Now this is a type of game i absolutely love ... i cant deny i love this

will wait until tomorrow to finish this gameplay and be able to give a proper rating


I really like this game - it has the right mood and i feel the story behind it.
Good work :)

I like the story of this game. And the music is awesome!

This is just great. It can be a full game and with better writing it can be a good detective game

First of all your graphics a really good. Ambiance is here, intro is well done and UX is fit simple and clean. Spend really good time on it. Keep it up team !

I love this! The models are really gorgeous and it feels like a complete experience. My one suggestion would be to have the notebook appear automatically between dialogues, it can be a bit finnicky getting it to appear every time.

I, uh... may have a slight crush on your characters. Great game! Truly cinematic. I'd love to play a longer version with this artstyle!

Besides the control problem with the book, the only thing that left me furious was the time limit. I mean, probably it was necessary to create tension and make players do wise choices, but for me it's on 90% a guessing game. I am angry because I liked the aesthetics and writing a lot, and it was genuinely interesting to learn more about the plot, but the time limit kind of kept me from having it in my own tempo. Or maybe I'm just bad at that sort of games. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Really good mood, Love it, Love the art and Audio design too, very well made ! Solid Entry

Great mood. I agree about the notebook. It was a bit unnecessariliy hard to open and use.
Quite funny "What are we doing here? I don't know ..." :D

Thank you for playing, everyone! Thrilled to hear everyone's liking it!

@a333 Sorry to hear about the time limit being an issue. I did try to put hints in the writing where the player should steer towards, but I totally get that in a game like this, going off the beaten path is likely to happen. (Especially if the players don't necessarily know what path was worthwhile in the long run and what wasn't!) It's definitely something that will be kept in mind for future games of this genre. If nothing else, it definitely does help me appreciate that to design a game like this you definitely need more than 72 hours.

So, again, really sorry it hurt your experience.

@joe-wright @freso Thank you for the suggestions for the notebook. We'll look to improve it after the Jam!

Okay, this game is very very good! Great style choice and even cool camera movement at the beginning. Suitable music and a ton of lines of dialogue! I was confused when I started (because it was a strange conversation between two strangers)... but then the story picked up. I didn't go over it, but I realized there were several endings. Is that so? Amazing :)

Nice mood, mysterious intro, and nice story ! Beautiful story-based game ! :thumbsup:

the work, colour, lighting, gameplay, mood, animations, art, everything is 11/10 this is not even my style of game and you made me excited

this game is really nice, apart from the fact that losing is not obvious

@dwam no problem absolutely. Sorry for going rough on you, it's only because I loved the game so much =)

It's realy great game! I tried to complete it but I didn't it. May be I chose wrong words when I spoke with woman. But the mood in this game... I think, It's the best game in this jam. And your idea crossing by my idea that I didn't accept before the game-jam started. I hope, your game gets a high rating. Thank you!

This is great! I love the cinematic opening and how the characters are animated. It was exciting to play and see what I would learn from picking each word - I was expecting a straightforward noir-ish mystery, so the introduction of The Children was really cool. I got the normal ending, but I'm very curious about what other endings are possible, so I may have to come back and explore more.

Also, my favorite line that I saw was "Someone... saw me?" vs "Someone saw... me?" - I love it.

I really liked this game, art style is really amazing and the music fits very well. loved the detective feel of it all! great work

Love the idea, the setting, the story and the sounds! Probably one of the best games I played so far this jam :)

There's 2 endings total, right?

I like the graphics and animation style and the story. I followed it until the curfew set in. Lets see what the story reveals in another round. The notebook was a little hard to open, i would say.
I only had troubles with the noise when text was blended in, i actually had to turn the sound off.
But: All in all a very nice game! :) Good work!

This is the first game I gave 5 stars in all categories.

Amazing!

@zhanna There are 3 different endings- a bad, a normal, and a true. Thanks for the warm words :)

@raomer Thanks for the feedback! I was worried the text blips might be a bit much for some but was too strapped for time to tinker.

