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Night's Requiem's itch.io pageWhat is the name of your wolf/wolfess/wolves?
Ehrain Toleur
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What is the name of your wolf/wolfess/wolves?
Ehrain Toleur
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This was definitely one of the most unique entries for the game jam even though you withdrew to update it. The premise behind this intrigued me, but didn't do much else beyond that. I think that's fine though because you said that this should be considered a tech test and that (from what I understand) this is from further on in the story and not the beginning. I enjoyed the 3d models and how some of the scenes are done, and I don't know if it's just my computer not being able to keep up, but sometimes the models take a moment to change from their stances and you can see some of the props being loaded into the scene before they should be. Also the transition between the cutscene with what's going on inside of the MC's brain to the gameplay seemed to take a while to load. Anyways, I know how hard it is to get an ambitious project like this going so I think this is a good start! Can't wait to see how this develops!
'Night's Requiem' seems to be a prototype of a stealth adventure game with a somewhat avant-garde introduction. Something that I found fascinating was the use of a 3d video game engine to create the scenes, models and framing for a visual novel. I've seen it a few times, and it's always a nice way to really make it feel like watching frames from a film. I really enjoyed that one shot of the thoughts in the main girl's head as these sentences that appear in the space. It got a little goofy when the actions were a little bit stiff and jumpy, but that's just part of the charm I think.
That being said, the story in the intro is pretty tough to follow. The dialog doesn't feel natural (maybe cause this was translated from another language), but even then, the exchange of ideas for using the intro as an exposition of what the setting and the scenario is, was not very well communicated. Then once you get out of the intro, you can explore the area a little bit, and there's a neat camera angle change and a figure in the distance, making it feel like a mystery or objective in this game, but this is but a prototype so, not much else to do after that. The 3d model looks great for something made in the time frame, and the environment really evokes a vibe that follows the theme of 'a light in the dark'. If this continues production, I feel like you'll probably want to present more of a hook in the intro to engage the player in why they feel like they need to go exploring in the dark. Still, it's definitely one of the more unique entries into the game jam, and hopefully you're able to overcome the technical issues that plagued it's development.
Thanks for taking the time to play. For context, and this is something I need to make more explicit, this is basically just a tech test to see if I can learn how to use Unreal effectively and what tools I may be missing (and there are quite a lot). So the result sits awkwardly between presenting itself as something that's been polished, especially due to the exceptional work by the creative team, but it's really more like the vibes of a story. I'm focusing on checking if I have the technical skills and resources to hit the big beats of a full project.
That's not to say that your feedback isn't valued though! My style of writing is kinda like every other line has been deleted. But this picks up in Act 2 of an old plot outline, and without act one you don't have enough lines to read between! The feedback consistently says when I reboot this project after getting my feet under me with the tech, a re-write is required. I'm not surprised, but it's good to have consistent feedback for that. Act 1 would've made for an awful way to start a game, but Act 2 is an awful way to start a story.
I think there's still a risk after a rewrite that readers may need to hold too much context in their head. For example. if somebody takes a break and comes back 3 months later, they'll probably be completely lost. For the future I'll rollback the ambiguity across the board.
With regards to jerky motion: I think this is something I need to dig into a lot more because this is an implementation detail with the dialogue sequence code. I need to figure out a way to automate smoothing between poses. Fun fact: Right now, every character's jaws open and shut between every frame because Unreal's physics engine applies gravity to their mouths. I tried to hide that fact, but it's deeply funny when I don't because they look like sharks biting each other. I think there's some intersection between the frame rate of the level sequence and the frame rate of the physics code. But that's Unreal for you. An absolute bear of an engine.
Thanks again for taking the time to read. I'm sure the creative team will be happy to hear this feedback!
Alright man, so the way I'm doing these reviews is to go through each jam criterion one by one. I'd usually start from the top with "Implementation of Theme", but for this one I have to start with presentation since that really colors the rest of the categories.
Presentation:
I'm not entirely sure whether this is entirely the game's fault or if there's an issue on my end, but this game barely functions. Game loads up, there's no cursor, and the only way I can even get it started is by wildly wiggling my mouse around the screen until I hit the "Start Game" button basically on accident. From there, the only way I was able to advance the dialogue was by hitting Tab and then Space. Nothing else did anything, and the other buttons on the UI appeared to be inaccessible.
