I am so amazed by the complexity of this VN and the use of it's abstract world in combination with the puzzles and mazes, I also like those distortion effects with the ghost and the name of the roommate, the movement mechanics confused me somewhat at first but then I understood around the 2nd maze, I'm incredibly impressed with the room changes and changes in cardinal directions, and that puzzle where you have to move the rooms next omg the changing of the bg in real time, loved that a lot, also hold on I just noticed that the name of the Wolf love interest is "That's a spoiler"
"I sounded annoyed, you sounded annoyed." I liked this line
This conflict of the afterlife is not one I often see. Being in an in-between, deciding whether wanting to go back or pass on with puzzles and challenges trying to reform memories, actually I think that's a thing in media but this is a creative spin on it, I love the designs of each of the characters and the secret was a neat addition, I wonder if there is a true ending where you finish all the puzzles because I do not understand the one puzzle with "WWWSNWWS" I feel like I was at the end there but I can't run back and try again, or maybe I can. Also like the morally gray best friend, was about to antagonize him, but I was like "Ok, you make fair points, but also, no"
I enjoy that the final choice is not choice boxes rather, a text box, and I found options like staying there and possibly unionizing eternity or myself, believe in the power of the self, I wonder if there are more
Yooooo Adastra crossover whattt

Overall I quite liked this game a lot, the writing was good, the use of Renpy to make a sliding puzzle game is impressive and stands out from other entries, I maybe wish the movement buttons were a little bigger so I resorted to using arrow keys instead, a lot of good qualities!

This jam entry stands out a lot with the implementation of the puzzles. There were some twists and turns in the story as I perceived it as the memory fragments went on, and it was done in a way that I didn’t feel was cheap. I’d thought from the opening that the sleeping pills were on purpose, and that Gabe had died from suicide. I was right on the death part (sort of), but it turned out that he took a normal amount of sleeping pills, which presented another question of “but then how/why did he die?” The picture of them at the hospital was after the accident, but it’s not the one Gabe recovered from his physical injuries at, which is the more obvious conclusion to arrive at. But it never said that that was the case.

When I got through to the end, I thought I was supposed to have divined the wolf’s name from some hint in the text, and then was glad when “life/my wolf” worked to choose that option. I like that there are a bunch of things that work there, including Atma as a kind of “third option”, even if it doesn’t end up producing an ending.

The two obvious endings weren’t wholly satisfactory, and after going through some jam comments, I found out that the wolf’s name was the way to get to the secret ending. I also had some questions about the plot that were left unanswered.

So I went back to look at the memories to find some hints that may have been there. But it wasn’t easy to look at the memories, because I needed to do all the mazes again. I hadn’t saved on all the memories because it hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to if I wanted to view them again without doing the entire game again. But I had my hand-drawn maps out in front of me, so I did. I found that by squinting hard enough at the glitchy text, I was able to see what was hidden there. Except for the wolf’s name. I spent a lot of time looking at the wolf’s name trying to see what it was supposed to say, since the other glitchy text works when you do that, but I wasn’t getting a name (I was getting a headache), so I stopped.

I pieced together the story from all the memories on a second run, and it was satisfying for me to put the plot together. Gabe’s mom really going through it after her friend died made more sense in the context of Dorian’s death. I thought that he and the wolf were at a gay bar, and that was what they were talking about that was glitched out, but it turned out that it was about being in rehab. It was nice to glean additional meaning from a repeat reading. Doing the puzzles all over again was not as nice.

While I had pieced together most of the plot that’s explained in the third ending (the big thing I didn’t get was Dorian’s motivation, which doesn’t show up much elsewhere in the game), I hadn’t gotten closer to the wolf’s name. I thought I was getting taunted when the glitch text letter came up because it wasn’t a consistent letter. I had written down several that it was switching between. I later found in the game’s code that it was supposed to be an M.

I had also thought that the highlighted N in one of the maze’s was an instruction to investigate the panel in the centre of the room. I must have messed up the order the first time, because it didn’t work, then I thought to investigate the panel at that point in the sequence and it did work, so it wasn’t on my radar as much when it came to being a name clue (I found this out from the jam comments). I didn’t find any of the other letters (including the glitchy M), and at that point was tired of looking.

