Refugees of Oblivion by arzi
Bless Nalakh! You have found shelter! It is now up to you to offer sanctuary for the other survivors in these mysterious ruins.
Explore the ruins and offer shelter for survivors, but the wounds of the War have not healed, so be careful who you accomodate together, or the rising tension might lead to destruction.
Goal: Explore 10 rooms to win the game.
Instructions:
- Choose where to accomodate the incoming survivors. Differing opinions raise tension in the room and can cause the destruction of the room and it's inhabitants.
- Click on an explored room (lighter colour) to place a survivor.
- Click on darker coloured rooms to explore them.
- All survivors consume food, but only some produce it.
- Exploring rooms requires Soul Dust. The survivors who do not produce food, produce Soul Dust.
- You are free to dismiss as many incomers as you wish.
Hints
- Tension builds up quick, if you place people with differing opinions in the same room.
- The food production is in balance when the game begins, so feel free to dismiss as many of the first survivors as you need before finding a good fit.
Notes
I really struggled with the theme and went through three different concepts before settling on this one. I wasn't even going to submit at first, but then the atmosphere of the game started to grow on me, and I decided to finish and upload it even if it wasn't that much abiding to the theme. I finally got something remotely playable around an hour before the deadline for the combo, so things are a bit rough on the edges, and there's no real onboarding. I hope you like it, nevertheless!
Watabou's Sigil Generator (https://watabou.itch.io/sigil-generator) was a life saver!
Ratings
| Overall | 716th | 3.417⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 683th | 3.293⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 168th | 3.897⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 314th | 4⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 750th | 3.293⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 851th | 2.22⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 148th | 4.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
The fact that food and soul dust are variable per person means that you really just want to ignore all the arrivals that don't have max stat in this because it just makes it harder to accept good arrivals later if you don't. It makes the game mostly about waiting for good colonists.
I think the game could be more fun if all migrants gave max food or soul dust but you couldn't reject them but had to shove them in somewhere. You would need some way to mitigate the rng aspect then like maybe moving people around or room upgrades. Also I really wanted the adjacency of the rooms to matter somehow, maybe it does but it's not visible. I feel like making the beliefs integers instead of floats would make it easier to reason about them and make it more fun.
Anyway the core idea was fun but needed some extra development.
Also I wanted to zoom in and see the cultists a bit closer.
I would love to see a refined version of this. Oh, the possibilities! :smiley:
The visuals are quite small, as the window cannot be resized.
I think it's a very interesting foundation. Even though it's a bit complicated in the beginning, I had fun playing it.
Looked for the most 'valuable' survivors who produced the most and therefore could help me attain the arbitrary goal of 10 rooms... there are some capitalistic undertones here despite the tribal theme. It's a thinker :)
I would have liked it to be a bit more zoomed in because I was almost squinting!
@hierarch Thanks for the detailed feedback! You're right that the game becomes just about waiting for good colonists easily, but I decided it's better to have it too easy than too hard, and just didn't have time to balance it any better.
The adjacency doesn't matter but it definitely should!
Also you really don't want to see the cultists any closer :sweat_smile:
Though I was thinking of making them walk around etc in the future, but as of yet I'm not sure if that's worth the trouble or not. On the other hand, the abstract nature does lend to the more mysterious atmosphere.
Having some numbers popup from rooms for example could push the need for grind a little more :smiley:
Overall, really well laid ! :clap:
Also, tension counter makes useless characters opinions, you just click on all the spots and choose one, there's less tension.
There's a dense atmosphere and i enjoyed playing, so thanks :)
On the first run, I ended up killing everyone or something :smile:
Second try got further, opened some new tiles and killed everyone on hunger :laughing:
Third time I notice the text about the tension will grow or so. Again run out of food. I see you get some food when you bring people in, but it still goes down.
next tries I keep running out of food.
Then I start dismissing some people who don't bring food to the table :smile:
Can't put anyone in a tile that has people died. destruction is brutal.
Then I start to get it more balanced. slow steady increase of food and soul dust. Waiting for that dust to rise. It's like spice of life in some worlds they say!
music has some mystique in it, atmosphere is spot on.
Propechy of Nalakh has been fulfilled. Thanks for making it!
I read you made this fast. So I'm not harsh on the details. It's interesting, I wonder how could you improve on this where this game could go next?
Unfortunately the gameplay itself is a little flat which is a shame, it's mostly just picking the right room repeatedly and the tooltip telling you how tension will grow takes away any thinking anyway, which is a shame.
Really interesting concept and executed pretty well, just needs more depth. I really like it despite the gameplay problems!
Great work!