Awesome game! Very original take on the theme, visuals are nice and elegant and once I've seen first darker emails, I knew I would have fun. And it definitely did not disappoint! Well done!
And interesting choice or platform! How do you like React? I am learning it myself and I am planning to remake my personal websites with it, and I very liked it so far.

I really liked this game and some of the emails were quite interesting.

Love the starting scene saying "invalid input is yes". Classic horror element of things going wild disregarding any type of resistance. XD

Did not get to remember an iconic specific person/object/lore in the first 3 emails. A slow start that is too slow for a horror/mysterious game. And wanted to ask why the "system" or something needed me to select the correct answer while it is able to judge if the word is correct.

Nice job! The input textbox is really a thing in building a mood, and making player think wildly. Great to see others also making narrative works.

Very unique and well made. Pacing could be better but it is super interesting

I love the writing, and the twist at the end! All the stories came together, and I had to confess. The fake answers were comical, though a bit too *obviously wrong*? I feel like the email about the medication perfected the formula, by requiring you to read further into the email to get the context before answering the early ones. Well- it would have if the other answers weren't "we're prescribing you 50 milligrams of human flesh." In any case, great work.

I recorded myself playing to provide maximum feedback:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbineG3l0QI

@100th-coin your video was super appreciated, and I totally agree with you when it comes to the answers being too different. I was trying to have them diverge as the game progressed, but jumped the gun a bit. Super appreciate your response!

Super clever. It's a testament to how thematically rich this idea is that I was constantly wondering about the many directions this could go in. There's a lot of potential here both for storytelling and puzzles. What if you had to make more difficult deductions to understand what word/phrase is missing (I agree with the previous commenter that the wrong answers are too obviously wrong)? What if there was story motivation to input incorrect or false information?

The typing was ever so slightly annoying but it's somewhat justified by the theme. Maybe the tokens don't have to be case-sensitive? I don't think I'd want to keep playing much longer as is.

Audio and visuals are minimal but super solid. The lightly strobing background is cool but can be a bit hard on the eyes. Maybe a toggle for that kind of effect in the future.

Overall, though, a really interesting and complete experience. Fantastic compo entry. I'd love to see something like this developed further with some really solid deductive puzzles and writing.

@pdotjpg Thanks for playing! Totally understand how that strobing effect can be hard on the eyes, and a post-jam build is on the way.

I can understand the typing being annoying, and I fought with the idea of case sensitive / smaller tokens / etc... In the future, I'll have the tokens in the message clickable to auto fill the chat box.

I'll definitely improve upon the difficulty of the responses in the post jam version. Thanks so much for the feedback!

+ It's a bit annoying to copy the code, if they were just numbered or a single letter it would be easier to type them in and wouldn't require getting away from the input console.
+ I read the first email but they were pretty long, and not very interesting, so I just filled in the boxes of the other ones, until the last 2 emails which were directed to the player. Those were nice.
+ I kind of liked that the answers were obvious, since selecting the wrong one only resulted in invalid input, I feel like if they were too hard I would just start guessing since it's not penalized, this way at least I got to feel smart since I didn't select the dumb answer. And they were quite easy to identify only after reading the email.

I loved this game!

The way the story is told and the twist at the end are so cool. I appreciate how the story starts to emerge from the very beginning with the 'wrong' answers, although I didn't realize until the last few emails that you could only choose the correct option, I tried my best to be a "good worker".

If I may give some feedback, I found the keywords being case-sensitive a little bit annoying after a few emails (Maybe it's me that I'm very slow at typing, I ended up copy-pasting them, haha). I wonder if making the keywords not case-sensitive or allowing players to copy the keywords from the chat when clicking on them would speed up the pacing.

A solid text driven game, It might be my favorite so far. Amazing work!

I can never tell with these Papers Please-esque games whether an unintuitive or frustrating design element is an oversight or intentional. Typing those long strings gets annoying, especially with how similar 1's and lower-case l's look. (Damn you, penny-pinching typewriter manufacturers!)

The twist at the end was clever! It was surreal thinking back on the previous emails and thinking how they fit together. But I did not confess because I can tell you they got the wrong guy. I happen to know with some certainty that I did not commit a hit and run. Although if I were really in such a situation, I would plead the fifth on advice of my lawyer. Not sure how you would fill in those blanks in that case, though.

Overall, I enjoyed! The gameplay is repetitive, but it doesn't outstay its welcome. And the revelation at the end makes it all worth it!

5* for mood.

Request future typing input games be less tiresome to type in. I probably failed about 30-40% of time, and the 1/l was really frustrating. Was that part of the idea?

Definitely a novel idea. I've not see any LD entries similar to this one. I don't know that I really saw the theme tie-in, though.

Very unique take on the theme. The mood was easily the best part of this one, I loved the dialogue and the twist towards the end - the humor was also good without disrupting the atmosphere (got a laugh out of me when it wasn't having any of my invalid inputs).

Most of all, I think it's an idea that has a lot of potential - the gameplay is pretty barebones which I think is perfectly fine for the purposes of a Ludum Dare entry, it's just interesting to think about how the "recovering emails" concept could be turned into a bigger puzzle/point-and-click kind of game.

My only complaint is that copying/pasting the broken messages over and over is pretty repetitive, though I suppose it helps reinforce the "sifting through emails" feeling. Very cool idea overall, never thought of doing a game with React before.

Love these kind of games. Pretty unique take on the theme. My only gripe was the confusion between "L" and "1", not sure whether it was on purpose or not. I also got the impression there was only one correct answer to each input but later I found it to be false. It left me wondering whether it was the case for the whole game, because there would have been quite a many interesting choices.

Good job!

Very clever game with good writing, although the typing got pretty annoying - don't get in the way of the player engaging with your game! The twist was neat, and the little sound effects did a lot to set the mood in a good way.

Very cool game. You told a really compelling story through a fun and unique experience. I've never felt so creeped out by emails before. Awesome job!

What a great idea, this was like doing an English test with a very tense storyline! The presentation is authentic and it's really well done. One might say that ending was predictable, but I didn't care, I was completely immersed! Well done!

Absolutely amazing! Even though it was a small game, it was a bit tense and even had me saying "Oh shit" once the answers started getting a bit more sinister. Well done!

typing in the codes really sucked. i wish you could just click on them or something. or they were otherwise more friendly for dyslexic people

Another +1 for clickable tokens - broke the immersion slightly to be copying and pasting with my mouse. I liked the concept a lot though. Great job!

Really neat game and excellent job with the writing!! As others have already mentioned I did struggle a bit with differentiating 1s/lowercase Ls which slowed me down but otherwise I didn't mind typing out the codes. Although it did take away some brain power that would have been spent thinking about the story.

One more thing, not sure if anyone else has mentioned it but thanks for sneaking in the content warning about references to violence, etc. into the intro. That was very thoughtful (or a happy accident if you just intended it as random intro dialog :smiley:)