This is absolutely perfect - I love it I love it I love it. I will steal it, and make it my own. Mood, story, writing, setting, the whole shebang. And in 72 hours too! Polish it up a bit and throw it out on Steam, pronto!

great idea, i thought it was kinda slow, but still very interesting! Great job!

Very nicely put together. May definitely return to this to finish the story.
Only thing to wish for is a clear indication of how many hours one would need. 😁

@lars-erik Noted, thanks for your feedback! The 5:00 time limit is somewhat revealed by a branch in the story (and by the time on the clock at finish), but it's definitely not given to players outright, and can be easy to overlook if you're unaware that you'll run out of time. We more or less expected a second playthrough to be necessary, so we ultimately neglected to inform players.

Nonetheless, we hope you finish it!

Awesome game! The story is great and the dialog is well-written. I feel like this game needs some mechanic to make exploring the story quicker the more you already found (if only by having a skip button on options taken in a previous run) but outside of that, this game is amazing.

@nocity Thanks for the feedback! I don't disagree, I'll definitely look into a way to speed up the experience on repeat plays. Glad you enjoyed it!

Very nice!

Nice game, it seems well put together and I can tell thought was put into creating the artistic elements behind it.

Wonderful art direction here! The only oddity is that the horizontal pans in the intro end up looking a bit weird in some cases due to the lack of depth cues, while still having perspective. Adding some kind of shading effect can supply those cues (Something along the lines of cell shading could work) or possibly just tweaking the camera fov. That said, I don't know how many people even pick up on this, so it might be a non-issue.

Story wise the writing is solid. If I had to complain, as the player I don't have a good grasp on where things are going at first, and there aren't enough clues in the story to direct my choices in a meaningful way. Similarly, there doesn't appear to be any obvious cost to choosing poorly at first, so all of my first play-through decisions were made quite lightly. That said, I like the high level design, and if you're shooting for multiple attempts as the standard, this may actually be the correct choice (else players may fret over making poor choices and feel cheated when they run out of time)

Overall a really nice narrative game executed in a super creative way.

@fireslash Wow, thanks for the detailed feedback! The intro was done last minute, I would love to have tweaked it to no end. I suppose flat shading would be at risk of causing that no matter what, but by the time the models were finished they had some artifacts that made them look strange under cel shading (since they were sped through with flat shading in mind). I would love to go back and tweak the art, if for just the intro alone.

As for the story choices, that is more or less what we aimed for- a clear deadline would definitely alter the user experience. It might be possible to beef up the clues in the beginning, though.

Thanks for the feedback, again!

This is lovely! Really nailed the mood of the whole scene, so simple but well made, and the result is really powerful! Really great job all around!

I didn't finish it at the moment, can hopefully come back later, because I'm very intrigued and want to find out what it all is about!

My only grievance would be the interaction with the notepad, at times I thought it was a bit frustrating to navigate, mostly due to the response time, I would like it to feel snappier to bring up and interact with. But that's very minor nitpicking :slight_smile:

Thanks for a great submission!

One of the best game I played in this ludum dare, and is the first time I gave 5 stars in all categories. I'm impressed with this game. You guys did a really good job. Congratulations!
Would be nice if you port it to mobile!

That's quite a gem we have here! I am super amused you were able to pull it all off in just 72 hours! It's like we have nicely polished and finished product here i would be willing to buy on steam or switch for a dollar or two. Think about releasing it!!
The only issue i had was with slow reaction of notebook. Apart of that none. Time limit was a surprise, but a good one. Good game needs to have some kind of twist, introduce something new. The time limit and message made me realize I really was going in circles with picking unimportant threads. I just had to try one more time, to pick different ones. And there again to try picking only those i see lead somewhere. Actually i played 3 times ad still got bad ending, but I am determined to try again and get to the truth this time.
There is plenty of good game jam games, but very rarely you find a game you are willing to replay few times (and come back to it after a day or two) :o Congrats

That's a really cool entry, reminds me a bit of Phoenix Wright. That's a interesting take on the theme, graphics are good and so are the musics. Only got a bad end and I am running out of time to try it further, but it must have took you a lot of work to write those dialogues. Anyway, congratulations guys!

