So, I died at the first choice for choosing “incorrectly”. When the “wrong” choice wasn’t even in any way unkind; if anything, I chose it because I did not want to flirt with this random woman I at that point knew nothing about beyond that my character knew her from before. I didn’t want to be creepy. As a result, I just … got stabbed.

I know this is a jam game, but that is not good storytelling.

I know I should shrug, pick the other choice, and move on. But the speech is so painfully slow that it makes me feel like the narrator believes blind people are stupid and also can’t understand normal speech. I know it is unintentional, but in a game about manners, I somehow feel like I am being made fun of.

I'll try again on Windows, but just a heads-up that I could not get the Linux build to run. OS: Debian 13, x86_64.

After unzipping, none of the files had executable permissions, so it wasn't clear what the main executable was. It seems like "nw" is the executable, so I ran:

$ chmod +x nw
$ ./nw

I get some logging output that culminates in a few errors:

[45762:45762:0309/214405.029325:FATAL:nw_content_renderer_hooks.cc(48)] Failed to load node library (error: libnode.so: cannot enable executable stack as shared object requires: Invalid argument)
#0 0x7feab3d2c43c <unknown>
[45735:45735:0309/214405.077051:ERROR:sandbox_linux.cc(377)] InitializeSandbox() called with multiple threads in process gpu-process.

I really appreciate you including a Linux build at all, so I'm happy to continue helping test it. In order to be able to play for now, I'll try the Windows build!

Nice submission! On my first play, I cackled when the music suddenly changed and you said Welcome to your first choice! Expectedly, I chose the wrong first choice, sending me back to the menu screen. While there, I noticed that this was created with RPG Maker, which is super cool to me, because RPG Maker 2000 was my first game engine!

So I tried a more well-mannered second attempt. I appreciate how the third question subverted my expectations: you think this is a game about being understanding and asking deep questions like you’re also a therapist, but sometimes thoughtful questions might backfire!

I agree that the audio is far too quiet and could use some mixing, but I have a sound interface and was able to crank it up to play. My only other criticism is how the voice acting is too slow for my liking, so I lose attention quickly and have no way to repeat it when I miss an important detail. Yet, I understand how this is actually pretty naturalistic.

I think RPG Maker is a great engine, and—from about 80 hours of making a small project in RPG Maker MZ myself— I believe there are ways to make its text boxes accessible to screen readers, which you could still fully voice yourself when they display. This might be the best of both worlds. If implemented properly, it would let folks skip past dialog too—like the tutorial and other paths in repeated playthroughs.

The Mac version tells me that the application "Game" can't be opened.

Hi! I appreciate the effort making this game, and I am interested and curious about the story. But I am sorry to say (honestly really sorry) that it’s very difficult to play this game, because it feels like a lot of control is taken out of the player’s hands. What I mean by this is that the tutorial is spoken by a human voice very, very slowly. It’s hard to focus and follow through it, and it also feels slow. I think this is worth fine tuning and looking into, because the experience is quite hindered by these things. I am streaming some games and I have streamed your just now. I’ll share a link to the VOD later, and I hope this might help some. Maybe we can even get to experience the game fully after you make some changes, if you’re willing and interested to do it?

Congratulations on your game!

Edit: VOD here for a few days: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2712855875

I'd like to try it, but it's password locked!