I have no idea what I'm doing and frankly trying to figure it out is proving somewhat hard on the eyes.

No idea what happened in that but was diffrent, was their a goal?

I don't know if it's a game, but it looks and feels awesome.

The gameplay is uncomprehensible.
Howewer, there's something in it! The idea of separation of memories from... "entity" is pretty serious and there's a great atmosphere.
So... I liked it! :)

Understanding the gameplay and what the fuck is happening is part of the experiment, but obviously the stuff is not clear at all. I added more accurate instructions, maybe it will help a bit

By the way the game can also be played just as another random contemplative experiment, and I'll be really happy if you could appreciate it in this perspective at least !

This looks very intriguing and poetic however I have no idea how it works or what i'm actually supposed to be doing. There is no clear feedback thus playing it gets boring and unsatisfactory quickly.

Unclear what is supposed to be happening.

Graphics and effects are brilliant though.

This is amazing I love it

I don't know if I got it right (probably not) but it kept my hands ans mind busy for quiet a while either way. I LOVE the visual style!

Art.

Atmosphere is really good but I've absolutely no idea what's going on!

Everyone seems to have said it all already in the way of gameplay, but visually this is a gem. Reminds me of demoscene demos -- a good thing! Also I somehow made everything black and concluded with no memories deleted, on one of my plays.

I don't know what just happened. But i liked it very much.

So strange and so pictorial ^^

Great eye candy but hard to figure out if there's a goal in particular.

Wow. Mind blowing presentation. Nice abstract and refreshing style. Very interesting to fiddle around and get used to the mechanics, BUT still very hard to find and erase all of the memories... Maybe because I suck in memory management at programming :D

Did you work with matrices? Really love the way the images are generated. Imagine this stuff projected on a wall and maybe controlled by a touchpad - that would be killer.

Let me try to explain what I just played. When I press the arrow keys the the colorful square sperm swim around, and I can also hit space to turn off the lights. When I'm done with that, I press enter and have the game tell me that I lost.

This is what people mean when they talk about pretentious, meaningless art games.

I'm sorry but the game never tell you that you lost. I don't like the term "art game", I think it's effectively a pretentious and meaningless naming, that's why I never use it when I make stuff, even if most of the stuff I'm making is not conventional. I like to experiment and get away from normal structures, like scores, levels, victory/defeat, etc. Please don't judge me too much, because it makes me sad é_è

You should explain the game a little more, but when I understood it I liked the idea :)

To be it was very pleasing to just play with the arrows and the let the tailed cubes swoosh over the screen and land in ordered patterns. Order was much more fun than disorder. I think the cosmic janitor bit was somewhat unnecessary. It might be my very strong aversion towards mysticism and religion speaking, though. Nice experience away from all these one-shot games.

Wow, this is a difficult one. I'm not sure if walking through the "zones" and turning them dark was the goal, but in the end I deleted all the memories and the individual was reincarnated - so I guess I won? ;) The game was at times beautiful (the swarming memories) and moving (at the end they tell you what you just deleted), but I'm not sure I get this whole religious angle and from a logical perspective: why is it called reincarnation when everything about that person gets deleted? I really don't understand how that makes sense, but maybe that's sort of the point..? Anyway, it was interesting and the game is certainly creative!

Ahah no it's not really about religion, but there's certainly some mystics in it ! Like I said in my last post, to maintain the illusion that the individual has only one life, you have to delete all his memories before his soul/stuff reincarnate in a new body, otherwise he'll remember that he had other lifes and...well I don't know, it would damage the cosmic order or something ahah

Very 2010s. LD needs less platformers and more creative experiments like this. You get my seal of non-foolgarbage.

Also, people, go read the author's commentary: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/12/18/about-data-stains/

Interesting experimental game, very nice style and mood. I don't mind that it doesn't tell you if you lost, but I was able to get all the data-sperm black, so then I "submitted" that and just got a black screen that I didn't see a way out of. Seemed more like a bug instead of having some sort of resolution. I like your ideas, though, I'm going to check out your other works :)

This is wonderful.
My suggestion to avoid so much misunderstanding from your players would be that you replace the "cosmic janitor" blurb by a text simply saying that the aim of the game is to explore it and its (rather simple) mechanics.

The ENTER on my keyboard is broken and the ENTER on the right of it don't seem to work on your game. So frustrating cause i love the graphics, and what i like in games is being lost and experiment and think until i understand what to do. Clearly your kind of game here. I'll try it again on another computer.

I enjoyed the few times I played the game BEFORE reading the "explanation"; I make my own background story, give my own meanings to the changes of shapes and colors, etc. so I was a bit disappointing reading the real goal of this game XD Anyway, it was a funny experience!

I usually don't tell obviously my own interpretation of my own games, but this time I wanted to tell a story. However, it's not the "true" story, I mean there is never a "true" explanation or meaning. What the player find in the game is not always the same stuff that the author put in it. In fact I prefer when people tell me about what thye find in the game and it's a totally different from what I imagined initially while making the game !

I think it would have been more fun without the swearing and the sperm. If you'd done it with flowers, say, it'd hit a higher note.

Really neat seeing the cubes rearrange themselves. :)

Help! What do I do? This looks awesome!

I half-read the explanation first, and now I'm curious how much I might've puzzled out, but mostly on an ego level.

Having half-read your post, I had a sense of what I needed to do, and roughly how to go about it. While the visuals are great, I quickly focused on the objective over the visuals. After being more or less certain I achieved the objective, I hit enter. Seeing the list of deleted memories helped the experience snap unexpectedly into something much more evocative and appreciable.

I wouldn't say the gameplay itself is particularly enjoyable on its own, but I think it does play a necessary role in your entry, and--for me, at least--the entry evoked an an unusual and interesting response, which is the kind of thing I look for in art.

Thanks for sharing both the entry and the explanation.

Your work is extremely interesting.

I think I know what's going on now. Pretend you are inside a cube. You face one side of it. You can press left or right to rotate your view of the cube. So there would be four sides you can see. Each side is a part of a an entire memory. Seeing one side of it is only a part of the entire thing. Disabling one side would disable the entire cube and therefore the memory itself.

Moving forward would bring you into another memory cube. Again, you can do the same to it. Seeing it, disabling it and whatever. So, I guess you can say that you are in sort of a maze made out of cubes. There would be dead ends, in this case those sides that shake when you try to move forward.

That's my best explanation for what's goin' on here.

I give credit to RockLeeSmile for leading me to this interesting entry.

Beautiful. One of my favourites!

Didn't know what to do. But beautiful visuals.

Thank you for doing such a game. That's exactly the kind of games I'd like to see more in the Ludum Dare. You tried something different and it was risky so thank you and nice job, I really liked it.
Now, I must confess that I liked it to a certain point and after that I was a bit disappointed. The game seemed complex and beautiful and weird and not very rational. But when I understood that a black room was a disabled memory space I just kept moving randomly until I could not find any white room. Then I pressed enter and that was it. It lacks a hint, moving randomly is pointless. I believe that there could have been a hint hidden in each room so that there is a path to follow maybe from room to room or something like that.
Anyway, nice job !

Wow I love this, a bit vague but I think it's perfect that way. If people don't like it then whatever, it's really interesting and the concept behind it is even more so!

Not entirely sure where the theme fits in, I'm assuming something to do with only having one mind / life or something

Beautiful graphics and sound! Seems like a good tool to just unwind and space out to.