The third ending, when I got to it by opening up the game files and looking for the wolf’s name as Fuze did, let me see the rest of the CGs, but mostly told me things I had already pieced together. I think it’s much easier to piece together the plot than the name. I was expecting more emotion out of that ending, for Gabe and the wolf to have more of a sweet reunion (especially since the other endings don’t have that), but it was mostly recounting the events of the plot.

I spent a lot of time on the puzzles and the maze. Way more of my time was spent on puzzle than text, and while I didn’t find the puzzles generally unpleasant (I felt some challenge and accomplishment, and skipped nothing on my initial playthrough), I was more there for the story than the puzzle.

About the puzzles. The controls were hard to get used to. The maze kind of reminded me of Etrian Odyssey, but in the ones that I played, you could rotate your camera without moving between tiles (I think), and I was having a hard time understanding what it did when you pressed the back arrow. I found the room numbering unhelpful (I initially missed the numbering because I had picked the option to not have them, and then found that I couldn’t scroll back. I then restarted the game.), and opted to not use that feature. All of the maze corridors looking the same also added difficulty, though I expect this was due to the game jam time contraint. It’s still a feat of programming that you were able to code this all.

I don’t have a problem with sliding puzzles. I know some of the tricks to solving them. It’s just that there was a lot of sliding going on, and the blocks slid too slowly for my liking, particularly on the main menu. I think that one’s probably a programming thing to do with the size of the puzzle pieces. (I’d also like to say that I did that puzzle first thing on opening the game and was frustrated when I wasn’t able to view the secrets, and when I had to do it again after finishing the game, and when I wanted to look back at the secrets when I was looking for name clues.). The CGs are nice. They were also done well regarding the ability to put them together as a puzzle. I can only think of two tiles in the bar CG’s background lights where it’s ambiguous as to what could go where.

The music is calming for the puzzles and mazes, which I think is good because it helps people not feel too frustrated as they’re going through them. I was pleasantly surprised when the music changed after I had advanced a maze. My two gripes are that the calm sliding puzzle music doesn’t always fit the urgency/seriousness of the scene around it (the maze music becomes more intense when you approach the end) and that the piano music for the wolf’s ghostly appearances is not the most suited to the short length of time these appearances are. It’s a very sentimental track, and hearing it come on for only a few lines before we’re back to the maze (and so frequently) makes me feel like the game is trying too hard to make me feel something instead of letting the text carry the emotion.

I liked Gabe as a player character. His sass towards Atma and the general situation he finds himself in is entertaining, and his “solve the puzzle for me!” lines are funny and can lighten the mood for players who are feeling down about the tile puzzles. His sprite in the corner is cute and expressive.

The wolf and Gabe’s family are… fine? They serve their purpose in the plot. I would’ve liked to have seen more scenes where Gabe and his wolf are getting along better, since a big part of the third ending is that they’re happy because they’re together again, but so much of the memories are negative ones.

I think Dorian could use some more fleshing out. It was hard for me to understand the particular loopholes he was taking advantage of, and how he had turned from someone who fought for justice in life to what amounts to the main villain in the story. His motivation to try to save people is there, but the memory-erasing is such a huge step towards evil that I’m still left scratching my head about it. He protested for civil rights during his life, but then in death he spends his time blackmailing people/taking advantage of strange and exploitable systems to enforce his will on his friends? I can believe the whole maze afterlife thing, but Dorian’s exploitation of the system (and the system being so exploitable) is a harder thing to buy.

So, disclaimer, I haven't actually played the game, I've only watched a playthrough of this game through a Discord stream, so I'm going by what I've seen.

This is definitely a big coding feat, it must have been a lot of effort making an effort coding all this in Ren'Py so props to that. Now, when I first saw the first two levels being played through, I was like "Oh, this looks fun. I enjoy puzzles more than the average gamer. This looks right up my alley." And then I saw the third and fourth maze, and I was like "Oh my God, how the hell is any sane person supposed to figure this out by themselves?" I think the puzzles in this game are a bit too complicated for a game made for a non-puzzle-oriented jam. I especially think the method of getting the true ending normally is too cryptic for most people. I get it because it's hard to make a good puzzle game, and this one definitely made a good effort, but flew too close to the sun in some areas.

