Great game ! I really enjoyed playing this game ! It's very easy to resolve the puzzles (exempt the origami puzzle with the screen tv), I think the clues (e.g the yellow stickers) are too obvious. And I'm agree with the other comments about the sound effect that plays whenever you discover clues, I think it could be improved. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game is going to progress x)
It's a nice game so far. The puzzles were a tad easy to get through with the exception of the origami puzzle. (The vertical equal sign threw me off) That being said, I spent the last week playing through Zero Escape so that probably helped. As stated in other comments, the sound effect for picking up items could stand to be changed as it doesn't really fit the mood the rest of the game is trying to present. Also in regards to the sound, fans of 100% OJ can recognize the sound immediately :^).
I feel that the story elements in the game would be more interesting without the narration. The narration kind of hands the player the story when this kind of game could benefit from having the player piece the story together themselves rather than have it spoon fed to them. For example, the wine receipt says that Mark's dad was constantly drinking and etc. but if it was left without narration, the player is left with much more questions motivating them to play on. Who's wine is this? Is this Mark's? Did his wife leave him because of this? Is this his punishment? etc. etc. And later on the game can subtly reveal that he was abused or whatever.
Hi GhostRi, good suggestion about the sound effects, we are trying to get some funding to polish the music and sound effects. We'll probably remove all the narration and focus on the art design of the story telling clues, we hope this would make the story telling part of the game deeper and more interesting. Thank you so much for the great suggestions!
Nicely done! I'm looking forward to seeing more of this.
Few thoughts:
-As with others, I had trouble figuring out camera movement.
-I really disliked the little sound effect that plays whenever you discover clues. It's super cliched and takes me out of the game. Maybe something a bit more subdued or even nothing at all.
-I wished that the character wasn't telling me the entire story when you find clues. Figuring out a character's history myself is an experience similar to solving a puzzle. Handholding your player through narrative exploration is denying them one more puzzle that they could solve themselves.
-The fonts used for narration/ the item menu are pretty bad. Maybe try to experiment with different ones, as the ones right now remind me of looking at a microsoft word document.
That all being said, the puzzles were the star of the whole thing. There were a few things that stumped me a little bit, but nothing that made me want to quit or give up.
This is some really valuable feedback. We are seriously considering removing the narration now that several players have suggested this, and yes we'll definitely change the fonts in future versions. We are very glad that you like the puzzles, we'll try our best to make the puzzles in later stages even better！
Very nicely done. Reading the other comments, I'm glad I'm not alone in being stuck for a while before realizing I could move the camera around but once I was past that, things went smoothly. I think that the puzzles are all well designed and it is immensely satisfying the way they chain into each other; you go from having all these different clues to quickly using them up. For me, the puzzles were very well balanced between being difficult enough to feel rewarding when solved while never being frustrating.
A few comments, technical and on content, including spoilers:
1) Make sure players understand that they can drag around the room to see more of it. This was not obvious to me at first.
2) Looking at the playthrough of navarsai, he was "stumped" by the origami/password/safe puzzle for some time, because he did not remember that multiplication is supposed to go before addition. It's always frustrating to see someone "get" the puzzle and then be stopped by a simple technicality. If you arrange the operation symbols in the order " * * + " instead of the current " + * * ", you will avoid this problem.
3) This password puzzle seems to be randomized, as I got a different color order on the tv and therefore a different password. "The Internet" (according to some discussions I have read) seems to hate this, as it interferes with their ability to use a walkthrough. See Monkey Kombat explanation for a historical example that I still remember (I liked Monkey Kombat, but was apparently the only person to do so).
4) As an addition to 1), as I watched navarsai's playthrough to find the one collectable I missed, I found it to be the "Alex" on the lion origami. I had no idea that you could interact with objects directly with your mouse, I always used USE/COMBINE/DISMANTLE. Again, make it somehow clear how players can interact with the environment. Nothing is more frustrating for me to see some interaction being the solution to a problem, which would be trivial to do IRL but that was apparently not available to me.