The writing in this game was fantastic. I actually played it several times because I was really invested in getting the true ending. I also really like the reduced color palette. It really tied back into the underlying narrative. A couple of comments on some general player experience. Because we always end up going back to the notepad for dialog choices, I feel like it should just pop back up right after the dialog, or at least pop up quicker when you mouse over it. It creates a lot of friction and doesn't really feel good when you have to mouse over it, then click and wait for the animation before you can proceed.

You've managed to create a very captive story, great job. During my playthrough I've got a strange bug several times: the game just quit to the main menu, without any ending screen at all. Besides that, the game is very polished and well made.

@jaydubbyasee Thanks for the feedback! We'll definitely look at tweaking the notepad, I think you're definitely onto something with it being automatic. We're glad you enjoyed it nonetheless!

@annie-owl That's very odd... we've gotten one other report of that issue but have yet to figure out how to replicate it. Thanks for letting us know!

Wow!! Super impressive, I'm really drawn in. I love the graphics, the concept, the story, everything. I only realized about halfway through that I was running out of time, so I need to play through again to get to the real ending. Also so impressed that only one person handled the art, audio, and coding. Kudos to the writer, too, none of the dialogue options were 'boring.' Really great take on the theme, too, since you really start with 'nothing!'

By the way, did you use any tool to handle the dialogue options, like Ink or Yarn? I'm slowly becoming fascinated with dialogue systems...

@chelc Happy to hear you enjoyed it! We didn't use anything of that sort, although @DWaM is very familiar with Twine and I'm sure we could have. DWaM wrote everything out in a screenplay-like text file, and then I wrote a parser to convert it into [Unity Dialogue System](https://github.com/ricgby/UnityDialogueSystem) components, which is a bare-bones setup that gave me a triggerable dialogue object as well as the typetext effect.
Unfortunately, it's not well documented and seemed to be oriented towards editor based input, which was way too much of a hassle for the amount of dialogue we had (which is why I ended up writing the parser and doing a lot of modification).

I'm definitely going to be getting familiar with Yarn before next time. I'm working on a story for a game that has branches and Twine seems like a great way to test and get a visual on the layout- not to mention it stores variables and things that I had to manually code in this jam.

Thanks for the kind words!

I don’t quite understand if my answers influence anything, but I really liked the game ^w^

It's most likely just my machine, but I struggle to run this on my browser right now, it's a shame since the aesthetics look damn solid and really play on the contrast of grey and orange, but it's hitting my ability to play the game, is there an executable I can download to see if it improves it any more?

Great gamplay and amazing art work. You also had a great audio and all in one package. When i played this game at night, I could picture myself being at that situation. Great concept BTW. Good work.

Wow, humming the aesthetics and the opening scenes, really nice! Not sure if it's suppose to go full-screen but wish it would. It's a shame there is a time limit on the story and asking the right questions but it seems intentional with the focus on the clock in the opening sequence and i don't mind giving it a second (or third) spin, it looks great and the story was just getting juicy. The music adds to the mood too, simple and not too noticeable in a loop. Awesome entry! Well Done!

@neonlare We just uploaded a binary at your request! Hope you get it running! (Unfortunately, because we designed it for WebGL, there's no exit button)

@ninjacatz Glad you liked it! You need to play through certain keywords to reach the normal and true endings, if that's what you mean by influence.

I loved this game so much. I loved the slow process of world building, the writing, the lighting...all of it. But I experienced a weird bug where when I confronted the mom about the truth the dialogue would keep restarting and the game wouldnt end. Thats really the only thing keeping this game from the top 5 of my LD45 games list.

@smileyface I'm worried what you came across was not a bug- if you try and use the "Truth" keyword before you have enough information gathered (i.e. certain keywords read through), the option is left open for you to return to once you collect more keywords. If the woman said "You know nothing", this is what happened, since "Truth" is the final keyword.

