... i've found myself doing this less and less. i'd like to attribute it to a mixture of mental health management and getting exhausted by the same fandom cycles, but idk what the true answer is.

i agree with your observations on sunny too. i'll talk about this more in my postmortem, but in earlier drafts, she was more of a cartoon villain.  if i had more time to finish this game, i would've given her an extra scene or two, where i could establish what she's like on a normal day.

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.

that's another thing i would've loved to flesh out more, haha. from the get-go, i wanted inner anita to gradually deteriorate over the course of the story. if i had those extra scenes i think i could've given her a slower death — showing how sunny's rhetoric killed her over time.

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.

yup! while anita made it out alive, sunny won.

i'll confess, the ending was the hardest thing for me to write (both the latter part of the lake scene and anita's final twitter thread.) i would've loved to flesh it out a little more — more of anita divorcing herself from her online friends + followers (of sunny clones lol)... the reactions to sunny's death, and so forth. but the feeling i did want to convey was that there was no justice for anita, or anyone else in her position. to her, quitting online art and working a menial service job was the only way she felt like she could be free from sunny's influence.

thank you once again for playing (and the awesome crits), and i'm glad my game could speak to you!

short and effective.

a little slice of life between two girls in a failing relationship. you capture the push-pull between clover going over to take care of ivy when she calls... and her uncomfortable feelings about sex and relationships, driving her away from ivy.

i especially liked the ending, where we see clover's pov fade out, and the title screen fade in. feels appropriately cyclical... like she'll be back to take care of ivy soon. well done on making your first vn! 

well done on making a polished little experience within six weeks. the art and UI is gorgeous and the writing is solid. playing through the game, i was like "this would pair nicely with an astralshift work"... fairytale horror yuri.

the bonus ending was awesome too. YURI!!!!!!!!!

thank you so much for playing! i'm glad you noticed the character design details... to be specific, anita is indeed a mantis, but sunny is referencing a common bluet!  \o/

i will hand you a check shortly... the waterville setting was mainly bc i went to rural/semi-rural maine to visit a friend, and i constantly thought about how easy it'd be to get lost in the woods...

thank you for playing! i'm glad my game could speak to you in this way — and capture the special hell of being in twitter/tumblr fandom spaces.

i spent so much of my teens online scared out of my mind that i would lose friends due to being "wrong" about whatever discourse was happening, only to realize later in my life that none of it ever mattered at all.

indeed, misery was one of the core inspirations for this work! thank you for playing!

ik this game is a demo but playing through it made me remember all of the time i'd spend playing pokemon mystery dungeon and dragon quest ix on my DS... this and the GBA really were the peak consoles for games. 

the way you laid out the UI and the interactive scenes were charming as hell. super stylish, cleverly laid out (as an emulator!!!) loved going through your gallery and music rooms after finishing the demo and seeing your commentary on everything. super inspirational... i wanna make a DS-like visual novel of my own now... 

im excited to see this in a finished state and to get to know your clock girls even more! i love messed up rpg parties...

love the art for this game. the cgs feel cinematic, which does a lot to immerse me into the fantasy world you've created... adore belia and the mongrel's tenuous, yet passionate relationship with each other. the body horror is awesome :thumbsup: 

i loved the buildup towards the ending, where the sun is created by the two of them slaying the god at the bottom, and then burning together to create a bloodied sun that rises and burns the world beneath them. kinda reminds me of childhood fears i had of watching our own sun expand into a red giant and swallow up earth

as for the writing, its good! beautiful prose and natural dialogue (something i see a lot of fantasy settings struggle with.) i think my favorite writing was at the start, where we only see an old soldier complaining about belia, her rule, and the lack of a sun in the sky. his voice is distinct and sets up the rest of the story nicely.

well done!

thank you for playing my game! i'm glad ckofntac could leave an impact like this on you. :9

holy shit that’s high praise, thank you. i’m glad my game could leave an impact on you like that

thank you so much! i'm glad you enjoyed my game, and that it gave you catharsis...

thank you for playing!! \o/ glad you had a great time

actually in awe at this. a tour de force of a visual novel, and it's only a demo right now. you've sold me hook, line, and sinker for the full game.

a lot of people have praised the presentation, and you can add me to the list. you've pushed ren'py to its absolute limits. several times, i was like "holy shit, i didn't know you could DO that in the engine"... or if i did have an idea of how you set up a scene, it was handled in such a clever way that it felt fresh and novel. every part of this game is drenched in the language of live film, of photography, so whenever the scene presentation changed ,it didn't feel jarring. i am taking notes from you all for my own work. well done.

