Not a typical game I'd play. Decent story, but I wish there was more at stake. The only players I was motivated to keep alive through all 3 runs was Thomas because he shows several times in the game that he contributes, and the dog. The sick person and the stranger were easy to get rid of as one literally asks for it, and the other doesn't have any impact on the game. The kid was always easy to leave behind too as they other than hope it doesn't affect anything. The kid should be linked to Thomas so that if you leave the kid behind, you lose thomas as an asset as well. Because tbh, it's easy to leave the kid just as much as the other 2 individuals I mentioned.
I think that if you're going to have a balanced game built on sacrifice and dread, each person should have some impact other than the base 3 stats, otherwise it'll be as easy as who helps the stats the most always ends up staying.
Play game
The Long Winter's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #1 | 4.196 | 4.333 |
| Theme Implementation | #1 | 4.712 | 4.867 |
| Game Design Document | #5 | 4.325 | 4.467 |
| Community Choice | #6 | 3.550 | 3.667 |
| Artistic Style | #9 | 4.260 | 4.400 |
| Playability | #12 | 4.131 | 4.267 |
Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTL-zV_LNjwyiNWV79y0I-2WmgvnTJ7SmlR5g25E41UHsbgoruzJT0fYoBbppsBdNr7ehtqhulMfXoU/pub
Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
Yes
Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
Yes
Summarize your game!
The Long Winter is a turn-based narrative choice game. You drive a cart north through an early, unrelenting winter, away from a home that no longer exists. Across 12 legs of the journey, the road makes a demand almost every mile, a broken wheel, a wolf pack, a fever, a frozen river, and you choose how to pay it: from your dwindling supplies, from yourself, or from one of six passengers riding with you, each with a name and a few lines of who they are.
Controls are just point-and-click: read the event, pick a choice. There's no combat and no timer, the only failure state is a gauge hitting zero. The whole run plays out on one evolving screen: no scene transitions between legs.
A run takes about 5 to 10 minutes and ends in either arrival, with an ending shaped by what and who you sacrificed to get there, or collapse.
Please explain how your game fits the theme.
My take on "The Cost of Progress" is literal and mechanical, not just narrated. Progress is the cart moving forward, mile by mile, toward a pass that might not even be worth reaching. Cost is never flavor text, every leg genuinely takes something from you: a resource, a piece of yourself, or someone in your care. There's no free option, and no way to "win" without paying.
The nuance I was going for is complicity, not tragedy imposed on the player. Costs escalate slowly enough that each individual choice feels small and reasonable on its own, "you didn't want to drain your Hope, but the supplies were already gone, so what else could you do?". It's only across all the journey, especially at the ending screen's tally of what was burned and who was left behind, that you realize how much you agreed to pay just to keep moving.
Did you use Generative AI to make any assets in your game?
No
Comments
Hey, thanks for taking the time to play, and for your feedback. I completely agree. To make this the narrative experience I want, the plot needs to go a bit deeper, and longer. I scrapped the initial mechanics involving the kid because they were hard to balance, but I will probably revisit it after this Jam is done.
Thanks again for playing, and for posting this feedback.
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