As for the story, it's alright. I like Gabriel; he's a pretty peppy guy in a strange situation. The memories were also neat vignettes, and the true ending was sweet. Unfortunately, the characters aren't that memorable or well-developed, which might be because the focus is on the puzzle sections. The CGs for the sliding puzzle look good, and the music selection is decent. Sorry if this is a bit disconnected, but it's hard to collect my thoughts for this game. Overall there were some good ideas in here, and while some of them fell flat, you certainly did a good job regardless.

I can see the vision, but I’m not sure about the execution. It’s great that you gamified the VN. I’m all for it. The idea of including an interactive section is good to add a new engaging experience. If you play it right, it will make the VN more immersive.

You took the gamble on putting so many mechanics, but I’m afraid they don’t all land where they should be. The concept of navigating a maze and piecing together memories marries well, but boy I had such a hard time, it wasn’t fun anymore. The ever-changing orientation of the compass (and everything) was very disorienting. It took away the experience instead of adding to it. Further, I don’t know if it’s an oversight, but it seems like skipping the maze skips the entire memories altogether? I don’t think that’s a good idea if the bits are integral to the whole story. After all, first and foremost, it’s a novel.

As a reader, I think I should spend more time digesting the story, getting immersed in the characters’ emotions, but instead, most of my energy is spent on trying to progress. Felt like Dark Souls but VN, except people actually expect and like got beaten to death playing DS, and, y’know, read when playing VN. Maybe the experience could be remedied by having thicker slices of the story, including the memory bits. That way it could feel more rewarding. The writing could also use some refining, making it less blunt. For some reason, even getting the true ending did not excite me that much since the struggle to solve the puzzle and figuring out the wolf’s name upset the experience.

Really appreciate the ambition to tell the story beyond the words, but alas it’s not perfect. The whole concept and plotline are cool. I can see the effort put into the project. Despite the flaws, it’s still a job well done.

This was technologically impressive first and foremost.  I can’t imagine what goes into making a maze-like puzzle or the sliding pieces that form a picture.  I got Apathesis flashbacks from last years’ jam with this entry, even though it’s mechanically different.  Thankfully, you have the option for the puzzles to be solved automatically with the tradeoff of losing some of the context of the story in order to progress.  

The maze reminded me a bit of the one in FFVIII when acquiring the Brothers’ GF, if I recall correctly (it’s been nearly 25 years since I watched my college roommate play it, so my memory’s a bit fuzzy).  While I do find the mechanic interesting, I’m not good at navigating these types of games myself, and while the option to skip is quite welcome, the penalty of missing out on chunks of the story is a bit steep in a game that is, first and foremost, intended to be a visual novel.  

That doesn’t mean there should be no penalty, though… having an alternate “perfect” ending I think would be a good compromise.  Still, I enjoy your creativity and ambitiousness in both this and your NovemBEAR entry, and look forward to seeing what comes next from you!

I thought the puzzles were cool but the maze was a bit disorienting.

Unfortunately, I had a pretty difficult time getting into this one. The sliding tile puzzles were all good, but the main game mechanic involving navigating a maze proved frustrating in all the wrong ways.

Not being a space the player can navigate by controlling the character directly only ever felt like a limitation of the engine, not a meaningful design choice – building a mental model of where things were in relation to each other was difficult not because of the maze's layout but due to how it was presented. I struggled to understand the point of the system that numbered the rooms in encounter order, too; apart from clarifying when I was exploring new areas, it felt so unintuitive in regard to how people approach this kind of task in real life or video games. A minimap or more prominent landmarks would have been way more helpful, I think.

If this was meant to be an intentional challenge, then I have to say that I just didn't find it fun at all, and the core gameplay came off as so janky it overwhelmed the entire reading experience. Though the other puzzles in the maze segments did look creative, they were difficult to appreciate.

On the other hand, the story mostly felt way too sparse. Almost every scene is heavily dialog-driven, and the writing is brief and plain in style throughout. The character voices don't have much personality, there is so little scene-setting (even the surreal place the protagonist wakes up in is barely described!) or compelling imagery, and the bluntness of the prose leaves basically nothing up to implication or interpretation. The memories are particularly badly harmed by all this, pointing the reader towards the relevant pieces of information so crassly they rarely manage to evoke a mood in spite of some dramatic subject matter, but the frame story doesn't fare much better.