that's not even getting into the story. i already have a good sense of how  rill and ruby tick, and how they bounce off of each other as characters... but you also made it clear where they might fall apart with each other. (namely the scene where rill talks to ruby about her full name. when ruby said "yeah, i like your nickname more", the connotations of that statement made me go "oh no") 

and then, there's the setting — which i'd argue is a character in of itself. a walled, sprawling, urban mass filled with rotting husks of past infrastructures — train stations, switchboards, offices. the descriptions of the school that rill and ruby went to reminded me of the begich towers condominium in alaska, where everyone lives, goes to school, gets groceries, et cetera. that, plus the more supernatural elements rill comes in contact with feels like an american response to roadside picnic and its creative children. 

cannot state enough how excited i am for the full release. fantastic work, everyone.

thank you for playing (and the kind words!) i'm glad my work could make an impact on you... i wanted those little details to make the game feel immersive.

excited to see what you'll bring to the table with your future stories. :>

thank you for playing!! \o/

glad you noticed the difference between anita's and sunny's POVs... and the design choices i made for them both.

be sure to drink water and take pepto-bismol afterwards!

raw, visceral, disorienting. despite the cute visuals, this is girls school hell in a visual novel.

the scratchy, collaged art add to the intensity of this visual novel. i especially love the cgs, with scattered stickers, objects, and hand-written links. the naming of the characters was clever too.

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dorian reminds me of my best (and only) friend in my secondary school (which was also an all-girls school.) he was a moody, quiet guy who was into prog rock, walking through the cotswalds, and playing with his dog. in a way, (like dorian and capella) he'd try to get me out of my shell, because i was very shy as a teen. i hope he's doing okay right now.

great debut! i came away from this visual novel with a strong understanding of lilith and vivian as people, and why their relationship is failing in the way it is.

i really felt for both girls. lilith's tendency to keep her true feelings to herself, because she doesn't want to rock the boat with her friends (and with vivian herself), even though her observations are incisive and hard-hitting. and on the flipside, vivian knowing how to act as social lubricant in any situation... but feeling like she's empty and vapid inside, and needing other people to confirm that for her. 

and it's this lack of communication that's hurting both girls. vivian's in the wrong for breaking into lilith's room to read all of her letters (and her diary) ... but it's driven by a desire, an anxiety to learn what her girlfriend really thinks of her. and that anxiety to learn what is wrong with you at your core... it plagues a lot of us, doesn't it?

thank you for playing my game! i'm glad it could leave an impact on you...

clever presentation! the way you animated and drew the interactions between the main character and her oc felt very involved. i love stories where creators get to interact with their creations... and see how they reflect each other.

excited to see their relationship evolve further in the full game. good stuff!

sheer wizardry. 

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the stories you provide here (and the characters that reside within them) their own distinct identities, which i loved to begin with...

... but seeing it get threaded together with website updates, ao3 fics, even a visual novel within a visual novel within a visual novel — and then watching these games speak to each other made for a truly unique experience. i've never seen a ren'py game do any of what you've done here. 

genuinely inspirational stuff as a gamedev. i'd love to see a postmortem on how you achieved this. thank you for making this game.

loved the explorations of child acting, fandom, and behind-the-scenes showrunning in this vn. a lot of people have talked about the elizabeth scene and the fanfiction scene, which were rightfully horrifying... but for me, the most impactful scenes in this game were when i saw, firsthand how leslie is sidelined to soothe everyone else's white liberal guilt — from the showrunners and writers to rita and her family themselves. that, and the exhaustion he feels as a public figure who wants to return to some sense of normalcy.

 parts in particular that did this especially well, imho:

• one of the junior writers coming up to leslie and telling him "you paid off all of my student debt, all of us couldn't have done this without you", and leslie just thinking to himself about how everyone's career advancement relied on him staying around.
• the scene between leslie and the veteran teacher, where he spoke about why he didn't want to pledge allegiance to the flag, but was told again and again to water down his honest statement to something that was much less challenging. 
• the scene where rita and her family are talking about the mass harassment the show is receiving because leslie is a main character... but so much of the comfort is aimed at rita herself versus leslie, adding to the tokenization.
• everything about fandom's perception of leslie and how that impacted his mental health. (esp "I don't want to see my likeness be your comfort character. : ) )

all in all, good work. i'm gonna chew on this for a while...

wow. i read 10 meter tide last year and came away impressed by the quality of writing, but 2-4 '94 is another step up. full disclosure, i am not a baseball fan, so some of the references flew over my head... but i was still able to piece together the doomed relationship between ys and yamos, and they both felt like fully-realized characters, with their own distinct voices. 