If I'm wrong though, let me know, that would be a fatal bug!
We're glad you enjoyed it up to that point!

Excellent art style and pretty cool story! The notebook was a bit "reluctant" to pop up and the conversation sound effects was slightly annoying, but well done on the rest!

@selkkie no it really was a bug....the conversation itself triggered about how she needs to give her son up and she ends up saying fuck off and walks out but the conversation would never end it would keep looping and wouldnt let the end game screen pop up

@smileyface Oof! Thanks for letting us know, then. Was this on the WebGL version or the desktop...?

@selkkie WebGL

Interesting take on the theme, starting with nothing as far as information goes. Great art, dialogue, and audio. Its a really cohesive entry, excellent work!

Well thats a very good detective style game. Not big fan of this type of mechanic, but i played until the game ends (which i lost, I am really bad into investigation hahaha) But i can say it was a very creative use of the theme and the dialogues are really great! Awesome job!!

Oh my goodness this game was amazing! I loved you guys' work so much, this really stood out to me as something special. I think this is even one of my favorite narrative games I've played recently. The mood was heavy, the game is so aware of its surroundings, and the characters are so dimensional (and then the story is too?). I can't believe this was a jam game :D Nice job! I'm so inspired, and I hope I can achieve something similar in the future ^ ^ [played if like 5 times and im still looking for the true ending xD I'll get to it someday I hope!]

first : loved the game, graphics are simple and cool, music correspond to the situation and I like the atmosphere of the scene (really cool intro too). The biggest point to this experience is actually what frustrated me, I wasn't prepared for sush a long game, the idea of making multiple run to get all the texts and explanations to dive into the lore was so cool but I lost my patience and in 2 run got the bad end. Also, making different camera angle over the advencement in the investigation would be a cheap and cool way to improve it (maybe making the nightfall too).

@inky Really glad you enjoyed it!! If it helps any, the only difference between the conditions for the true end and the conditions for the normal end is one additional word. I'm so happy to hear this inspired you, that's honestly the best thing I could ask for! :sob:

@morilia Thanks for the feedback! We definitely want to try and improve the repeat-play user experience in the future, starting with a speed-through-previously-read-dialogue function.
I would love to have had different camera angles, but ran short on time by the time the intro sequence was put together. Having the time outside progress to night was another idea I wanted to do, but there's never enough time for everything! Thanks again!

Great game! Reminds me of Aisle. I had some trouble with pulling up the notepad - maybe remove the exit times on your Animation Controller? Love the aesthetic and writing!

So, I spent the first few seconds clicking on the top image, thinking it's a title screen, before scrolling down and noticing the actual game area is below. ^^'

The game is definitely well-made and polished audiovisually; I was quite impressed with the intro, and the animation was pretty good as well, making the game livelier. Also, it has some good story behind it, as well as some nice bits of lore that become apparent through the investigation.

I played through it many times, eventually building up a tree of words that the game leads to, until I made sure I've found every dead-end word. And here comes a problem which I'll call "Phoenix Wright syndrome" - even knowing all the words, even having more or less complete picture of what the context is, who is the protagonist, the woman, the crime and the culprit, I still can't figure out which buttons to push to get a relevant answer from the "truth"*.

There seem to be two parallel goals - convincing the woman that you figured out the situation and gaining her trust. But based on the dialogue alone, I still can't tell with 100% certainty which of potentially useful-sounding leads are actually useful, and which are actually a waste of time. In Phoenix Wright, the barrier was picking the "just wright" piece of evidence from a bunch of sensible-looking ones (and sometimes picking the not-sensible sounding one), or suffering a penalty/quickload. Here, it's finding the right combination of many answers, or starting from the very beginning, with lots of guessing which leads are relevant.

Personally, with this many possibilities, I'd have the mechanically-useful information emphasized somehow. Granted, it'd make the gameplay more schematic - just note down the routes with important-marked dialogue and use them for the final showdown - but I don't think it's a bad thing.