The basic plot is certainly fine, and some twists even seem exciting on paper, but I don't think how the story was presented as prose did it any favors. While I get that gameplay is meant to be the focus here, the writing just didn't really compel me at all, making it more difficult to care about getting through the maze as well. I will say that "solve puzzles to progress to the next cutscene" is not really a form of videogame storytelling I care for a lot in general, so maybe this is just a personal issue.

What we get here is ambitious to a fault as a puzzle game, boldly stretching Ren'py to its limits and beyond, and as a story the opposite, so unassuming it almost feels like it only exists in the form of writing out of obligation. All the art is super good, and I respect the chutzpah, but I found the package too unbalanced and too badly harmed by a couple of fatal flaws to really make for an enjoyable experience.

Loved your approach, and as frustrating as they can be, I liked the idea of rebuilding your memories with puzzles! I appreciated the "solve for me" once I'd gotten all the memories. I get really lost in maze things and I only had a small amount of time to play this today. The story was fun to watch come together, the wolf's voice coming through "as a ghost" when he was likely the only one not a ghost was clever.

I respect the shit out of this game, but it's not really for me, unfortunately (and that's alright!).

The fact that the VN has a functional maze and sliding puzzle system within it in spite of being made in renpy is incredibly cool and a very impressive feat, but I think there's definitely some jank that comes across as a result of how it's made - especially when it comes to the maze minigame. Even after gaining the ability to keep track of rooms I've already been in (which, let me just say - absolutely diabolical move to hide that in the middle of the first maze instead of just handing it out at the start), the mazes were too difficult for me - the rooms are all too similar to each other, especially in the first maze, and the fact that Gabe's perspective is accounted for when you turn back around (meaning that controls are reversed) is definitely cool, but it led to me getting lost significantly more than I would have were it consistent. Because of that, I had to give up on the mazes partway through - even if I gave each of them a try at first.

Unfortunately, this also meant that I missed a lot of the plot, making it feel way more disconnected than I assume it would otherwise be. This fits perfectly with the game's plot, given how Gabe's memories are scrambled and how hard he has to work to gain them, so I'm not complaining - but it is a bit of a bummer, as someone who enjoyed what I saw of the plot but couldn't really do the maze puzzles.

On some level, I wonder if making this game in an engine that's more fit for games with 3d graphics, or adding an optional map or other form of "easy mode" could have made it more approachable and let me enjoy it more, but at the same time I understand that this game just isn't really for me, and that's alright - ultimately game jams are great precisely because they encourage this sort of experimentation, and I think this game is incredibly impressive as a result of its otherwise uncompromising nature and how difficult to approach it is for someone like me with awful spatial awareness.

This is a really cool game. I'm saying game instead of VN because of how many interactive elements there are. It's fun to explore the maze and map it out in my mind, figuring out where I've been. That was always a part I liked about video games. However, I hate sliding tile puzzles so I skipped all of them, but I'm glad I was able to without any consequences. The writing in this one, though... ehh, it could be better honestly. It was rushed in many areas, not giving me much time to linger on each memory before we're whisked away to the next one. Some of the dialogue comes off as stilted, with a couple of bad jokes here and there. Kinda broke the immersion a little, but I still enjoyed solving the maze and piecing together the story. The presentation is quite nice as well, and I especially liked the glitchiness of My Wolf.

I really like this one. A very bold choice to have the interactive elements in there. They weren't really my kind of thing, but the maze segments helped keep the memories on a drip feed to build intrigue and let me mull over them. I wish they were a little easier or took less time, but having them did build more of a sense of tension and struggle in fewer words than any of the other entries I've read so far.

They were a little less appreciable when gunning for the third ending though. I probably would've done a second read through to find the hints had I not gotten turned off of doing the maze again. In the end I just brute forced six of the eight letters.

Otherwise, the writing is really solid. Interesting conflict, entertaining characters, and no scenes or elements overstay their welcome. Some, I do wish we got more of, though. Mostly the endings, which I think could've afforded to linger or let loose a few more details to really nail the catharsis.