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tailgater.'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Visuals | #34 | 3.216 | 3.556 |
| Theme Implementation | #54 | 2.613 | 2.889 |
| Audio | #63 | 2.211 | 2.444 |
| Overall | #69 | 2.395 | 2.648 |
| Fun Factor | #72 | 2.211 | 2.444 |
| Gameplay | #76 | 2.010 | 2.222 |
| Special Object Implementation | #82 | 2.111 | 2.333 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How is your game related to the Theme and Special Object?
Theme:
Deja Vu means something along the lines of "I've been here before". The game explores the idea of memories and reminiscing of the past; the things you do today will always be affected by the past. Everything in the car will remind you of something else; something related to your ex-lover. You've been here before, even if you don't want to remember it.
Special Object:
The reveal at the end of the game is that there is an apple in the locked glove box. It's basically a metaphor for letting go in a relationship; the protag eats the apple and tosses it as a way to finally move past their relationship.
I am aware that this reads like an exam's subjective question.
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Comments
Good game!
Text is good. And there should be a lot of good text. An interesting experience.
Technically an escape room that runs along with a visual novel that actually has a death timer going at the same time, pretty novel idea. The art and the music are fantastic, with a high focus on narrative. Pretty neat experience, albeit a bit frustrating at times.
On the other hand it's kinda confusing what to do, at one point it becomes randomly clicking in the environment to find what interacts with what to progress the story, I think it took me like 3 or 4 crashes before I made some progress. Also it's not clear how the timer actually work, it kinda clashes with the game being about a lot of reading imo.
thanks for playing our game! and thank you for the review as well, these are some very fair critiques. the game is a bit of a mess in terms of game design and apologies for any frustration you may have experienced.
about the death timer, it's actually a bit of a holdover from our original idea for the deja vu theme, which was supposed to be a time-loop concept. the idea was to have certain elements in the point-and-click section be time-sensitive so the player would have to gradually learn the timings of puzzle elements over the course several playthroughs. unfortunately, we couldn't implement any of those ideas in time, so all that's left is the 5 minute death timer. the walls of text were also meant to serve as a challenge for the player; parse as much information as you can from a massive log of memories to aid you in your next playthrough. of course, the execution does leave a lot to be desired but it's something i definitely want to try fleshing out more in future though. hopefully without all the jank.
thank you for the kind words about the art and concept though, and thank you so much for giving our game a go!
I failed to solve this after a few crashes but I really love the art and the audio! The mood is perfect
This was a very, VERY well written game. I love how it feels like a visual novel escape room, and how you have to dig through the protagonist's memories to get the codes you need. The impending car is also a nice touch, though I did crash a few times before finally beating the game. I think the scenario of contemplating things while driving is very relatable. The story was also impactful, and the ending where the protagonist finally accepts their situation was such a nice way to end things. Also, the art was pretty solid!
I guess the only point of improvement I can think of is to make it so that clicking makes the full text appear, but without moving to the next line if that makes sense? What would happen is that I want to rapidly click to try to get through the text faster, but doing that just cuts off the current line of text and starts the next. So I have to sit there and wait for the text to scroll through on it's own because button mashing will make me miss important info by instantly advancing to the next line.
This was my favorite game so far. But maybe I'm just a sucker for good writing :)
hi! writer for the game here. Thank you so much for the compliments to the writing! i must confess, a lot of it was very last minute and hastily written before the deadline (i was praying that the manic writing style would hopefully fit with the stream-of-consciousness theme we were going for. also, it helped reduce the amount of time needed to proofread and rewrite too lol) but i'm glad that it resonated with you. and of course, thank you for playing our game and reviewing it. it means a lot!
Don't normally like visual novels but this was good.