For me, the appeal of this game comes from learning about the story and its context, as well the internal sense of figuring the story out. The challenge - external validation that I *did* figure it out - doesn't work so well. It relies on pinpointing the relevant leads solely based on a dialogue that puzzle-makers may find obvious but is often fuzzy for puzzle-solvers. On the other hand, explicitly important dialogue would make the challenge not as frustrating, while still keeping the internal figuring-things-out appeal - I mean, detective novels have no mechanically imposed challenge, but they can still give this kind of satisfaction.

Of course, that's my view on things, you may disagree with it.

From other things - sometimes the game would randomly restart. And by randomly I don't mean after the time runs out, but around the third or tenth question or so. It didn't happen for my first few playthroughs, but then got two situations like that in a row with questions I earlier got an answer to.

Overall, a well-made entry with a great story behind it. Sadly, because of the aforementioned Phoenix Wright syndrome and the combinatorial hell of all these words finding the Normal ending - let alone the True ending - is way too frustrating for me.

*incidentally, on my graph "truth" is spelled in a distinct rectangular box, and with a badly-drawn homunculus next to that

@alphish Thanks for playing!

I definitely agree that the more the game is replayed, the harder and harder it gets to try and make out what the game might be asking of the player. As I mentioned in another post, I did try to add clues in the dialogue itself to help steer the player in the right direction, but given the amount of people ultimately stuck, I'd say they were either not strong enough, or just in paths the players never ended up taking, anyway.

It's definitely something that's harder to plan and design around than I initially believed. Unfortunately, at a point in time with 50 topics, 1200-something lines of dialogue, and the timespan between having it be playable and submitting being so short, it was not something we could dedicate ourselves to. Especially since things like this are fine-tuned based on other players' experience which we also didn't really have at the time.

So, for future updates, I think it might be more worthwhile to ease up on or just flat-out get rid of the time limit. We'll see. I'm afraid I'm not really in favor of the suggestion of highlighting which leads might be of the player's interest, simply because the players are likely to just focus on those and not bother with the other conversation topics.

The bug with being booted out to the intro is a strange one. You're not the only one to bring it up. At the moment, though, we're not really sure what's causing it. Definitely something we'll try looking into down the line.

Overall, thanks for the feedback! I'm hoping the frustration didn't ruin the whole experience for you.

@dwam Thanks for your reply. I understand that under Jam conditions, making the game alone is a challenging task, let alone running the playtesting rounds.

> I’m afraid I’m not really in favor of the suggestion of highlighting which leads might be of the player’s interest, simply because the players are likely to just focus on those and not bother with the other conversation topics.

Just for clarification, the highlights system as I imagined would be at the dialogue level (e.g. by having relevant piece of dialogue shinier or in a different colour, but orange is already taken by the keywords), not the words list level. The player wouldn't know whether the word is useful *before* clicking it - they would still need to explore it and read carefully to spot the "shiny" dialogue. So the player still needs to explore every single word, because they wouldn't be able to tell in advance which words they should focus on.

That said, getting rid of the time limit is also an option. I just wanted to reassure you that the highlight system can be executed without the negative side effect you mentioned (also, the time limit is nicely integrated in the game with the curfew, so I wouldn't be too eager to remove it altogether).

As for the frustration - as long as I eventually get to play a version where I can get the endings without semi-blind guessworking, I should be fine (so please keep me updated). ^_^

I like the cinematic scene transition and the story. Such a nice stylized detective game! Also, a good theme interpretation. Music made the game much more deeper and the mood is kept nicely. I liked the mechanism of cutting the word on the notepad. Overall, this is such a solid entry.

This game catch you from the very beginning with this atmosphere and why there is an interragation. Pretty effective graphics and audio, really into it with those dialogue good job !

Nice game with a deep story behind. Well done with the graphics and music. The only thing that bothered me was that the clicking-typewriting sfx was a little bit loud for my ears.

