Pretty neat twist on interactive fiction!

Great interactive fiction, and really creative! I like the concept of being able to go back into the past and changing / seeing different events based on the words you collect throughout. This would be a really great project to continue on, by adding even more branches to the narrative!

Spooky vibes got me deeply immersed in some text! Great job

Just trying to play but I can't seem to do anything on the initial screen; the options are 'close' and 'set' either of which can be dragged to the prompt at bottom left but I can't click 'ok', press enter or type anything. What am I doing wrong?

@paul59 There are some highlighted words in the story as well that you can interact with. The contrast could probably do with some increasing.

I'm read a lot so interactive fiction really appeals to me. I liked all of this; the narrative, the visual presentation. Great work.

I really like the idea a ton but I'm a bit stuck personally after having just gotten to the end. I thought there were a few obvious branches but I feel like I'm missing stuff and it's hard to discover what that is.

you can pet the cat

Brilliant concept, I haven't played so much storytelling and text games, but it was a great experience. Really spooky after a while and a telling a story in this game is fantastic! Keep it up!

Excellent and elegant mechanics, on the one hand focuses on parts of the text, on the other hand, creates a feeling of research when you need to put words into possible actions. The first time I see this.

narrative and presentation was really clean and well created.

Theme fits and it's very polished, I don't usually like interactive fictions but this one enjoyed me.

High level for a compo entry, really creative and innovative.

Really cool game !
The concept is very neat, the ambiance is really nice, and the execution is top notch !

It was a bit hard (but I'm not a native english speaker, which could make it harder for the expressions and combining words), but I went to get the story.json file, and with it it became easier and allowed me to check path that I did not even think of ^^ If you have time for a post-jam session, maybe you could add an help button, that can help the player by telling them if there is a path that they did not explore yet from this screen, and if they can get to it with their words ;)

Really cool game, very original for a game jam ! Good job !

This is so cool!! The story is compelling to read and it fits very well with how you interact with the game. I did end up having to read the source code at one point to figure out what to do, but I'm glad I did since I got to read all the paths and your internal names for them. Also the music definitely added something. This makes me wanna try to make a writing-centric game sometime.

Very good story, and the collecting of words was a very clever element. Got stuck after the bluff in bosses office and returning home however, could not open my door because I had spent the word already.

Well done! I liked it!

Thanks for the feedback and nice words everyone!

@dodormeur An indicator for when not all valid answers have been given sounds like a fantastic idea. Stops you from just throwing down answers hoping that you'll be able to do something else. Perhaps a little star next to the help button that lights up?

@zondarg Great to hear you liked it! There are two routes to the ending, and you chose the trickier of the two (congrats :smile:). You were very close, here's a hint that's been [ROT13'd](https://rot13.com/): qb lbh jung lbh qvq gb trg "bcra" "pbzchgre" bire gur cnfg ebhgr, ohg va erirefr gb trg gurz onpx gb gur cerfrag ebhgr.

This was awesome! Favorite entry that I've played so far. I did have to look up the script once, I had missed that you could take the word 'before' from the email attachment.

All in all, really innovative mechanic, really interesting take on the theme, great mood and atmosphere! Not to mention it's a fellow "just a website" game like mine. :) Really good job!

Help button needed, I got stuck on the email :joy: Spooky vibes, feels like I'm peeking into something that I'm not supposed to. Gonna go through the source code and play all the routes!

As i first saw this game, i was extremely mindblown by it's twist. I never really played interactive fictions before, but this is really good! Also the minimalist graphics really fit in my opinion

I enjoyed it! I don't know why but it reminded me bandersnatch :)

You said short? this was very long for a compo game, and every minute was great

i was not sure how to play it exactly. somehow i managed to bring words from the right panel to the bottom input area but what to do next??

@nexusviper It’s sort of like those old text adventures where you have to type in the right commands to get the the game to do anything. Once you drag in the right phrase, the OK button will light up and you can click it.

Wow! Very neat. It all works really well together.