5) When I selected to start the game (download, not in browser) as 1900 x 1080 fullscreen (the resolution of my primary monitor) during the Unity startup, the unity logo screen would be fullscreen, but the game would revert to 1900 x 1080 *windowed*. The same is true for using smaller fullscreen resolutions.
+++
Again, I really liked this. I'm not much of a horror fan, but the story of Mark, as told through the collectables and starting with his childhood room, is interesting for me.
The game was originally designed for mobile phone so that's why we naturally chose to use dragging instead of moving mouse to the edge to move the screen, but you are right about this and #4, we'll add a tutorial in the final version to explain all the necessary interactions.
Actually the math puzzle is intentionally designed that way as a kind of misdirection, right now we have players who found it to be no problem at all and players who got stuck because of it, we are doing more evaluation and the puzzle might change in the final version of the game.
The randomized password is to prevent players who already know the password(exactly, from walkthroughs and videos :P) from finishing the game too quickly before actually exploring the room, it's designed for this demo and again might be changed in the final version.
We'll look into the resolution issue and try to fix it in the next demo, thank you for letting us know!
Please continue to follow our updates and offer your feedback and insights!
Hi, thank you for playing our demo, amazing playthrough, and you actually got all the collectibles in the first run, wow! Thank you for the feedback, we'll definitely try to add more horror elements!
Hey Stephan, thanks for trying our demo, it's a very fun video, at first I thought you must've beat it when I saw you clicking through the puzzles, please don't hate me for being glad to see you got stuck after all:P Good point about that poster, other people mentioned it too, we've got to replace that, like right away.
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Great game ! I really enjoyed playing this game ! It's very easy to resolve the puzzles (exempt the origami puzzle with the screen tv), I think the clues (e.g the yellow stickers) are too obvious. And I'm agree with the other comments about the sound effect that plays whenever you discover clues, I think it could be improved. I'm looking forward to seeing how the game is going to progress x)
Hi Break2fast, thank you for playing the game and the nice feedback and suggestions!
And keep making those cool let's play videos:-)
It's a nice game so far. The puzzles were a tad easy to get through with the exception of the origami puzzle. (The vertical equal sign threw me off) That being said, I spent the last week playing through Zero Escape so that probably helped. As stated in other comments, the sound effect for picking up items could stand to be changed as it doesn't really fit the mood the rest of the game is trying to present. Also in regards to the sound, fans of 100% OJ can recognize the sound immediately :^).
I feel that the story elements in the game would be more interesting without the narration. The narration kind of hands the player the story when this kind of game could benefit from having the player piece the story together themselves rather than have it spoon fed to them. For example, the wine receipt says that Mark's dad was constantly drinking and etc. but if it was left without narration, the player is left with much more questions motivating them to play on. Who's wine is this? Is this Mark's? Did his wife leave him because of this? Is this his punishment? etc. etc. And later on the game can subtly reveal that he was abused or whatever.
Hi GhostRi, good suggestion about the sound effects, we are trying to get some funding to polish the music and sound effects. We'll probably remove all the narration and focus on the art design of the story telling clues, we hope this would make the story telling part of the game deeper and more interesting. Thank you so much for the great suggestions!
Nicely done! I'm looking forward to seeing more of this.
Few thoughts:
-As with others, I had trouble figuring out camera movement.
-I really disliked the little sound effect that plays whenever you discover clues. It's super cliched and takes me out of the game. Maybe something a bit more subdued or even nothing at all.
-I wished that the character wasn't telling me the entire story when you find clues. Figuring out a character's history myself is an experience similar to solving a puzzle. Handholding your player through narrative exploration is denying them one more puzzle that they could solve themselves.
-The fonts used for narration/ the item menu are pretty bad. Maybe try to experiment with different ones, as the ones right now remind me of looking at a microsoft word document.
That all being said, the puzzles were the star of the whole thing. There were a few things that stumped me a little bit, but nothing that made me want to quit or give up.