Awesome graphics and mood! Really enjoyed the story and the dialogues. Only little concern was with opening the notebook but otherwise a pretty flawless entry in my book. Awesome job!

As a fan of story-based games, this enthralled me. I played through twice and got the bad ending both times, but watching the plot and backstory slowly unravel before my eyes was captivating. I learned a lot about the world in the second playthrough that I hadn't expected based on my first playthrough. The limited colour palette and minimalist piano music really help sell the atmosphere.

In terms of criticism, I agree with what's already been said. Figuring out what's going on isn't too difficult - obviously I'm not going to give it away, though. But figuring out the exact path to take to get to the "truth" that I already actually know - or at least, I *think* I know - feels a bit like guesswork. I'm sure if I played through a couple more times, I could get a clearer picture of which leads are important and which aren't, and grasp my way towards the correct route.

But having to get a "game over" repeatedly in order to figure out the correct route... I'm sorry, but I have to say, it feels like bad game design. Especially if the correct route is *exactly* as long as the time until curfew (about 24 questions), and there's absolutely zero leeway. It's fine if you have to "game over" repeatedly in order to see all the different dialogues and get all the world-building information, but actually winning the game shouldn't be this hard to fathom.

I do like the idea of the curfew, though, especially how it's presented as part of the game world. As soon as I noticed the clock moving after every question, I knew there was going to be a time limit. Without it, you'd be able to beat the game by just methodically clicking every dialogue option, so it does press you to try and make the right choices instead of just "let's see what this one does". I just think it's too strict.

I also agree with those who said the notebook was too hard to open. On more than one occasion, I tried to open it and accidentally clicked a dialogue option instead. I don't see why you couldn't just make it pop up automatically after each dialogue ends. I also experienced the same restart issue as @alphish, just after completing the "name" dialogue - so I hope that one isn't compulsory!

I think I've sounded a bit negative here, so let me just reiterate: this is a fantastic entry with an engaging storyline, and definitely one of the most gripping Ludum Dare entries I've ever played. You should be proud of yourselves for developing such an excellent story. There just needs to be an easier or more intuitive way to get to the normal and good endings (or to know what you have to do to get them). At the very least, consider releasing a flowchart of how to get each ending after the jam is over?

...wow, I don't think I've written an LD review this long before. I think that in itself is a sign of how much I enjoyed this. Well done!

I liked a lot this game. 1st the graphics look amazing. The art style is perfect and a very good choice for a detective game. The environment is really good and the animations are amazing. I have a question are you animatin a 3D object or is that a 2d object with very fluid animation. In any of the cases, what software did you use? Congrats your game is awesome.

@f1krazy Wow, thanks for the detailed feedback! At this point, we have a list of things to work on that have been ingrained into our skull. These are all things that would have come forth in normal game development with beta testers, but we didn't have the time to beta test to know what worked and what needed improvement until now. In effect, jam participants are our beta testers- so I'm glad you're being as critical as you are.

We should have made the dialogue pop up automatically for sure, and fishing for the correct answer is clearly a problem - but we couldn't foresee either of these, because when we tested the game ourselves, we already knew the answers and were only looking for things that shouldn't happen. It's hard to be objective about crafting user experiences when you have nobody to show, because you can't see what doesn't work until it's in the hands of someone else.
As for the restart bug, we've had trouble replicating it to even begin fixing it, unfortunately, since it seems to happen at random. I'll have a look at it again today.

The flow chart is a really good idea (or at least some sort of walkthrough)! We may look at doing that even now before it's over, considering that there are a good handful of players struggling with getting to the endings.

Thank you again for the detailed feedback, I appreciate you taking the time to do so, and I'm very glad you enjoyed it regardless!




@pedro-rosa Thanks for the kind words, really glad you liked the art! The characters are 3D with unlit shaders. I use Blender to model and animate.

@f1krazy @alphish @inky I've added a flowchart that shows the words necessary to get the True End and the Normal End, if you're still hoping to see those endings! It's available [here](https://dwam.itch.io/the-firebrand/devlog/104357/the-firebrand-flowchart-guide-walkthrough).
(Thanks again for the great feedback!)