I may be dense but I wasn't able to figure out any branching paths besides petting the cat >_>

This was awesome, really well done! The music was so good - really added to the vibe. You really nailed the graphics/ambiance from the game. I also thought the way you made the story interactive was really cool, and being able to go back and try different combinations was a great idea. Like others have said, I think this would really benefit from some kind of an indicator about whether you've tried all combinations. Overall, this was amazing though!

Very cool concept! Nicely executed too! Took a while to find the right combinations after hoarding all of the words lol

I got stuck after the email part but it was still pretty awesome! Quite an interesting take on the genre and the theme! Super original, I loved it!

Loved the twist of this game. And it's definitely creepy. I got stuck when I came back to the house a second time and played through to the first ending to find nothing had changed. I'm not sure if I was supposed to go back to the house or do something else earlier ... there didn't seem to be any hints about how to progress from there either.

Thanks for giving it a try everybody, I really appreciate! 100% agree, I think some sort of indicator for "hey there's stuff you can do here!" would be super helpful.

For anyone who's really stuck, I added a link to the internal story file above. Feel free to take a peek behind and get back on the right path.

@carraka You were super duper close to the ending! Through the route you took, you gained two things: an additional word, and some additional knowledge. I think you have everything you need to get to the end, but if not, feel free to take a peek at the file above.

Wonderful experience! A bit of a longer game, but the story was quite nice! The graphic design of the site/app was really well done! Clean and easy to read the text. I wish the selectable words were more visible, and some of the solutions were a bit unsatisfying to figure out. Lovely music, great story, fun game! Thank you!

5 star game. This is amazing. +10

Whew! What a ride. Extremely innovative way of doing a text adventure. Loved the music even though it was only like a 8 second loop. Fun gameplay, although some solutions were rather ambiguous (I did need the walkthrough to get the ending). Very well done.

Thank you for including the link to the story file! Helped me see some things I missed out on (lol @ stairs end) and definitely helped keep my rating schedule on track. The short music loop you made is simple but really sells the whole package, great great decision adding it.

Some quality of life improvements would have been nice, like not having to collect all the words again when backtracking, better feedback to avoid the "zillion combinations of trial and error", etc etc.

Fun regardless!

Great game.But have less mood and I am kinda bore

This is great. Reminds me of https://www.letters-game.com/ but creepy rather than cute.

Great experience! I really like the concept. Congrats!!!

It was weird and interesting. I really enjoyed it!

"PET EMAIL" :smile: didn't work though! Nice game, good job!

oohhh this is really good. Totally failed to finish it as I got stuck at the end but could definitely spend more time playing!

Awesome entry, well done!

The music does an amazing job at setting the mood, and I wish there was more of it! It would have been great for the stairwell to be trippy or for the boss scene to be anxious/urgent. Great story and great concept!

@zarkonnen Yoooo thanks for pointing this out to me! Super wondering if anyone else had explored this mechanic before. Definitely will put it on my wishlist!

Great game! Very creative idea, well written, and perfect atmosphere. Played through the whole thing and only reached for the hint for the second-last clue. I might not have used a hint if it was a bit easier to "get around". A couple suggestions:
- collect words automatically as you go to "before"
- have a "quick select" for already discovered word combos (provided you have the words)
- trim down the number of words (e.g., "disembark" and "deboard" maybe could have been the same

For a Ludum Dare game this was amazing! Had lots of fun puzzling through it, and I'd definitely play a longer story.

@boxedmeatrevolution Hey friend, thanks for the nice words and the itemized feedback! I’m working on a stand-alone blog post to generally address feedback, but I wanted to jump in on the last one since I thought it was kind of funny.

So the engine I wrote that’s driving the game has had a core issue from the start: it barfs at duplicate words, especially if the user managed to put two of the same word in their wordbank. I told myself “ah it’s ok I’ll fix this later” and then two days and four words for “get off the train” later it’s still there :laughing:

A post jam version of the game would definitely get that right cleared up.

I actually noticed that I never played your game and wew, I had a blast.

