thank you for playing and leaving your thoughts!!! A lot of things are meant to be left up in the air or were just spur-of-the-moment decisions, but for a lot of it you aren’t far off from what I was originally thinking :-) im glad my vision could come through
i really love it. the rhythm with which the words are fed to the reader had me finding myself clicking at a steady pace when usually i just click as fast as i can read.. i feel like the run-on nature of it all, surprisingly, made me savor everything just a bit more... these two are cute. i hope they can learn more about each other and themselves
made me feel a sense of melancholy that i both have and haven't felt before, or perhaps will feel in the future... that is to say, it is good and i enjoyed it. i cant believe they named that girl Nicole Nicolet
this was so so crazy good. so hot and so heartfelt and so painful. loved every moment. slime girls should get to do a little toxic yuri as a treat i think
i read the content warnings but seeing it in action left me blindsided anyway. wow. claire's pathetic nature and sheer depth of self-pity is so well done. not even to mention the wonderful visual style... i will be thinking about this for a while
so so so so so good... the short length left me wanting more but what's here is great. all of the shots of the world are so evocative and mysterious, and Jules is so cute. loved it
hi sorry for the late response! I would be 100% okay with translations, but it would be a lot of text to translate. I’ve also never had a game of mine translated before, so I’m not super sure what I’d have to do to make it easier for you to do it. I am open to it though. Feel free to email me at starbagey@gmail.com with any details :)
fucking awesome. you do a lot with a little.. i felt so many emotions in such a short amount of time. i also like the minimalist art, it feels appropriately ominous.... the music choices added a lot, especially the more intense pieces coupled with Em on the computer. i was laughing my ass off seeing her immediately go back to her old habits. she's great
if you do please show me!!! I was daydreaming about the possibility of this becoming a real book the entire time I was making it (very unlikely, but maybe someday)
i looooved this! i was just going to do one playthrough and next thing i know, i've played for two hours trying to get all the endings (which, i haven't yet, but i will eventually). i'm really surprised at the amount of depth this game has with unlockable characters and everything, not to mention all of their little typing quirks feeling so true to life. wakaba was my favorite she's so silly...
fanart is completely fine to post! You don’t have to ask permission. I unfortunately don’t have an instagram but if you post it and would like to link it so I can see, that would be awesome. Thanks for playing
hi! i am sure there are ways to implement volume sliders, but i didn't for this game and don't really plan on doing so retroactively. at least not anytime soon. the music isn't copyrighted or anything but i know youtube's systems are kind of silly regarding those things. you can really only mute the music entirely or turn the game's volume really low. sorry about this!
Answering your other questions below the cut:
the 'essence of community' is not a physical item-- it will not appear in your inventory. They're just progress flags related to one of the game's endings. So, yes, you can complete Chapter 2's secret quest without having completed Chapter 1's, you just have to figure out how. The guide has hints on the bottom if you want them.
hi! Thank you for enjoying the game. I’ll go into the spoilers below the cut!
After killing Mother, you should be able to pull out the scissors in her chest. There’s only one tile you can interact with to do this, if I remember correctly you need to do it from the top. Afterwards a white door should appear near the top of the room (takes a few seconds for it to show up) and you should be railroaded into the ending from there. If you still aren’t able to trigger it, please let me know!
thanks for playing! 1) yes, it is possible but a bit difficult, though it does not lead to much else other than extra dialogue because it is mostly leftover content from an earlier period in development that i didn't want to scrap. maybe someday i'll patch the game to make it a bit more substantial.
2) also yes! i haven't made a walkthrough for the fourth ending in lieu of keeping some mystery alive, but i leave some hints for it at the very bottom of the official guide page.
i loved this game. the presentation, in all its simplicity, seems like it took a lot of effort to pull off the way you did, and i really enjoy it. the unconventional character sprites are really cool. repeating the same day numerous times, each loop bringing a new understanding to each character and the way they treat the others... lines that seemed innocuous at first suddenly being given new meaning when you see them as someone else... this is a story that makes me want to chew on it. Osthola was my favorite, i think, but i ended up loving all the characters a lot by the end. overall a really great job, i'm excited to see what happens in Phase 2.
this game hurt me in a special way... i really enjoyed it. fictional situations like this always seem nightmarish yet tantalizing to me and this story captures that very well. great job
i enjoyed this bittersweet little story a lot. the visual direction is pretty simplistic but i think it serves the overall tone really well, not to mention it kept things nice and readable. making some of the lineart animate was a really neat touch, and i loved the little text wobbling effects too. despite not spending much time with them, i can't help but feel for Angel and Addison... the final moments between them were very sweet.
ano1 was one of the main games that inspired me to start making this one, so hearing this makes me especially happy. Thank you for playing!
I do really want to put the OST up for purchase at some point, I just haven't gotten around to it yet because I'd also like to include bonus tracks and things like that-- I also just got preoccupied with life stuff as most developers do. When I get around to it I'll make sure to put an announcement up on this game's devlog. Until then, I do have the base files found in the game thrown on my soundcloud!
such a great visual novel. all of the little flourishes done in regards to the visual presentation immediately had me charmed. it seems simplistic at first but it feels so Purposefully Done at every point. the writing is also great. the first half had already gripped me by being, well, incredibly relatable, but the ways in which the delusional side of things slowly crept up on me has kept me thinking about this story on and off since i played it. great job
this is a very charming little VN! the meticulous ways in which the characters' smallest of quirks are described really resonated with me & endeared me to them. the sudden contemplative tone paired with the flashback scene really pulled me in, too-- i genuinely wasn't expecting that. I'm excited to see what the future holds for Rictus and Icasia :)
I'm glad all the endings feel satisfying to you. I didn't want to correlate "best ending" with "true ending" in this game, so I tried to make them all exhibit different facets of the same core idea. Especially since I know most players will probably only go for one or two of them. Thank you for playing!
thank you! I'm glad you had a good time with it. The fourth ending is intentionally pretty tricky/out of the way, but I recently made a guide page that has a few hints at the very bottom if you'd like to try and find it: https://starbage.neocities.org/HalOPE/guide
hi, thank you so much for such an in-depth comment! Stuff like this truly makes my day. A lot of the stuff in the game is intentionally up to interpretation, I don't like implying there's a "wrong" way to read things, but I'll try to answer your questions as best I can.
Community’s gift was something that kind of just came together, actually. The scissors as an item came before the siblings existed as characters (I was in the middle of developing Chapter 2 when I had come up with them as the main "reveal", and I think it shows a little bit). I came to really enjoy the scissors as a symbolism of "cutting free" though, and began to lean into it a lot. It's why Mother has such a strong web/thread association to her (as well as the white Interlude areas). That is to say, I didn’t originally put as much thought into it as it might seem. It was kind of a happy accident. i really love this reading of it though.
As for Regret, the compass pointing away from Mother's confrontation is intentional :-) if I remember correctly, the earlier versions of the game didn't have this, so it was partially added as a hint for one of the endings. But I also wanted it to be a way for some of Regret's desires to shine through. They care for Hope even if they're kind of spiteful about it at times, and I thought having that show through the compass would be a fun detail. I'm really pleased someone made that connection!