like, the fact that you didn't color-code their dialogue with each other, but i could tell who was talking... that's skill. (and i screencapped so much dialogue from this visual novel. god you are so good at it.) you also have an excellent sense of place too. i would love love love to know your process for how you research/write for your visual novels, because your prose is *that* slick.

of the two, i liked ys the most, questionable as her relationship with yamos is. getting into her head wrt why she feels so disconnected from the lesbian community, despite being one — and that stemming from her experiences with the divides between gay men and lesbian women during the AIDS crisis... no wonder she's as cynical as she is.

i haven't even gone and talked about the presentation yet but yeah the presentation is amazing too. i was actually inspired to do mixed media stuff for ckofntac because of 10 meter tide's hand drawn sprites (i did most of the linework for the game traditionally)... but the collaged backgrounds you made for 2-4 '94, the little parallaxes, the scene where ys opens the window and the flurry of voices and noise comes through, with each new line introduced by a note from a baseball organ... wow. wow. wow. and speaking of, the soundtrack is great too.

this is definitely one of my favorites i've read from the jam so far. thank you for making it!!

thank you for playing!! i'm glad my game could resonate with you.

Even though we may not agree on everything, I’m so so grateful that you shared this. It’s a new way of exploring issues that have been with us for decades, but from a new perspective. Although it may retread old ground, it is yet idiosyncratic and personal and raw and yours, and it should be allowed to exist and thrive. As always, excited for more.

And of course Sunny is just so amazingly terrible in such fascinating ways. “I’m going to hell” YEAH I KNOW GIRLIE LOL

SHE SURE IS........ let's examine her under a microscope like a bug.

i need to watch gundam so i can give you my own take on this LOL

i'm glad you noticed the hypocrisy in what sunny believes is acceptable in stories/art in contrast to her actions. especially with the kissing rule she places on anita. 

thank you for playing!

thank you for playing!!! i'm glad my game could leave an impact on you...

what resonated with me though is (no surprise) the theming. like yes i largely avoided tumblr and was not really a creative up until very recently (and certainly not one of any notoriety), but as a twitter oldhead it was unavoidable, both seeing artists get exploded over being a little "spicy" and watching that behavior percolate down into interactions between fans who would hardly know or effect one another if not for yelling at one another about being problematic. it was tough not to both fear and internalize all that as Anita and Sunny had. to replicate it.

yeah, i was there too... i am a tumblr vet, but a lot of what happened in ckofntac was based off of how twitter fandom culture rapidly changed into mid-2010s tumblr fandom culture after the great porn ban migration. not to say that that behavior... wasn't there before, but it got so much worse after the migration. i internalized a lot of that behavior as a teen/young adult.

i felt you really explored the power of language and like, expression versus action. how Sunny frames her obviously manipulative and abusive behavior in medicalizing language in order to justify it to herself was just like, ugh. damn. right on the money.

yeah, yeah... glad you caught that. even now, i see a lot of people in fandom/adjacent spaces justifying their abuse towards someone else using social justice/medical-adjacent language, and it leaves me very unwell... like, every time i see a callout post (or adjacent) with a "do not harass this person" at the front i'm like "i'd hate to say this, but by making this post you are automatically inviting harassment onto someone." 

like you said in the afterword, i got no idea if this will change anything, but it does give people a language with which to recognize and reject abuse cloaked as purity and other such misused ideas.

yup. at the end of the day i just want this work to help people to recognize this behavior for what it is: harassment and abuse. 

also some of the particularities of Anita's imprisonment, well, sniped me from 800 yards away. god. the kissing rule. her breath. revolting. (lmao i'm going through the comments and of course this got everyone. as gross as it was, it was really the infantilization that horrified me. you really nailed what is so terrifying about being someone's uwu precious smol bean in need of a little fixing and healing come on i'll just put you in this little cup don't you like the holes i poked in it for you here eat my favorite leaves we'll be together forever :) :) :) )

also, fucking, god. i'm sorry you were able to depict so well such an utterly terrifying obsessive manipulative abusive fan/collaborator. god damn. god damn.

thank you for playing. and fwiw i think your work for this jam was harrowing and beautiful — in the way that it captured the complex emotions and pain that came with the experiences you had. 