Not because of the game itself but because of the mood. I mean, there's no much gameplay but the writing and the music were exceptional. I think there's a fine line that divides pretentious with artistic and this is right on the artistic side, and I really love works like this.

thanks for taking time ;)

P.S: There's a bug. Opening your cat doesn't work :thinking:


I really love the narrative coupled with the ominous music! I especially loved when the other instruments would kick in as you reached parts of the story. Everything creates a really amazing atmosphere.

A small note - I love dragging the text in place, but sometimes it got a bit cumbersome as I was going backwards and collecting words to drag them back in place. I feel like it could be helpful to let them return to the right panel with a click rather than having to drag them back.

Awesome work!

Really a fantastic entry, I played all the way through, took me way too long, especially as someone who grew up with Zork. I really enjoyed the story you were telling, and the way you told it.

Some mild criticisms: I think the music got really repetitive. I eventually ended up muting it. I would have loved if it were easier to remove things from the selection bar, dragging things in and out got pretty tedious.

All things aside: I got an hour and a half of playtime out of it, and thoroughly enjoyed myself, so well done!

@occultone Hey friend, thanks so much for playing. The idea of anyone playing a game I made for such a period of time is bewilderingly joyous. 100% agree that the selection mechanism can be improved -- drag and drop is sexy, but it's not the most efficient :smirk:

I think the music in its simplicity is ripe for expanding upon, such that you aren't listening to the same little ditty over and over again. At the very least, I would have loved to make another track for the past-heist.

You did a great job. Anything that gets me to play for >30 minutes gets high marks in my book. I have a NOTORIOUSLY short attention span.

Very spooky! A changing background, or a gradient would add just a bit more colour to make it more eye-catching.

Very cool method of interaction! It all clicked the moment I understood what the last sentence of the bad ending meant.

Really cool. The music really sets up the mood and the way the story is told is very intriguing.

If I have any complaints it's for QOL changes. Multi select and ability to quickly remove all answers would be nice. Other than that, maybe you could make a graph based approach? Like each node would be a block of text. And once you would be able to swap between alternate answers that would lead to a particular scene.Sorry if that didn't make much sense.

I also found that the okay button disappearing too be annoying later on. It fit with the 'this is not what happened' section but not with the others, Is it a bug?

I really liked this idea with dragging and dropping the words, the story was intriguing, a bit difficult at times, so I had to look up the guide. Some more hints would be nice. Also considering the story took over 1 hour for me to complete, the ending was a little unsatisfying sadly... I wish there was a bit more explained about what you were doing, what "invertebrae" was or some sort of plot twist. The ending still left me wondering and I wish there was more to it.

Thanks for the additional feedback everyone!

@arcus That’s a pretty neat suggestion. When originally designing this one of the ideas I (very) briefly had was letting people choose their own terminal palette. I think having dynamic, smoothly transitioning palettes would be pretty cool, and potentially a good way to signal that the “path” you’re on has changed.

@akirassasin I still feel that line needs some workshopping, but that feeling of “...OHHHHH” is 100% what I was going for, so I’m happy it worked.

@fahim-faysal The button disappearing is intentional, as the game was designed to require at least a little bit of inventory management (e.g. your words are stuck in the past! how do you get them out?). However, looking through the feedback so far it doesn’t seem like this was handled in a terribly fun way, so I’ll need to work on it a bit more (I don’t want to scrap it altogether, as I do like the core puzzle-ishness it adds).

@fat-cat I’m preparing up a formal post about it now, but one thing I honestly was completely blindsided by was the actual length of the game. Seeing comments above plus talking to my friends have indicated that the game is waaaay longer than I had expected (I mean, when I’m testing it already knowing everything it takes me like five minutes to blow through lol). I’ll have to find better ways of figuring out playtime in the future, as there are many things I would have prioritized if I had known (such as writing an impactful ending rather than just a teaser :joy:).

Oh my god, this was SO GOOD! I loved the storytelling and the story itself, I loved the mechanics, I loved the idea, the sound design, everything! You did such a good job!!!

Very unique entry!