This had me absolutely hooked.
The writing is great, and the mechanic of the words on the notebook works extremely well.
Clicking on the notebook sometimes didn't work for me, not sure why.
I had no idea about the time limit or why the game sudenly reverted to the main menu mid-sentence
Would love to see you keep working on this, I'm gonna play again to try to get to the ending.

Ended with the bad ending, will keep playing. It is a little annoying having to start all over from the beginning, at least you can somewhat skip the dialogue on later tries. This has amazing mood and artwork and audio.

@selkkie Thanks a lot for the flowchart, it's tremendously useful. Of course, I'd have preferred if the game itself was more clear about the right answer (there are quite a few nodes that explain part of the truth while not being mechanically relevant, e.g. "school"), but I'm glad I got to see the endings, anyway. ^^

Music and vibe is great! Really well done story based game :) We also did a narrative game, so I'm impressed with how many branches you had...did you use Twine? Something else? Nice work!

@catie-jo We did not, although it probably would have saved us some time! I had to write a custom parser to convert the screenplay-like text file into (https://github.com/ricgby/UnityDialogueSystem) components, and then do a good chunk of modification from there. I definitely want to try out Yarn and Ink before next jam if we end up doing something story heavy again!

NARRATION ~

So, at first I was like "hey that's pretty cool". The art was amazing, the music felt right in place.

But then, fairly quickly I became bored. I thought to myself: "Begining out from nothing is good, when you make something out of it" and I was frustrated because it really seemed to me that we were going nowhere and it was just another badly-written conversationnal simulator. The dialogues felt out of place and unrelated.

I was hooked because I thought it would be an investigation stuff (Phoenix Wright syle) but it was more of a conversation to unfold thoughts of characters.And because I didn't relate to the characters emotionnaly, because I didn't know nothing about them, those thoughts felt very cliché and useless for the investigation.

However, by chance, pieces began slowly to put themselves together. Really slowly. But enough to catch my attention. It was merely when, digging my character's backstory about his nickname, I stumpled across a key-word that seemed out of the blue but led me to useful and meaningful informations about the case. That was brilliant.

After that, I felt emotionnaly more attached to the story and -some of- the philosophical thoughts felt great. But too much of them was really anoying at last.

So yeah, felt nice, at last. But there is waaaay too much text (and useless ones). Hence, the end felt unfair when I digged not enough informations. Punishing the player for not reading ALL the possible key-word with a bad end is, in my opinion, brutal and not cool. Don't get me wrong, it's justified, lore-wise, but unfair gameplay wise. I felt it was really too much.

About the story, also, that sci-fi thing with the powers felt so out of the blue.

Sometimes, less is better. There is, in your game, a very subtle and distant feel of Kafka's The Trial. And that's super nice to see, and you could have digged that way instead of doing "like everyone" and throwing inside sci-fi elements at random ...

Finally, even if it's something very little, when there's this much text, making some kind of change here and there in the situation and/or gameplay help A LOT not getting bored: music change, environment change, a character gets up and looks at the window. It's small details but they make the player breathe.

OTHER ~

Gameplay-wise, we could use: accelerate dialogues by clicking, doing dialogues twice.

About art: awesome, really hooked me instantly. The animations were really great.

The music is a bit repetitive but fits well the atmosphere :)

PS:

Yeah, just a little edit to say that your game is a very good game and especially for a jam. I juged it as a real game moment/scene, that's why I sounded so harsch maybe. But as F1krazy said, be proud of yourselves. Creating and unfolding a story is not an easy thing and, for smtg made in 48-72h, it's very very good and prolific. Well done.

Cool interactive fiction with great writing and presentation.

At first I was not sure if I should cross the words I wanted to use or the words I wanted to discard. But once I got the game idea and flow it was quite intriguing and curious. Great work, good job!

