Awesome concept! I really enjoyed the seemingly endless combinations. Very fun to play. Great work!

This is so so so so cool. Doing a story game like this is crazy unique and having to unlock different words is a really cool idea I can't believe you managed to balance a whole story around the progression of the words you get

very fun, super unique imo i was a little confused at the very beginning but when i realized how the mechanics work i was kind of astounded at how cool it was. the sound design was also super cool. good job!

I like this idea. And sound design is really suitable and good

Hey this was so cool. Incredible concept done incredibly well. Loved every second of it. Even when it got to the point where I ran out of things I could think of asking, I would use hints just to read more. Amazing work

sometimes i get sad at how underexplored language is in video games (which is quite strange given the dynamic and inherently playful nature of language) so your entry made me very happy =)
this game is basically a perfect execution of what it wants to be, on all fronts. really cool stuff.

This was a great concept, very engaging. The mood and minimalism are great

This is a really cool concept, and a lot of fun to explore! I know you probably had a tree as long as your arm to map out all the possibilities, but I'd have loved to see a few more snarky replies to the goofy combinations, if you decide to keep hacking on this.

Thanks for sharing your game!

Extremely well done concept. Definitely fits the theme of "depth" because there's a lot of it. However, couldn't reach a satisfying ending, even by continuing to use the "hint" over and over again after all words were found. The audio and simple visuals were great. Though, some combinations felt unnatural or not very obvious, which often I could only find by getting a hint. Otherwise, brilliant concept.

A really cool concept, and I really wanted to finally finish one of your games, but after using about four or five hints to get to 44/44 I just got stuck. Two more hints came, they led nowhere. I really tried, but I couldn't tell if this was going to lead to an actual ending or whether I was just collecting possible replies. I was engaged with the premise, the music set an unsettling tone, it was all good, but my meter ran out.

It felt like there were a few responses missing, most notably to:

1) Why did you do this?

2) What is the thought reconstruction? (After "The trap has already happened. Now begins the thought reconstruction.")

You jam games always feel like *entire* games. :laughing:

@flaterectomy If you managed to unlock all 44 words, you can consider that a victory condition. There really is no defined ending, you can just stop when you feel you have found what you wanted to find. I took a page from Her Story on that one. Then again, Her Story did have at least something that indicated that you found the main thing you were supposed to find. So in retrospect, I wish I had done something like that.

As for the missing responses, there were always going to be a few I didn't get. But I can't believe I missed "WHY DID YOU DO THIS?" The answer probably would have been similar to "WHY DID I DESERVE THIS?" so take that one for free. And try "WHAT IS THOUGHT RECONSTRUCTION" for the other one. The article THE tripped up playtesters and I'm still conflicted on whether I should have removed it. I did something similar with MY since it tripped up my first playtester when "WHO IS MOTHER" did not work.

Thanks for playing!

@hoichael There probably aren't more of them because dealing with the complexity of language isn't easy to do in code or game rules. Language is complex, messy, and most importantly, subjective. In contrast, code is rigid and works best when implementing simple and elegant systems.

Think about Scrabble. Just imagine how much collective time people on this earth have probably spent arguing whether a given word should be a legal play. My friend recently made a game that's basically Tic-Tac-Toe but with words. My winning strategy was to place Q's everywhere and force my opponent to figure out what five-letter word ends in "iak". (The answer was umiak.)

And that's just dealing with one comparatively simple question in language. "Is this a word?" If you want to move beyond to actually understanding semantic meaning and tonal intent, it gets way harder.

The main problem I wanted to avoid in this game was the old text adventure thing where you would type "look at cup" and it would say it doesn't understand because it wanted you to say "examine cup". But in my case, it turns out that restricting questions to a only being five words long and from a limited word bank was half of the solution. I used an LLM to help me find combinations I hadn't thought of. (Here is a list of words. Please arrange them into as many sentences as you can that are five words or less and are in the form of a question.) The other half of the solution was just being willing to write hundreds of responses to those combinations by hand. (I did not use the LLM for the actual writing, I promise.)

So any game that relies heavily on language is inevitable going to run into this problem and in order to even start making a game like this, you have to do something clever to prevent the possible combinations and consequences of the mechanics from getting out of hand. I hate to self-promote, but I think my Ludum Dare 55 game did some interesting things with language as well, if you want to check that out.

very cool concept, very well executed. I really like this take on the theme of depths. I had thought about the depths of consciousness but didn't know how to pull it off, this is awesome.

This is definitely the most innovative game i played this jam.
It's simple but intuitive.

This is an amazing game! The concept and atmosphere really stand out compared to others. Even though English isn't my native language, which made the game quite challenging to play, I still had a lot of fun.

I wanted to mention the lack of hints, unskippable animations, and occasional lag, but it turns out these are already noted in the game's description. Maybe it would be good to add an in-game button explaining these points, since this is important info and not everyone reads descriptions.

Btw I played via Chrome and performance was still low, refreshing the page helped.

Ok wow this was something else. I don't know what I was expecting going into it, but it sure was not this! This game is why I love game jams, it's so different and unique. Even though they are very different it still in some ways it reminded me of "Baba is You" (which is a huge compliment). I usually play a ton of games each Ludum Dare, after the Jam ends I remember a couple of them. This is a game that I will remember, it stands out from the crowd.

Fantastic entry!

I thought this was incredibly neat. The story was very good at hooking me in - the combination of the character you occupy having little information and you the player having few words to use to get information is compelling. I think I share that same feeling of having built tension not lead to a satisfying ending, which at least for me was subdued by the game's description outright declaring what to expect. The sound was great. I loved finding new responses where words with 5 or 6 ticks on them were included, knowing I had to dig to find a way to ask about it.

Kudos, this is one of my favorites.