Loved the game!

One of the best ones I've played for this LD so far.
Don't really have anything to add that others haven't said, I'd play a full game like this for sure.

Very smart and innovative game. I loved the unsettling atmosphere created by the minimal music, interface and story- perfect example of "less is more". I agree with other people about the drag and drop- I was playing on trackpad and I suspect it was worse on here.

The puzzles were good which is probably why I and others got stuck playing for 1+ hour. If you wanted to expand the game further or make a sequel, you could have puzzles that combine words across more temporally distant frames, or have more play on words/riddle types. But honestly everything about the game fits together so nicely as is.

Overall, excellent work!

clever game and i really like the element of looking for the words to use next -- great game -- thanks for making it

enjoyed the game, struggled to find the highlighted words at first. Thanks for the game!

really cool variation on an adventure text game! I ended up using the guide as it wasn't immediately obvious sometimes to me what I should be doing (usually if I thought I was in the office but I was still actually in the stairwell, or I thought I was still on subway, not outside of office). I ended up collecting all the words I used as I went backwards so I think I needed to do, but then I had a lot of choices that I could potentially make. Perhaps having more alternate pathways? Anyway, nice job!

Very nice ambience overall... The intro track reminded me of the Resident evil safe room :)

Very cool and unique game! This is very innovative and the writing was immersive.
I really liked combining words in different ways during the first half of the game. I got frustrated when I started to accumulate so many words that it was taking up two pages. Pretty quickly I found that combinations that made sense to me weren't valid choices which was too bad. Reasonable for a game jam game though. I wound up opening up the JSon to cheat a little and see more of the story.
Very original! Would love to see more like this.

@jamesolivermusic Oh yeah, I can sort of hear that. Thanks, it’s a flattering comparison!

Very nice and original idea. :twisted_rightwards_arrows:

@candlesan @aeveis Thanks for the feedback! I think ultimately in a future version I’d like to just decrease the number of words altogether and increase the per-word utility.

For example, there’s a couple of small paths in the game that are just there for optional flavor, such as the smoke break (“head out” during lunch talk). Do you think these small “flavor-paths” add anything do the experience? Or should all paths preferably be consequential? At the very least there’d be an indication that these flavor paths are dead-ends, so you don’t spend your day trying to figure out how to further extend your smoke break :joy:

@jjjjason Ohh yeah, if I knew which paths were dead ends that would help a lot. I liked the flavor text, but not doing what to do next was a big problem, since each possible step could have a potential path(s). Maybe for the sake of exploration either letting players know it's a dead end, or if there's more potential at that moment?

@aeveis Makes sense! Was discussing this with a friend (based on @dodormeur’s idea), what we had come up with as a potential solution was a circular icon next to the question mark that would

- Be solid if there’s solutions you haven’t tried that you have the words for
- Be hollow if there’s solutions you haven’t tried that you don’t have the words for
- Be faded out/invisible if there aren’t any solutions you haven’t already exhausted/this page is a dead end

This wouldn’t fix the “too many words!!” issue but it at least would prevent people from wasting time. And maybe for the hardcore folks out there could be a “moon logic” mode that permanently turns the icon off, lol.

Hoooly that was an awesome game!
Played it entirely (Did this just to a few games in this jam)

The narrative is very good, and somewhat funny (The boss part is the best)

But I had an "Issue" with this game
- Lack of the ability of double clicking the word for fast placement/removal

This wasn't reeaally an issua, but it would have made my experience far better (Nothing that removed points from my rate)

I loved how you had to go back and foward through time for grabing words that you had to use somewhere else

About the storytelling one Issue
- How did I received the e-mail and I said "Oh, so it work" when I didn't do it yet, I could have received it but I wouldn't answer that it worked if I didn't really do something, got it?

Just that.
The game is Awesome, Congratulations!!!

An interesting game indeed.
A new - for me at least - kind of text adventure, quite far from the classic "You Choose Your Adventure" mechanic.
Music fits the mood perfectly even though I would have liked a few more variety.

Well done!!!

