You never know untill you try right?
I've made several narrative games, and after that you will never see games with narrative and text the same way. Good for you though because you just got a new area of respect, and a good fresh new skills : D
I love the idea of your game, both the initial and the final one, you have my respect and admiration ^^

I know that a jam, and not much time and stuff, but I would have liked to be able to be friends with some pieces and they could help me instead of just vanishing (or freeing, or whatever) them. With that you could make some pieces convence others and would not have had to bypass the chess rules of movement and that. Just an idea if it ever can be useful: )

Some quick admin before I get to my review: If you could add a quick note in your description on exactly what changes you made in the post-LD version, that would let LD participants better decide which version to play.
(side note, your itch.io page is set to request money, not sure if that's an intentional choice or you mis-clicked there)

I elected to play the 1.0 version.

- I love the writing here; it's abstract and childish and there's a lot of jokes scattered around.
- Pawn movement is slightly buggy but you may have fixed that in the post-LD version.
- I'm not entirely sure why the enemy pieces seemed to vibrate most of the time.
- The game doesn't offer any challenge, either in the dialogue or in the chess. This adds to the narrative you've written, so it's not a bad thing, but I also wouldn't mind an actual real-time chess puzzle mechanic.
- I do wish there was some music here, but spending that time on writing was not a mistake. The writing did come out very nice.

The experience was surreal, and innovative, and I enjoyed it. It's hard to find much more to say about this title, so I'll leave it at that.

Nice game, very innovative and so meta ;)

This was a lot of fun! Very imaginative concept to combine chess and narrative. We were going to try and do dating sim and doom ourselves and ended up with more a narrative as well. Writing is definitely a huge undertaking that's easy to underestimate in these jams. Writing is only part of the struggle too.. hooking that up to a dialogue system then ends up being a huge pain too! Your entry ended up feeling very polished! With some audio I wouldn't have known it was a jam game while playing it.

Beautiful entry, clever and unique. I never would have thought of this but it was fun to play and the dialogue was really intriguing. Really, really well done, I enjoyed it the whole way through.

Nice writing and graphics. Audio would have been great to further improve the mood.
Having some more of the chess rules apply to make the gameplay more interesting. But it might not have fitted the narrative very well, i guess.
All in all the parts, that you put the most effort in were extremely high quality for a game jam. Solid entry

@markus Yes, one of the things that I regret I didn't use enough is the fact that all the pieces have a complete movement system implemented, I tried to exploit it making the player use different pieces instead of always the king, but I feel like that was not enough.

Doesn't really feel like I'm playing chess, more going up to pieces and stepping through dialogue choices :thinking:

i wish it was more complex, since it's a neat concept. I hoped that I would be able to actually make friends and do something with the pieces instead of just having them all disappear. The writing is pretty good, and I wish that each character had more dialogue (but that would take much more time of course). I also liked the sort of creepy surreal void everything was in, although it didn't totally fit the mood.

Good job!

Beautiful game. Definitely some audio would have been great, and a little more content wouldn't have hurt, but honestly as it stands I think it's a powerful and provocative experience :open_mouth:

I felt bad for Buck. I'm actually pretty impressed. I've always shied away from anything involving narrative. I was initially really confused during the first time when the pieces started vibrating moving on their own.

Since it went full meta, could have had the imagination tell me to move if I stared at the screen for half a minute like the dope I am.