Throughout what I was able to see, there were weird issues with models being misshapen and distended, and after the cinematic sequence where Clerre is self-reflecting (which was cool!) I'm taken to a free roam area that looks very unfinished, in which Ehrain is just... T-posing? And where there doesn't seem to be anything to do or interact with. It looked like maybe I needed to go up a set of stairs and over a rock bridge to the giant flower thing, but I clipped right through the rock bridge and there was no way to get back to the other side. I dropped off the edge of the map to see if that would respawn me and that crashed the game to desktop. I'm honestly not even sure if that free-roam area was meant to be part of the game or if it was supposed to end after the cinematic sequence.
Like I said, maybe there are some local issues, but I run Unity games all the time with no problem, so I think there may be some major technical issues with the current build.
Story:
Couldn't follow it, to be honest. Part of that may be influenced by the technical issues, but I genuinely have no idea who these characters are or what they mean to each other. Store page says Ehrain was responsible for some kind of catastrophe, but I didn't get any of that other than one vague reference to a murder. Store page also says we're supposed to be in a ruined town, but from one angle it looks like the setting is a cave and from the other it looks like a generic factory or warehouse or something.
I can glean Clerre is an engineer (?) that likes math (?) and that Ehrain is not an engineer (?) and has scars (?) which Clerre does not find endearing (?). Some of the individual lines were wittily written but there really seems to be some connective tissue missing.
Implementation of Theme:
Well, there's a literal lantern in a literal dark area. So there's that. But as previously stated, I just don't understand what else is going on here to be able to see if there's additional metaphor going on or not.
Creativity:
I admire the ambition of using 3D models and going above and beyond to try to do something more complicated in Unity rather than putting together a standard Renpy VN, and the cinematic sequence I mentioned was really visually interesting. However, as discussed, the technical issues are really holding this one back at the moment. Would love to see a patched version of this to better understand the story and characters.
We had major, major issues cooking the build. Literally the last 5 days of the jam were spent trying to get basically anything to build at all. The control rigging uses an experimental feature that Unreal required an entire engine version upgrade. Today I basically started over to try and get this rolling again, and at the very least the rigging is broadly working. We'll get there, hope you can come back in a few days as I work these things out.
Well first, please ignore me for referring to your Unreal game as Unity twice in my comment... oof.
Otherwise, I get it - higher degree of difficulty means more issues especially on such a short timeframe. Glad to hear things are moving in the right direction and I will definitely check back in if you drop an updated build.
I'll be periodically dropping fixes and more features, with a major release including all the cut features by the end of next week.
Thanks for hearing me out, it's very embarrassing to release something in such a broken state, so I've been jumpy at explaining it. I'll be mindful of how I can improve the clarity of the story in upcoming releases. I do think Ehrein's very faithful slenderman impression obfuscates the story... a lot. But the way the characters are introduced isn't pulling through, I agree.
The game drops you into an adventure game like environment and I'm not sure that was intended--looks neat though in that it makes it feel like a play and you're looking behind the scene. Also Ehrain's rig/skeleton breaks frequently in very alarming ways.
The mood is lovely and you can feel that in the atmosphere. The rapport between the characters feels casual enough with something deeper beneath. The writing is clipped in a way that make following the progression difficult for me, Moments where there should be additional lines between them.
The sequence of inner-dialogue is very creative and especially well done.
Adventure segments (and more, actually) are fully implemented in a local build, but due to a bug in the Unreal engine I wasn't able to get anything to cook correctly until I upgraded it on Sunday. Soooo nothing loads. I'm glad that at the very least the end of the 1st sequence was impactful, as I really wanted to build towards that as a way to show off the tech. I hope in a few weeks I'll be able to look back on Ehrein's terrifying rigging as something to laugh about, but for now it really sucks.
I agree that the character introductions are weak. They're close, but too subtextual at the moment. Ideally the drop into the adventure segment would've allowed us to move past setting the tone and relationships into contextualizing the story, but as it stands I think I pushed exposition out too far and there's not enough balance.
With regards to the dialogue feeling clipped, I think I need to find a better balance between prose and leveraging the cinematic tech I have at my fingertips with Unreal. The path forward should be to use the cinematics to fill in those blanks. I think what's here is a good start, but it lacks the cinematic glue to hold it together.
I think you’re on a pretty good path, I see the building blocks there.
And it is quite a tightrope to write nuance into characters in a very short amount of time. Especially when trying to weave in subtext.
Despite the hitches from the engine, that sequence of thoughts I think is well earned and shows off your creativity, and it’s the thing I’ll remember most about your entry.