The best storytelling game I've played in this jam so far. Excellent job!

What an amazing game! I loved the narrative. I think that the initial difficulty in understanding how to use the interface is ok. I couldn't see the different colour at first. The when I realized I could go back and collect words I was really excited! I think that the absolutely genius thing you managed to do was to solve an old dilemma: long text in narrative games , but I should say long text in general, is easily skipped by the bored user. They go through it quickly, just to grasp the idea of it. It's really hard to catch the average player's attention, to make him want to read more. But you brilliantly did so and made the user hungry for new branches to read carefully, looking for precious words that can change everything. I asked myself many times how to make narrative "rewarding" in this sense. Great job!

For me, I could not make the story progress at all. No buttons worked.

@jadedresearcher Oh no, I’m sorry! First off, make sure you’re zoomed out enough—you should see full boxes with no sides cut off.

After that, look for the words that are brighter than the rest. You can click and drag those words onto the word box on the right, as well as the prompt on the bottom. If you put in a correct answer, it’ll light up the OK button.

The game really should have a better indicator of this. Perhaps a ghost cursor that finds and drags the first word for you.

Sadly this is not working properly on my laptop (Linux Debian build - All software up to date). In Chrome there are bits cut off and buttons not working and in firefox nothing displays at all. I will give this a go on a different PC tomorrow as I do really want to give this a go. Will comment again after trying this.

@sahoskins1 I’ll try and debug FF. For chrome, you should just be able to ctrl minus and zoom out. Apologies for not handling various monitor sizes correctly.

Edit: on a whim, is there a chance you have JS disabled in your Firefox? I tested FF Nightly latest on both Windows and Mac OS and it works as expected, trying to get my Linux friend to check it out.

Double edit: my Linux friend can run the game in Firefox, but it’s also too zoomed in due to the small laptop he’s using it on

Triple edit: Realized I am using a JS method that was not added to Firefox until version 62. That might be a reason for a full crash...

Overall, this is an excellent game, with a really clear and crisp presentation that works excellently for the type of story you're telling. I'm really impressed with the story you were able to create in such a short time.

I will, however, sheepishly admit also to reading _story.json_, simply because I wanted to see what happened, but the mechanics of trying out answers became a little tedious when repeated constantly (especially when I was trying to find out-of-the-box combinations). Dragging the words was a great tactile feel the first couple of times, but then I just wanted to get into puzzle solving mode. Nonetheless, excellent job, can't wait to see more!

Thanks to everyone that had suggested clicking for moving the words around. Double-click to move is now in the first post-jam update and god*damn* does it make things quicker.

This is a very cool idea and the music works really well and creates great atmosphere!

Really cool game ! It has a nice feeling to it and I believe the music has got something to do with that. Unlike a lot of other entries, despite the game being pretty long and letting your mind wander on the music it doesn't get tediously repetitive, on the contrary. Maybe a tad bit of sound effects could have been a nice (nothing too flashy but like a soft click when you get a combination, a little feedback when you drag a word, and perhaps a faint typing sound of the text ?).

Narrative games seem pretty rare for jams but they're one of the type I usually enjoy most, and indeed the story kept me invested. I got to the end but there's still a lot of mystery going on (although I didn't read the whole json to see if I could glean a few more information). I'm not sure I understand how the theme ties into it though, was hoping the whole invertebrae thing to be linked to it (selling information on some type of lifeform ?) but maybe I just didn't explore the story enough.

I found the main mechanic (picking up words and keeping them to make actions) interesting and I think you did a really good job fitting the different word in context (at least most of the time :P ). The ability to go back is also really cool !

Technology wise I think it's cool you made this game in React (instead of a specific game engine) and open sourced it. It was also interesting to see how you formatted the story as a json (actually it's surprisingly similar to how we did it for our game, which we originally open sourced but went back on because of shame about some of the things we did to make the game work ^^").

You managed to fit in a lot of content for a Compo and I think the result is really cool :) . Great job !

@ashtrail Hey, thanks for writing so much feedback!