(copypasted from main itch page!)

gorgeous imagery here... love the way you collaged everything together in this work. i'm definitely taking notes (from your devlogs) for future projects of my own because the cgs in your game are so beautiful. 

later on in the story i could sense how tired and in pain the protagonist was. the desire to not move, to rot in bed (with beautiful green gf) because moving even an inch is agonizing. and it was cool that you gave the players a choice between continuing the rot, or forcing the rot away through force of will. 

the self-screening was cool too! i definitely do not have HEDS but i could see this being a cool tool for people who might be unsure. i've also sent it to my twin sister (who is an MD/PhD student — who's interested in autism and its comorbidities, like HEDS) and i think she'll be really interested in it too...

thank you for sharing this beautiful work!

gorgeous imagery here... love the way you collaged everything together in this work. i'm definitely taking notes (from your devlogs) for future projects of my own because the cgs in your game are so beautiful. 

later on in the story i could sense how tired and in pain the protagonist was. the desire to not move, to rot in bed (with beautiful green gf) because moving even an inch is agonizing. and it was cool that you gave the players a choice between continuing the rot, or forcing the rot away through force of will. 

the self-screening was cool too! i definitely do not have HEDS but i could see this being a cool tool for people who might be unsure. i've also sent it to my twin sister (who is an MD/PhD student — who's interested in autism and its comorbidities, like HEDS) and i think she'll be really interested in it too...

thank you for sharing this beautiful work!

thank you so much for playing my game! \o/ i'm glad you liked my writing...

harlan ellison's essay is great, isn't it? he was a complicated guy but his writing is beautiful... i need to read more of him.  (also, adding adaptation to my watchlist!)

thank you so much for playing!!! i'm glad my game could leave an impact on you (and make you feel less alone...)

i'm glad sunny came across as horrifying as intended, haha. everyone's talking about her not brushing her teeth and i think i might've accidentally made a hygiene PSA  with this visual novel... after kissing her, everyone will want to go to the dentist!  

i do wish i could've given the player more time with sunny and especially anita... just to give more of a sense of what they're like in their day-to-day lives before shit starts hitting the fan. but as you said, yeah — i had to manage those six weeks very carefully as a solo dev! i'd love to talk about my process in a postmortem...

But the best part of Anita’s characterization for me, and the part of the vn that will probably stick with me the longest, is how she still undercuts herself in the thread on her priv at the end. I am sort of tearing up even just writing about it lol. How she is still unable to fully see the power Sunny had over her and how Sunny exploited Anita’s vulnerabilities, and how paper thin so many of Anita’s supposed “privileges” over Sunny are/were. That was very real and made for such a powerful ending. 

thank you once again for playing my game! \o/

thank you for playing!! \o/  glad my game could make you think, hehe.

your comparisons aren't juvenile at all. i mentioned this in my afterword, but i do think part of why fandom behavior like this has gotten worse is because, on a larger level, we're all stuck on an internet where we have to use the same 5 hellsites, and none of us really have an anonymous presence anymore.  also, the disappearance of online third spaces (like forums, etc.)... 

Another thing I thought about while playing is that while I was never someone to police others in fandom spaces like this, I've definitely impulsively cut off friends out of nowhere for giving me the "ick" in even a more benign way or out of fear that their preferences would reflect negatively on me. So while the terror that Annie experiences isn't relatable to me per se, I did feel guilt for cutting off people in my life out of the blue. 

same, same. i feel immense guilt when i block people over small fandom stuff on tumblr or w/e  because i feel like "oh god, i'm denying them the opportunity to talk to me. i'm creating an echo chamber." but then i have to contend with  "but if i don't block, my brain will overheat and i'll ruminate, which'll make it hard for me to function." 

I do think it felt a little contrived that Annie wouldn't just return to her house in walking distance. Also, Sunny having bad breath/not brushing her teeth might've detracted a bit from her scariness tbh - I think she would've been even more terrifying if she was completely presentable to her workplace and just acted insane at home/online.

yeah... i wonder if it would've felt less contrived if i mentioned what that walking distance was? my story's set in the waterville area in maine, so  i mapped out where the different locations were... and the walking distance between anita's apartment and sunny's house is over two hours. so when i was writing those scenes, i had that in mind, haha. maybe i could've included a comment from inner anita or something...

with the bad breath comment, i 100% see where you're coming from. i think people who know how to keep a presentable front in public, but act insane at home are terrifying... and then you can piece together why they were able to get away with the abuse they did for so long.

thank you once again for playing my vn! i'm glad you could get something out of it.

thank you for playing!!

thank you so much for playing! 

yes, this game did start out as "misery but with young online artists" — but it kind of evolved from there. i'd love to make a reading list/postmortem for this game where i talk about my influences... because i was just as inspired by "the man who loved dickens" by evelyn waugh (which inspired misery).

i'm glad anita could resonate with you too. i put a lot of my own discomforts into her, so i'm glad they came across... 

as for sunny's teeth.... yeah, kissing her would not be nice at all. the style of teeth she has is ranguiba... so very uneven.

thanks again for playing!