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SeaMaid

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A member registered Jun 09, 2018 · View creator page →

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OK, that's understandable; thanks for the swift reply, and good luck with the project(s)!

(Och vilket sammanträffande, jag är också svenne!)

Hello! Just played through the demo a bit and while I don't know if I can afford supporting the KickStarter, I'd like to try it out when it's out. The graphics and bantering between characters have been entertaining.

There's one thing I'm curious about: considering your dev team is based in Germany according to the KS profile, will you make a German version of the game as well, or will it be English only? (Hatte Deutschlektionen vor ein paar Jahren, aber seitdem nicht genug geübt und möchte gerne durch VN'n uzw. kompensieren, haha)

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To be honest, the biggest reason I checked this out was that there was a Swedish translation (the VNDB list of VNs in Swedish has just six entries and one is a dead link...). Haven't gotten far enough into the game to give it a proper rating, but I just have to ask something first:

Was this machine translated? The phrasing is really off at some points due to overly literal translations (such as "Jag håller i min haka med min högra hand som om jag tänker efter" - you would normally write "som om [...]" with [...] in past tense even if the first is in present, and due to the word choice the first half comes off like he is grabbing his chin rather than just holding it gently.) Considering how old the game is I understand if you don't want to go back and change that. But if you want to add Swedish translations to your future releases, I would really urge you to either invest in/find a volunteer translator to help, or at least someone willing to edit the machine translation first.

I've only played two rounds in one sitting so far (got ending 2A first, then 5), but am definitely planning to return to this game in the future.  Maybe in short spurts, though; it would be a shame to repeat the recurring lines so many times in one go that I stopped appreciating them.

Genuinely amazed by the fact something this complicated came out of a NaNoRenO entry - not every day you see games that took this little time with a full freaking OP video! And the whole game permeates uneasiness really well, especially thanks to stuff like parts of the background flashing in and out of sight. And that music!

The one thing I have to criticise is that it seems kind of random which parts have spoken narration; since I'm someone who tends to read pretty quickly this led several times to awkwardly cutting the narration off mid-word.

+ The artstyle is actually pretty cute in an unique way! Gonna follow you just for that. (An extra plus for the nice character designs, I'm gonna remember the game's style for a while.)

+ Plenty of endings for such a short game, also appreciate how there are several good ones rather than just one true end.

+ The premise is fairly interesting.

Would have given it higher than 4/10 but a couple of things brought it down. Going from the smallest issues to the biggest:

- A way to tell which endings you'd already gotten would be nice

- Distracting typos (can't pinpoint them after the fact but I remember at least one case of "Calyspo" and "its" rather than "it's")

- Title screen music appears to be an uncredited fanmade remix of the Hypno K.K. song. (Regardless of if you or someone else made it, you should point that out somewhere! Spent more time trying and failing to find the remix than actually playing the game, and that after getting nearly every ending.)

- Even though the cute aesthetic with the grim content is intentional, the treatment of actual grim content seems very... Flippant. To point out just one thing; I assume that Phip still has Blair's hand in the apartment to summon her in the ending(s) where that's possible? What would the police think about that when they're searching people's houses for clues on the disappeared people? In my country they recently found someone's body part in a dude's apartment and everyone's basically calling him a goddamn idiot of a monster for trying to claim that he didn't cut her up himself; writing a horror story (or cute gore story) should not be an excuse to ignore realism to the degree that Phip gets away scotfree just because Blair can chuck other people's corpses into hell. And if there is no police in this world, the narration should make that clear at some point since every reader is going to assume the opposite is true.

Man, writing a comment on this without spoiling anyone who sees it is gonna be tough.


I did really enjoy the concept and execution! Poor [redacted], I'm glad he took the revelations and stuff more levelheadedly than [redAAA] or [reDDD], he's becoming my favourite example of characters who [---------]. The drawings are done in a very soothing style, too. It was nice looking at the extra cgs and seeing how they had developed over the years.

But you mention in the comments below that you're planning on polishing the game at some point? In which case, I have two suggestions. Maybe, after [------} starts happening, it would be better to simply revert to the title screen, at least some of the time? Repeatedly being exited out of the game over the course of the 45 minutes it took to play took the sting away fairly quickly.

The second suggestion is related to the music. I didn't see any music credits in the... well, credits section, so I hope none of the team takes this personally, but... It was honestly kind of hard getting into the game due to the low music quality. Perhaps you should look into copyright-free music for the remake, or maybe even ask friends/colleagues for help? Having bubbly but wellmade music might help the mood whiplashes get across stronger, imo.


But overall, I did enjoy this and look forward to hearing more about the updated version! Maybe I'll convince some friends to play it or at least show it to them, who knows~

This VN has a very eerie atmosphere and immediately put me on edge. The short play time felt much longer. But that's just a good thing imo, considering the protagonist we're dealing with and how easy it is to slip up and get a bad ending...

The one thing I would suggest (for future releases?) is adding an option to fast-forward through text one already has read.

No worries about the late response... especially considering this one is, too, heh

Good to know! While I consider myself no game dev, it's true I have some ideas coming up, so I'll be taking a few looks and it and see what would be possible (and reasonable) to include+expand on. (I won't delve into too much detail here, but I have thoughts of recreating a story I am writing as a VN, and the letter system could be useful to include "extra" updates in the original with worldbuilding that didn't advance the main plot... /thinking )

Speaking of... as I'm writing this, I just finished reading the extra material. Admittedly since I had very short play lessons to start with it took a while to get fully immersed in the mystery, but once I did... Hm, it's hard to write about mysteries without spoiling them for those reading comments before playing, but personally I'm leaning more toward the rational conclusion. Although I haven't had the time to elaborate even to myself why that is...

The choice of music nd where to place it was exceptional, too - as a hobby composer I should be taking notes. In fact, my only criticism re: audio and visuals would be the sprites for John, Paula and Rose. Hyanide did a great work with the sprites they provided, and the silhouettes fit the tone of the story as well as the sprites... But those three sets of sprites being a strange mix between them was slightly off-putting, and I do believe having them as silhouettes as well could have been a better choice. (That said there are more jarring examples out there - *cough Sengoku Gensoukyou cough* - and I was still able to take their scenes seriously.)

... I have no idea how to end this comment so: overall, 8/10 kinetic novel, worth trying to learn things from!

Hello Rastagong! I have roughly an hour into this game and am interested in reading/playing to the end whenever I have the time.

The reason I'm writing a comment already is that I noticed something when opening the file directory via the itch app... Namely, that most of the files under the "game" directory still are in RPY format, meaning I can read the script in Editra and - theoretically - edit the script of your game. This struck me as unusual because every Ren'Py game I tried except one have the RPY files exported as PYs for copyright reasons (the one exception was made by a group sharing it with a closed group I just happened to be part of, which means they probably trusted us not to spread it on).

I guess what I mean to ask is - was this intentional?

Cute idea yet surprisingly difficult (it took a lot of tries to get some maps right...) Neat little game!