Thanks for making Behind Every Great One. Though its themes did not resonate with my own experiences, it was clear the game was designed with a fully-formed vision, and the other comments on this page show how many people found it relatable.
I appreciate very much that it was unlike other games I've played, and that it made me pause and reflect on my own life circumstances, and those immediately around me.
quietly-turning
Recent community posts
Wow, this was great!
For players, it's a fully-contained horror game concept that can be played in five minutes. I loved that I could play it from start to finish during my lunch break.
And, for curious developers exploring Twine, it's a fantastic showcase of what the engine can do (sound effects, changing passage content after render, etc.) with only a day of effort.
Thanks for making it and sharing it with the world.
I was impressed by how atmospheric this game's single, brief scene was — the muted palette, downtempo score, and evocative themes complemented my interactions as a curious player just right.
And just as my in-game reporter avatar took notes on the interview being conducted, I took notes as a hopeful creative on the short-story-game format.
Thanks for the experience and inspiration, Deconstructeam! 🙂 💛
Thank you for making this. I enjoyed experiencing it and am in awe that it was completed in 72 hours for LD43.
As a noir game/story, Eternal Home Floristry really brought its artistic elements together cleanly. The pixel art was appropriately stylized, the ambient music was just right, and the sound effects were strikingly compelling. The feeling of this game–its aesthetic, its mood–was impressively coherent, especially given how quickly it was made.
Though the details of the story were largely foreign to me, the themes were human and I found myself smiling at times and sighing at others as different points of the story resonated with me. There were a few English spelling/grammar errors, but they were minor.
In all, this was worth the 10–15 minutes it took to play! Thank you for sharing it with the world.
As an aside: I ran this game on macOS using Wine 3.0.4 and it ran great!
I really enjoyed playing ESC! Thank you for creating it, Radical Dreamland.
I'll copy/paste my thoughts from elsewhere on the Internet here:
--------
I recently played ESC, a visual novel by Lena Raine.
ESC emulates roleplaying in the text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs) that became possible in the late 1970s and 1980s as computers became networked. Part of ESC is firmly planted in this history. Everything about ESC's audio and visuals–from the glitched 1-bit texture startup screen to the simulated CRT flicker to the subtle whrrr-ing and clicks of moving computer parts–evokes a sense of a bygone era of computing.
While interacting with strangers on the Internet via text was very much a formative part of my adolescence, the audio and visuals and core gameplay mechanic were largely foreign to me. I didn't really start spending serious time on the family computer until we had an LCD screen and I've never played a MUD. Still, once ESC got going, the conversations it emulated felt familiar and inviting. It felt like the adolescence I might have had under just slightly different conditions.
In contrast to its audio and visuals being firmly planted in the past, ESC's story is set in the future. There is a curious duality to this, a theme that ESC embraces and continues to explore throughout. ESC constantly alternates between the past and the future, between two distinct character perspectives, between roleplay ("in-character") and who we really are ("out-of-character"). It's delightfully engaging at times, intentionally disorienting at others, and thoughtfully crafted from start to finish.
The storytelling is enjoyably imaginative, deftly playing with its subject matter throughout. ESC takes you on a 4–6 hour journey, during which the text you type into your flickering command prompt will carry you from a lush forest to a mysteriously empty city and beyond. What starts as an emulation of an archetypal MUD transforms into an introspective, metaphorical exploration of self-identity, roleplaying, and technology. It indirectly asks the reader to consider how these themes shape one another in the narrative that is ESC and, more broadly, in real life. I personally liked this quite a bit as these are questions I think about frequently.
The soundtrack is compelling and effectively enhances the core reading experience without ever overpowering it. As someone who has written music to accompany words read from a computer screen, I can attest that this subtlety is more easily understood than executed, and it suggests a level of mastery on Raine's part as a composer.
In all, I very much enjoyed ESC, and would solidly recommend it to anyone with an interest in MUDs looking for a thoughtful, engaging visual novel experience.
This is the closest thing I could find to a generic troubleshooting thread on the matter: https://deciphertools.com/blog/2017-10-02-no-mountable-file-systems/
Hope this helps, as ESC was a very enjoyable visual novel experience!
EDIT: Also, some people in other threads elsewhere suggested it might be tied to the version of macOS used to package the dmg vs. the version of macOS on your computer. I'm running 10.13.6 and was able to open the dmg; what version are you running?
EDIT#2: It looks like this might be caused by the dmg having been packaged using APFS (Apple's new filesystem), which would result in it not mounting on a Mac using HFS+ (Apple's old filesystem). If this is the cause, the options would be:
A. Upgrade your OS and ensure that you opt into APFS
B. Try this driver (at your own risk) that would allow you to mount APFS images in HFS+
C. Kindly request that Radical Dreamland repackage the dmg to use HFS+ so it is more broadly compatible with more Mac computers