itch.io

The only hard criticism I can really lobby is something I think is inherent when I play a lot of games like this where having to move around is cumbersome. I'd chalk this to the engine or my computer itself, but I felt like the game was struggling a lot every time it loaded a new room or you were picking conversation topics and cycling back to room descriptions and navigations. Knowing how these game works and python, it's probably just python's slugginess in loading scripts. Overall it did feel a bit unergonomic, but it's only a problem if you ever stumble in finding out what to do.

The writing, audio and visuals were all excellent, so most of my difficulties with the game came with interacting with the design. I often get lost in these kinda games, even when the scope is this small. Depending on where you want to take and how much you want to take the players hand while playing it there's a bunch of stuff that would make it easier for a player to eventually stumble and move the story forward. Off the top of my head I'd recommend stuff like marking conversation topics as spent once you have seen them and there's nothing else you can get out of them, which would leave uncleared conversations as points of interest. Highlighting new or updated conversation topics once you unlock them I  think would also be good to keep the flow going. But all of these are more matter of polish that necessarily getting the game design wrong, having played a few of these kind of mystery adventure games lately, it follows the established formula quite well.

Perhaps it'd be helpful if you also put the default keyboard bindings as part of the instructions? I admit that when the first screen popped up it too me an embarrassing amount of time to press "E" to advance the textbook and it wasn't until my third try through the game I realized you run with shift 😅

Otherwise had a lot of fun with the game. I have never really played "Pages" type of horror games but I enjoyed that since the map is fixed you can plan around to run the game better next time if you fail.

I really don't want to come of as rude, because I actually like what I could feel you were trying to get across while trying to work on the game but I hope that if you continue working on this you'll work on polishing it more... you really got me good with Quzher's design and personality so it's not like I want the project to be abandoned...

Either way. I have a bunch of things I could say... First of all being that I feel that the intro before starting to read the story is rather superflous... this is a FVN so I don't think you need to explain why the characters are furries or have animal like traits, while I think that you don't need to explain out of the story the idea of quirks...you could for example explain it has internal dialogue from the character itself what a trait is, and explain it on relation with his own trait as he's talking to himself.

Related to that intro scene...I think the music in this game might be too loud, and you might want to find some way to lower it's volume because...I had my volume incredibly low, and the alarm you hear was ear piercingly low. Yes I know loud funny but even the normal music is really really loud and that is on volume levels that on other games or watching videos is incredibly low.

After that...well, the character dialogue of Quzher, and the other characters, *specially* Kyle, is really really hard to read. The text in the dialogue box needs to have more contrast to it one way or another. I'd suggest making the text a darker shade of the same color for readability. I literally couldn't understand most of what Kyle was saying because of this. 

I think the actual script is fine, even with some occassional typos or grammar mistakes, but like... the script can get very shitposty at times and that's fine...if that's what you're trying to write. I saw your other game was like that, but there's at least no obvious signs this is the same here so I'm working on the premise you're trying to seriously tell a story so... I'd reccomend from like, refraining from breaking the 4th wall or talking to the player directly. 

Like, on the lecture when you say these characters are immortal so the writer had to give them a curse that took me out of focusing on what I was reading because even on a script that has a lot of jokes like this there's a suspension of disbelief that I'm trying to mantain that well, directly adressing yourself as the author and this is a work of fiction breaks. I think if you want to keep the same overall feeling of this message, you can say it in character with something like "but Immortality comes at a step cost, everyone who is born with it has a curse unique to them", or something along those lines...

Anyways, this is a lot and it might be kind of pedantic but, I thought some sincere constructive feedback could be helpful... I'll admit that I tried it out cuz I actually like how the art you're showing here looks so I think if this got a lot more polish then you could really have something here.

If you need an example of how to do it, another game I played does it this way to set up a character who has both a first and last name 

Also, I'm sorry if it's naggy, but I found the menus a bit hard to read since I had to specifically hover on them to be able to read them... I felt it was a deliberate choice on the very first scene like this, 

but I also found it a bit hard to read the menu choices on the normal scenes... I think a bit more contrast between the text box and the dialogue box could be helpful

I don't know if it has been reported already, but I left my name as the default, and the game acts like I didn't set a name at all (I just pressed enter when prompted).