I’m going to preface this by admitting that I had consulted Andrew Schultz’s map for a small portion of the initial part of the game.
Overall, I loved how it was designed in a way that I could explore additional parts of the game. It’s nice to have something different in a good way.
The changes from the book was quite interesting and I found that the challenges (where versions of the book’s characters cameoed in) was quite fun. There’s also a nice twist at the end, but I’m not going to spoil it.
I’m going to preface this by confessing that I had played this using the downloadable version (over the in-browser version) without making modifications to any of the files.
Even though this version lacked a couple of the fonts and lacked all of the images, it was still playable and I managed to find 3 out of the 7 endings. (Admittedly, I did use the gentle difficulty mode.)
The panic mechanic did bring an additional factor into the game, as the game warns you against reaching the maximum panic level. (Though, this didn’t stop me from intentionally doing this after finding 2 endings.)
At the risk of spoiling one of the endings, I found that the characterisation of the ghosts as victims and the inclusion of their backstories made the game quite a confronting experience.
Thanks for the feedback!
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have put the main part of the game into only two passages, using the visit count to display different parts of the present storyline (given how that seems to have broken the progress feature). Also, in hindsight, I probably should’ve implemented the continue button differently (as Harlowe’s restart button turns out to have a bug where it doesn’t actually restart the game from the beginning if the (save-game:) and (load-game:) macros were used).
