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Fantastic! Definitely earns a spot up there in the hall of fame of the genre right along with its inspirations. I've learned a lot about Borneo and the period, and also grew inordinately attached to so many characters (Tweety...). I can't believe this is free, and will definitely buy the sequel.

Glad you enjoy!

In broad strokes, to become an avatar, you must first get marked by an Entity by brushing with it often/significantly enough. Some Entities are easier to encounter than others (eg lots of opportunities for the Corruption through the plot in season 1); if you're struggling to get a rarer specific Entity, you can try spamming visiting the library or Archival Storage during your work day for random opportunities.

Once you first get marked by an Entity, you'll get the option to "answer the call" on weekends, which will list the Entities currently available for you to pledge yourself to if you so wish. Once you've picked one, you can't change to another in this playthrough, but they don't get dibs, so if you get the call of the Corruption super early that doesn't mean that you'll never get a chance to instead pledge yourself to the Eye later on. :) You can also "lose" the interest of some Entities so they might come and go; for instance, you can fight off the Lonely or the Eye by hanging out with your loved ones or refusing to do Institute work.

And once you have become an Avatar, you'll need to regularly feed your patron if you don't want consequences. (But maybe you want consequences? :) )

Playing as an Avatar is totally optional, but it does have lots of achievements and unique scenes (including nsfw -- this is the only way to "date" Entities).

Ooohh there's been more updates to the ending?? Time to re-re-play it!

And I exactly agree re: applying translation and playing Sennaar that way -- though I did input my notes and translation in the game, just never using the validation tool that smoothes out the final translation. Also, for some of the words and concepts in Trevosa, there aren't necessarily direct English translations, which I loved :)

Nope! Partly bc realistically, the characters finding this out should react negatively, which I didn't want to inflict on players when this was intended to be a horror-fantasy-enabler (same reason no one ever finds out if you're banging Elias). And also bc I didn't want to have to write and code all that for every possibly character lmao

Enjoy the scoobydoo horror office comedy 🙂‍↕️

Took me a moment to find the toggle, but the intuition count worked a lot better my second go-around and allowed me to easily fully finish and find all documents!

I would also never have figured that out before reading this comment. Omfg. You're totally right, and I reached the same conclusions as Sonata Green's guesses.

WAIT

came back to look for the last few documents after the updates and someone's comment intrigued me and then getting the final message again it hit me like a truck

omfg oh damn

still at it, thank you so much for the bleeg (blue bee, big) update :) 

ID: screencap from a Zoo-Ika game over screen, showing a score of 28264, with a medium size blue bee in a corner and a bear in another. So close!

I haven't been able to find the last 3 documents, but could still make a very educated guess for my last 3 characters considering the remaining titles, and this did nothing to take away from my huge enjoyment of this game. The little twists like

(spoilers)

the gender variations, including neutral gender, the compound words, the words that cannot be translated but can be understood, the succession rules being based on things one wouldn't expect based on habits of male primogeniture, usurpation throwing chaos into the expected line of succession... that's something I love in language/culture-discovery puzzles and so rarely see!

Congrats and I'd love to see more like this from you!
[checks creator page]
oh lmao yeah I didn't recognise your username but ah ok this is by the creators of My Friends The Monster Trainers and The Case Of The Dungeon Descent which I adored, NO SURPRISE HERE, keep it up you wonderful minds 👍

Ran into the same problem, while being at 27/30 and 45/48 and having cleared all the notifs on all 45 found documents. Meaning I might have to reconstruct some words to find the last 3...? I'll keep searching!

I haven't done one ordered list of all secret achievements, but here's one for how to get some specific mini-variations of the endings (some of which give secret achievements), and there's questions and hints of all types in the comments on the AO3 page :)

Oooo love the little challenge additions! Got the rats and lovers one so far :)

YAAAY!! I'm so glad to see you're indeed still actively working on this little treasure, and the stamp collection aspect is definitely going to make me start a new game again! The stamps I already saw are soooo pretty. Happy extended winterfest and new year to you too, thank you for the update!

Fun gimmick!

CUTE

Adorable!

I can tell this is so fun but alas wonky and extremely complicated on AZERTY keyboard 😔

i enjoyed this so much and i'm so mad

Took me a minute but managed and aah, that was fun and brainscratchy. Nice! :D

Augh, I'm on AZERTY but the game uses QWERTY, so when I press my A key it enters Q. That's gonna take me a minute.