This is some really valuable feedback. We are seriously considering removing the narration now that several players have suggested this, and yes we'll definitely change the fonts in future versions. We are very glad that you like the puzzles, we'll try our best to make the puzzles in later stages even better！
Very nicely done. Reading the other comments, I'm glad I'm not alone in being stuck for a while before realizing I could move the camera around but once I was past that, things went smoothly. I think that the puzzles are all well designed and it is immensely satisfying the way they chain into each other; you go from having all these different clues to quickly using them up. For me, the puzzles were very well balanced between being difficult enough to feel rewarding when solved while never being frustrating.
Here is the seemingly-obligatory playthrough video: https://youtu.be/E19JHppDQ0c
Thank you Foehamner for the feedback and playthrough! We'll definitely add a tutorial about the camera interaction, so sorry about your suffering!
hehehe sounds good. I'll recover somehow =)
That was a really nice game.
A few comments, technical and on content, including spoilers:
1) Make sure players understand that they can drag around the room to see more of it. This was not obvious to me at first.
2) Looking at the playthrough of navarsai, he was "stumped" by the origami/password/safe puzzle for some time, because he did not remember that multiplication is supposed to go before addition. It's always frustrating to see someone "get" the puzzle and then be stopped by a simple technicality. If you arrange the operation symbols in the order " * * + " instead of the current " + * * ", you will avoid this problem.
3) This password puzzle seems to be randomized, as I got a different color order on the tv and therefore a different password. "The Internet" (according to some discussions I have read) seems to hate this, as it interferes with their ability to use a walkthrough. See Monkey Kombat explanation for a historical example that I still remember (I liked Monkey Kombat, but was apparently the only person to do so).
4) As an addition to 1), as I watched navarsai's playthrough to find the one collectable I missed, I found it to be the "Alex" on the lion origami. I had no idea that you could interact with objects directly with your mouse, I always used USE/COMBINE/DISMANTLE. Again, make it somehow clear how players can interact with the environment. Nothing is more frustrating for me to see some interaction being the solution to a problem, which would be trivial to do IRL but that was apparently not available to me.
5) When I selected to start the game (download, not in browser) as 1900 x 1080 fullscreen (the resolution of my primary monitor) during the Unity startup, the unity logo screen would be fullscreen, but the game would revert to 1900 x 1080 *windowed*. The same is true for using smaller fullscreen resolutions.
+++
Again, I really liked this. I'm not much of a horror fan, but the story of Mark, as told through the collectables and starting with his childhood room, is interesting for me.
Hi Ingix,
Thank you so much for the valuable feedback!
The game was originally designed for mobile phone so that's why we naturally chose to use dragging instead of moving mouse to the edge to move the screen, but you are right about this and #4, we'll add a tutorial in the final version to explain all the necessary interactions.
Actually the math puzzle is intentionally designed that way as a kind of misdirection, right now we have players who found it to be no problem at all and players who got stuck because of it, we are doing more evaluation and the puzzle might change in the final version of the game.
The randomized password is to prevent players who already know the password(exactly, from walkthroughs and videos :P) from finishing the game too quickly before actually exploring the room, it's designed for this demo and again might be changed in the final version.
We'll look into the resolution issue and try to fix it in the next demo, thank you for letting us know!
Please continue to follow our updates and offer your feedback and insights!
Hey there! Great start, I'm looking forward to seeing the finished product!
Here's my playthrough, if you're interested.
https://youtu.be/84GPscVeZvo
Hi, thank you for playing our demo, amazing playthrough, and you actually got all the collectibles in the first run, wow! Thank you for the feedback, we'll definitely try to add more horror elements!
Gave your game a go...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkxsKeYKqJ8
Hey Stephan, thanks for trying our demo, it's a very fun video, at first I thought you must've beat it when I saw you clicking through the puzzles, please don't hate me for being glad to see you got stuck after all:P Good point about that poster, other people mentioned it too, we've got to replace that, like right away.