The starting of the game got me hooked to it. The way the game started especially with that music is just amazing. Core mechanics is nice, it slightly goes with the theme as you start with the word "Nothing" but its funny and I liked it. The game play is very slow so it kinda gets annoying but overall its a fun. Good work! :smile:

The initial cutscene should be skippable, it is a bit long and just showing it the first time is enough. Also sometimes the game resets by itself.

Criminal UK, videogame edition :)
Bit slow of a game, but interrogation are :) Nice experience

People who do not know English have no fun. It's hard to proceed if you don't know English. That's why I'm sad.

Very impressive! Great writing and I love the visuals too!

The notebook should probably open automatically, since clicking it is the only thing you can do at that point.

Very simple setting but great art style! Straight forward concept to drive conversation, definitely was fun to be able to choose the interactions.

@pl4typus Thank you for the detailed feedback!

The story was designed *around* the powers, they weren't randomly "thrown in"- the original concept (and the entire reason this story manifested) came from the theme. Our idea of starting with nothing initially *was* the powers- and specifically pyrokinesis- starting fire from nothing. Originally I think we would have done a story focusing on one of what became the Children. Obviously, once the concept solidified itself as a mystery, we figured a detective starting with nothing to warrant arrest was very fitting, so we went down that line.

As for the extra details, as with any game jam, we were too strapped for time to add that sort of polish. There was a point when I didn't even think we'd get any idling animation, and the intro was done up until the last minute. I would loved to have used animation, angles and cutscenes more prominently.

Excellent detective game!
The graphics really suited the style of the game and the music was nice!
The gameplay with the questions and the notepad with keywords was very well done (personally I would have preferred for the notepad to always be visible (plus the click area for it to popup up was small) but that is nitpicking :smile:
And it also fitted nicely with this LD theme!
An excellent entry worthy of high ratings! :smile:

I love almost every aspect of this game - graphics, work with camera, writing, characters and music. Great work!

Love the graphics. The number of logic trees is awesome. very nice.

Loved it. Splendidly done.

Holy crap that was amazing! I played through for all the different endings (well at least the two + running out of time). I really appreciated the guide. I will say that the time I lost I was a bit confused because there was no great indication that it was why I lost, I thought I picked the wrong word or something and that restarted the game. The other issue I had was getting the notepad to popup, sometimes it wouldn't register the click, and other times I would click on it twice. Maybe make it so it always appears after a dialogue session (since there isn't anything else you can do at that point), or speed up the animation.

Getting into the actual contents of the game, it's absolutely phenomenal! The art style, the shaders, the characters, the audio, and most of all the story. The pacing and slow reveal of the story through the interrogation was incredible, and I actually found myself super engaged. The dialogue flowed really well, and I really am interested in seeing more of this world you built. I wasn't sure it was possible to make something like this in such a short time, but you pulled it off. I also loved the interpretation of the theme, very creative. I can't really add much more here aside from I'd really love to see more of this, either this style of game or the world, so keep up the great work!

@selkkie Thanks to the flowchart, I just went back and got the Normal and True endings and... wow. Even more twists that I didn't see coming. This is a phenomenal piece of storytelling and I hope it ranks highly in the final results <3

This is very well done. Writing's good, sfx sound fitting, music is good and does not feel repetitive and the visual don't distract from the experience.

@selkkie IT IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! The writing is so compelling. The SFX sets the mood amazingly well, the models, the font, text panel, every visual is amazing. FANTASTIC submission! congratulations, I also hope you rank highly!

As for constructive feedback (and i might be the only one to think so), the notebook is a little bit hard to click and the "next text" sfx is a little bit too high and/or loud!

Nice visual story! Writing is truly amazing! It kept me hooked! I like also the atmosphere and the graphics of the game. You kept it simple but very consistent which I think is very important to get you in the mood of the game. The high pitched sound of the text is making my ears hurt a bit :P I played it twice.. but on the second time when I asked about "danny" the game went to main menu.. is this a bug?

Great game. I included it in my Ludum Dare 45 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/oyFtoUSqXW8