Well then, I look forward to seeing what you do!
RenamonSenpai
Recent community posts
Well for a start, I would like to point out that I'm not saying "beating her" in the argument should automatically change your overall fate (assuming that my reading of her is correct and it would be wildly out of character for her to just spare someone for talking her down). It'd be more that doing so would get Kera to actually look at you differently than just any other prey. You're making her think about it, and that's unusual.
As for how to beat the "You eat meat, I eat you" argument, a big problem with it is her framing of it. She tries to equate you eating chicken (which was raised for the sole sake of being eventually eaten, and the majority of domestic chickens and cows would be entirely incapable of living without human intervention in the first place) to her eating you alive. And she wants to eat you in a way that she actively makes things worse and more stressful for her prey, in contrast to how humans generally try to avoid making livestock unnecessarily suffer.
Even if her argument is that she doesn't care about that aspect, it makes her entire argument unfairly biased in her own favor and hypocritical rather than accurate. On top of that, she also tries to frame it as a specific punishment towards humans, when the implications are pretty clear that she doesn't only eat humans when she hunts, so trying to go into this dark monologue about how she's a balancing factor comes across as it stands as extremely hollow. Like I said multiple times, it sounds more like she's projecting some edgy OC over herself than saying anything she actually believes.
On the topic of her not caring about the lying and such, that explanation that she doesn't care feels hollow to me from a writing standpoint. I do a lot of writing myself, and if I had a character who didn't care about lying and being manipulative, I wouldn't have them actively make a point of pride about not lying. If she doesn't care, why does she argue she never lied? That simply doesn't track. She clearly does care about being deceptive if she's going to defend her action, so her lies, direct and indirect, getting pointed out should affect her. Otherwise she should just brush the "you've lied to me" comment off with something like "Yes, your point?" rather than trying so hard to claim she never lied (which isn't true).
Also other cases she directly lied: She said while staying here she was fed MULTIPLE gourmet items (no, the "Maaaaaaaybe" response to Newcomer's incredulous question does not make it not a lie. That's still a lie, she knows exactly what she's getting Newcomer to think and it's obviously meant as a positive answer. This isn't a debatable case of "well it's only a yes from Newcomer's perspective" it's a yes from EVERY perspective.), she claims she has no idea why the dog in the park ran away after she clearly scared it herself, and there's even the argument that she lied when she referred to Newcomer multiple times as a "New Friend" as she clearly never had friendly intentions to begin with.
(Edit: On rereading this I see it came across as SIGNIFICANTLY more harsh than intended. Sorry about that, I really do like your work and am just kind of passionate about wanting to help improve it.)
I had a thought just now, but why not instead of making it a requirement to find the clues in the apartment just to reach the bedroom conversation, why not instead have them let you derail Kera's argument? The clues honestly work better as massive holes in her argument than as reasons for the player character to be able to avoid drifting off to sleep with how many red flags she gives to begin with.
The phone is proof positive she lied to you from the start, and isn't something she can write off as not technically a lie. The fact she forgot to get rid of things out in the open like the friend's wallet shows that she isn't some amazing perfect predator like she pretends because she couldn't even manage to hide obvious evidence of her misdoings. The bowl in the kitchen and much of her actions leading up to the conversation show that her urge isn't so much irresistible as much as it's hard to believe she's ever actually TRIED to resist it.
It's not JUST that part (like I said in the post you initially replied to actually), that's just a point that stands out. Her whole argument for the entire bedroom section is flimsy and sounds more like she's trying to convince herself than she actually believes anything she says. But even then, the dialogue options you have are frustratingly bad when you get to reply. I immediately thought of MULTIPLE major flaws in all of her points, and the fact that even the good arguments you get just result in the main character horribly fumbling them is cringeworthy at best.
Also for the "I'm 14 and this is deep" bit, how about her entire spiel about "I am that mirror" when she gets into that part? It legit threw me out of the scene because it doesn't fit at all and really does just sound like a teenager's first edgy OC. Which is really rather a shame because like I said, up til that scene I really liked the character. It's a fun concept and I love to see it, but as I put it earlier, that conversation retroactively ruins everything that made her interesting.
And uh, no offense meant, but I'd really rather talk with the dev than with you. It's not really constructive feedback if we turn this into a petty back and forth disagreement like this.
For the question in point 1: ...Yeah? Like, honestly her actions just from you acting along should be a massive red flag if he stops and thinks about it. Hell, the fact he doesn't immediately realize he should just bounce the moment he looks around the apartment is kind of inexcusable from a narrative standpoint if you do it while Kera's in the tub. There's absolutely no narrative reason why he shouldn't put 2 and 2 together right then and there rather than in bed later.
For the lies, every time she intentionally acts coy or leads you into believing something, that is a lie. It's a lie by omission, and her claiming it wasn't a lie at all is also a lie. There is no deception without some form of lying, so her trying to say she never lied isn't something you can fix as a writer, it's just her automatically lying due to the nature of the story. Either she lied, or she could never have deceived you to begin with. There is no third option there for her to be like "I never TECHNICALLY lied" without it being such a huge flaw in her reasoning you could drive a truck through it.
EDIT: Just realized there really is a specific lie you should be able to point out that can't be discounted due to the fact you have to find out that the message to get you to come was fabricated just to reach that conversation to begin with. She lied by telling you (using your friend's phone) that they needed a dogsitter. The entire plot revolves around her having lied to you BEFORE you ever met her.