Haha, the theme tie is definitely a bit :thinking:. Mechanically I was going for sort of a pun, interpreting currency -> currentness -> progression of time. From a story standpoint, I guess it's less that the MC is currency as much as they are pawns used both by their workplace, as well as "them". I don't want to go too far into it lol, this is something that needs to be telegraphed in-game rather than in-comment.

The tech implementation of this was very fun! Making the game a webpage rather than a raster canvas made some things super easy (text rendering of course, taking advantage of browser APIs), but also made some things a lot more tricky/unconventional (no traditional game-loop, how do i perfect-pixel-scale things, etc).

And I think the most important thing I want to say is you (and anyone else who reads this) should really open-source your game code! I am a huge proponent of learning through open-source projects, and if anything, the tricky parts of your code base that you're not quite proud are the *most* educational. Some tasks are just hard, and require hard code! Plus, it can teach newcomers that your code doesn't have to be awesome to make an awesome game.

I'm thinking back to when the Celeste devs [released the 5400-line behemoth that was the Player controller](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/03/05/celeste-movement-code/). Of course you got a lot of armchair programmers criticizing it on Twitter. But at the end of day, Matt and Noel made Celeste and those armchair programmers didn't. I think I know who'd I rather learn from :smile:

Tried it again after you updated it and it now works fine on my machine. Was interesting to play this one. Is not like anything else I've played in this jam. Well done for trying something new! It could get pretty frustrating at times but puzzle games in general have the ability to do that. Nice job on this :)

That was very cool. The concept of collecting words to use as actions was great, and not something I'd seen before. I would love to see a full version of this concept with more branching and possible options. I played the post LD version where you could double click words which helped a lot with navigation, but I feel it was still a bit tedious to remove letters.

@shunaky Ah whoops, I forgot to respond to this. Whatever route you pick in the past, it still ends up with you doing at least part of the important action. Therefore whether or not you’re able to get the real ending, the present version of you feels like they did something, and email “confirms” it, hence the reaction. Even before you go to the past, it being the past already happened.

@jjjjason Oh, makes sense.. Pretty clever, actually! ^^

Really enjoyed this one! The music was simple but enhanced the experience a lot. Moving back and forth, gathering words to get more options - I loved the puzzle elements. I agree that it would be nice if clicking "before" automatically put words used on that page back into the bank. I would have liked a more conclusive ending, but overall the writing was really solid!

All i can say is wow. What a unique experience

What a truly amazing game this is. I am glad you posted the guide, otherwise this would have taken me a lot longer to beat. (Not that I wouldn't have tried!)

If I had one minor point of critique to offer is that I often felt like I went too deep the rabbit hole, like there were multiple things I wanted to try in a scenario, but by the time I reached the end of a path I would have forgotten what they were. Something that might be helpful would be a visual representation (like a tree) of where you have been, and which scenarios still hold alternative solutions. I think this would be a nice help in not missing anything.

Super interesting and unique experience. I'm not smart enough to figure it out though

Interesting project. I like to find words and use them so as to progress in the story. The quiet music was perfect. For a compo entry I am very impressed by what you did in a few days. Well done ++

This was well executed, and the addition of putting the words you can collect in bold was an excellent update. I loved the music. I definitely referred to the guide after a while, but I made it! Cool concept and great execution!

Surprisingly immersive! I'm sure my company's security team would love this too :)

I really really love this game, I love the minimalist UI, the font you choose, the music set the mood perfectly, and I love how the theme is used. So much in such a short time!
I didn't finish it yet, (but I will) and your guide helped me for one situation (for now) so it's pretty usefull. It become more an more difficult as you progress in the game with all the world combinations you can get, but it also makes me want to try them all!
Great job! :)

Good job! I needed help to finish the game but still liked it a lot. :slight_smile:

Ok. Reality check. This is one of the best games.
But also, extremely hard to finish without the guide.
Some kind of keyboard typing (such as first letter of the word, or first few in case of ambiguity) would help tremendously. This way, it's kind of slow.

But honestly, very well done.