How wonderful! I had a great time with the puzzling and figuring out the story; even guessing some of the twists ahead just made me feel smart and just made it harder when I eventually found the scene that revealed them. Great job on the HerStory-like writing to make each separate scene interesting in various order of discovery. Love the pixel art style also. A lovely little gem!

Yup! There will be zero consequences, positive or negative, because I believe in polyamory and it would be hell (and unpleasant) to code each character reacting to each other possible relationship. No one even minds if you date Elias.

So cuuute! ;w;

So cute! It feels like a wonderful tribute to monsters-collecting games but with its own mechanics. I had a blast.
I'm very impressed with the personality all characters got from so little text. Loved having two takes on some events, and quickly becoming able to tell right away which friend wrote this letter -- I love these kids and want to protect and nurture them!! So wholesome ;w;
I want to keep playing in this world for hours and hours :)

There's a tiny mini route about getting its attention (which gets you an achievement), but not a full route nor an established relationship like the other characters.

there's no "good ending", there's a few non-standard early endings (where you die, mostly) but that aside the game always ends at the end of S4/start of S5 with the canon setting :D of course, some players may find that ruling a domain as an avatar of some unspeakable horror with their traumatised and/or also monstrous partne  is an ideal and happy ending!

Whoah, thank you for the explanation of the mystery! I managed to fill the yearbook but absolutely didn't understand the machine, that took the game from "fun but I didn't really get it" to "WHOAH SO COOL" :D

How cute and whimsical!

Love it! It feels like a full game already, very excited to see that it's still in active development. Will definitely return to play more endless mode and check out any future update :D

Loved it! I was just having some light fun and enjoying Eli's fun "teehee i'm totally not an alien" lines and incredible design, then I started getting void 1 stuff and got completely sucked in. Really enjoyed the slightly-off and casual horror scenes, and the True End hit harder than I thought. I love Eli and will remember them for a long time! (If they let me)

Thank you for the walkthrough, that helped a lot and I had a lot of fun exploring to get all the endings.

There's just the Skip button being finicky sometimes (not always showing correctly as on or off, and quite a few times I would suddenly skip quickly through completely new ending text and have to reload to actually read it). And the start of the True End dialogue had everything suddenly really slow down for a couple lines before normalising again (possibly bc of the animation or music?). Even with that, very pretty game and polished-looking UI.

Yup, you can get all the marks you want (though some are easier than others, eg there are a lot of opportunities to encounter the Corruption in season 1 and the Lonely in season 4), it's just once you have answered the call and picked one that you can't switch to another on this run!

Beautiful and so chill :)

Thank you! I originally did plan to expand it, before getting hit with a multi-years writing drought/Fallow Period, but even if I do manage to pick it back up and post a content update, it's more likely to be extra characters routes than a season 5 storyline.

Oh whoah!!! That's fantastic, I'll be following the new version for sure! While playing, I felt that the format was perfect for the mechanic, but I'm excited to see what more you had thought and couldn't put in and will now... :DD 

Got linked this by a friend within 24h of watching the movie, was delighted by the mere concept, and so charmed with the execution. How delightful! I keep chuckling at dialogue options -- your Tedesco is dangerously charming!!

Thank you! ^^

Having fun but keep getting got stupidly because my eyes skim over monsters when they don't have their number displayed. Please please please leave the numbers displayed over monster sprites! I'm never gonna remember that by heart!

-Edit- NVM i found the setting to do that, yaaay! :D

Fun!! Really enjoyed this, the characters are all delightful in their own way (YEAH THAT EURY ART, and Cain is very efficientaly adooorable) and the atmosphere is great, especially its sudden tonal shift near the end (Rafael, babe???). Very impressed with how much you packed in so little playtime, and the level of effort and all the little details everywhere.
Will absolutely be back for the additional route when it happens <3

Oh whoah wait update? 8D Oh damn we have a P9 now oh no!! [excited]

Loved it! The graphic style is absolutely incredible, I truly cannot tell how much (if at all) is photos of real life stuff and how much is computer art, if you tell me these characters are actually clay figures doing stop-motion animation I'll believe it.

And again, the puzzles are so cute, creative and refreshing. Always a little spark of delight when an element is reused later when I expected to be fully done with it.

And i GASPED in happiness when making the final solution.