For the vegan section, I'm not saying anything about claiming Newcomer is a vegan or that, I'm saying her statements at that point sound like the same kind of anti-meat eating rhetoric you get out of vegans. It sounds like she's being incredibly preachy in a "I'm 14 and this is deep" level of understanding, or in other words despite the game trying to present her as way smarter than she's letting on, she actually comes across as childish and like she barely understands anything she's talking about.
I legitimately don't know how you could fully fix this without it requiring you to completely rewrite the scene, but I feel like a good start would be a way to actually break Kera by talking, with her losing her stride by you deconstructing her (again) frankly ridiculous points. The crux of the problem is that Kera's entire speech, her argument for the way she is, in that final section is just... bad. She comes across more like she's projecting some edgy OC than anything she actually thinks, and the fact you just have to go along with it no matter what dialogue you pick isn't very satisfying.
Alright, I do really like the game and concept, but I have a few narrative issues and one thing that hits a major pet peeve of mine.
1. The player character is kind of... forced to be an idiot to a degree that gets very frustrating very fast. Even discounting for genre savviness from me the player, it becomes excessively clear something's off super early and unless you do some arbitrary sleuthing during the story, you'll just... ignore all the obvious red flags. This is really frustrating to me as a player and kind of throws a major wrench in the narrative's enjoyability.
2. In the current "good" (ish) ending when you get to actually have a conversation with Kera at the end... it actually sort of makes her less enjoyable of a character in my opinion, and not just because of her stalker-like behavior. She claims she never lied, but there are multiple times where she actively did and you're not allowed to bring them up (also the flimsy excuses for her saying you just "inferred" she lied are just that, flimsy excuses and the fact the player character just lets them slide is another point that frustrates me with him being an idiot again). She has that extreme holier than thou attitude and comes across more like preachy pro-vegan propaganda than a predator when you get to the point that you both eat meat (which is a shit point for her anyway and hurts her argument more than helps it) and so on, honestly that whole conversation just retroactively ruins her whole character up to that point and needs a LOT of work, or if I was writing, I would make it so that her arguments are actually fairly easy for the player character to discredit and throw her off because well... they ARE easy to debunk and discredit, her argument is terrible.
3. The resist minigame. It's very frustrating that succeeding it repeatedly just gives you an unwinnable scenario and sort of ruins any enjoyment of the scene. I've said this to multiple people in the past but you're actually hurting the scene by adding something like that. Why bother having such an annoying minigame if no matter what you get treated the same in the end? Either have a completely different outcome if the player succeeds on the three possible ones or don't have it in at all, the impossible one comes across as a massive middle finger to the player for no reason.
A: If that's an intended mechanic it doesn't behave like one. It looks a lot more like a bug in the way it plays out because jumping off a slope shouldn't logically send you higher than jumping from above the slope (which is the case with that particular climb)
B: The wolves being easy to juke MOST of the time is fine, but they're so commonly placed on tight platforming sections that anything other than aggression 1 makes certain sections (especially in the mountain) pretty much required damage.
C: NO ONE would regularly discover this about the struggling, the mechanic is so unresponsive and has no explanation; there's ZERO indication that's how you do it, and even WITH that, it's a slow and irritating struggle method.
Okay quick notes: You have a LOT of dickish jumps and enemy placements, even on the lower two difficulties. This isn't advertised as a rage game, don't do that.
The struggle method is unresponsive, and you tend to take ridiculous damage even on vore difficulty 1 because the game just refuses to let you make struggle progress even if you're doing it correctly. An option to trade it out for a mashing minigame instead would be a big improvement.
The lack of enemy variance takes away a lot from the game, as after seeing the wolf eat me a few times the game lost any interest from the vore aspect, making enemies a massive fucking chore due to how they're faster than you, jump higher and farther than you, and are often in the aforementioned dickish locations.
A few jumps in the final level are only makeable due to a bug in the physics engine that lets you jump way further and higher than you should due to being just above the max arc of your jump even with a full run up.
Some areas are downright impossible as early as halfway into level 2 if you fall into them with vore difficulty set above 1 as you're trapped between two preds and there's not enough room to lose either of them so you WILL get eaten twice before you can escape. Due to the unresponsive escape controls, this is a death sentence.
Overall pretty good for a Jam game made under a time crunch and control scheme challenge, but it's quite rushed and has absolutely no replayability.
Major suggestion, ability to turn off some predators. There are definitely predators that just are "instantly ruins the game for me" tier whenever I run into them due to either having uncanny appearances from the art styles, or simply being way too human looking for my taste in pred (the harpy and succubus respectively for an example of each)
Major issues in gameplay I can see from my little playthrough:
A: Heretic chests can spawn anywhere, which leads to issues when say, a random level forces you to step past a heretic chest on your first move.
B: Sacrifice tiles need some kind of algorithm, I lost half my health in a promising run because one spawned on the SINGLE TILE connecting the two halves of a level, making it impossible.
C: When Heretic chests are opened, heretics can, despite having an entire open board, spawn more or less anywhere they want, which is an issue as more than once they've spawned by some weird random chance in places where they just block off most of the board before I can do anything about it.
Well I can think of a couple things, the first one that comes to mind is a possibilty of "extended" ending content when you lose/give up. Possibly with an item that instead of doing anything useful to you gameplay wise makes it so you survive longer inside a stomach.
Another concept I would love is some willing content (aside from the Eerie Shopkeeper) since Give Up really just makes it so you stop fighting back rather than really being willing prey.
That and I'd love to see if you have anything in mind for "Haunt" scenarios, I'd love to see some antagonistic critters, possibly even some that are even relatively friendly (but will gleefully eat you if you fuck up or just let them)