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What, if any, Jam-Specific Challenges did you include in your entry?
Hawk makes a cameo!
Does your game require playing multiple routes to get the full experience?
Nope. The game has 3 endings, but you'll get the gist of what happens in the final cutscene regardless of player choices.
Approximately how long is your game (in minutes)?
Depends on the route taken. If EVERYTHING is skipped and you go right to the final room, it's about 30 minutes. If you interact with everything and DO everything, it could be around 75 minutes depending on reading speed.
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Comments
I'm enjoying the lore and all the little details in BESTIEWORLD! The missing players and their stories make me curious about what really happened. I love how the cheerful game would hide something much darker underneath. Great work! 🖤
This took me around 2 hours to get through because I was intent to interact with everything I could. It reminded me a little of the .//hack series a little bit, on top of I have no mouth and I must scream, and Undertale (mainly cause of the optional pacifist route). My only real complaint is the mapping of the last office level, since it wasn't entirely clear where I had to go next. So much so I actually went back outside of the tower to skip the level to see if I could back track and figure out how I was supposed to get up there. Bestie just screamed at me. xD
Part of me does feel a lil bad for Bestie, since they just wanted to fulfill their function. Unfortunately that came at the detriment of basically everyone's lives. . w .; Much like the recycler, I look forward to seeing a fixed up version to run through again later. :D
Thank you for playing! Oh wow, I never actually thought of the .//hack series. You're right, and I forgot about that one. As for the office, I'll need to do some revamping on that level because you're not the only one who had trouble with it. I might actually end up changing the entire layout depending on what the post-jam stuff ends up as. I wanted the office to be a playable area at some point and thought it would be a good source of discomfort for the main character.
Yes, I made Bestie as sassy as I could for people who skipped the final dungeon. XD If you skip everything, he's even angrier. At first, I was going to have him be more like SHODAN from System Shock, but then I realized that the laws of robotics and laws of AI could be twisted in a number of ways where the AI is STILL fulfilling them and yet still harming humanity in some way. In the post-jam update, some of those laws will probably have a much bigger impact than they do in the jam version.
I had no idea what I was going to run into but honest I had fun playing this game and managed to make me uncomfortable (in a positive horror way) during certain bits of the game.
From here forward, there are spoilers so no reading if you haven't played:
I did not skip the final dungeon, and it took me around 1hr and 30 minutes to finish the game, but I am not sure if I skipped stuff from the start cause instead of going to the Ground cave I went straight to the Beach and the meat dimension.
On the positive side of feedback, some of the sound design was very well done, the squishiness of some surfaces made me very uncomfortable, and the background music fit the general ambience of what was happening.
I also enjoyed the sense of humor, the alien invasion comment to delay work made me laugh out loud. It does feel like it breaks the tension here and there but nothing too bad.
The story even if a bit predictable with Bestie being obviously bad from the start, feels very on theme with current in real life issues and was interesting to see the want to rewrite humans instead of the classic just erase humanity (the ai rewriting the laws of robotics was very disturbing and I loved that detail).
I also liked having the option of talking to the monsters instead of attacking, and having Bestie be very insistent that you should beat them up instead. Not sure if something changes if you decide to do one or the other but I went Pacifist route so to speak.
I liked the visuals especially the distorted ones, the whole game had vibes of, retro game but make it cursed.exe, felt nostalgic but also disturbing at the same time in certain parts.
My main feedback would be the story can get a little confusing in some parts, it is interesting having to unveil what is happening with the thorn notes (I could only found the Right sides, not sure if there were Left sides to complete the notes), but at times it felt like Marvin knew things that only he knew and assumed we as the Player knew too, so it took a bit of catching up to what was happening (like the mention of the dead coworkers). I also couldn't fully understand if, when playing BestieWorld, you were somehow teleported inside the world or just an avatar, cause Marvin acts like he is inside of a game/virtual reality but more advanced, but that could also just be me missunderstanding something.
Other than that is mainly minor design stuff, the dialogue pauses work for some of the dialogues, but for others it just cuts the flow and gets a lil bit repetitive. The meat office is a bit confusing to navigate with the same door you walk in not being how to go down and the bathrooms being the way down, and finally it's a bit hard knowing what you could interact with and what not but I am assuming that was just running out of time cause I ran with the same problem in my project.
Random but I think I found a bug? When I bought the Speak to Monsters it had the text of the icecycles attack instead, but it did give me the Talk to Monsters skill.
So sorry for the wall of text, but I think you did a really good job for one month and should give yourself more credit! Not sure if you intend to keep polishing it but I think you have a very good base for a full game here :)The only thing that changes by talking to monsters is that you don't hear what they have to say, and you get experience and items for winning the battles. The thing with the Speak Monster skill was an accident; I copy/pasted the conditional branches for the other spells and changed them as needed, and it's extremely likely I missed one. You CAN get the missing notes, but it requires fighting to get them. Taking the pacifist route gets you more lore and memories, but you forfeit some of the notes from the bosses as a result. I do plan on continuing to polish the game. There's a LOT I didn't put in that I WANTED, but I also wanted to really keep this game to as close to an hour as I could.
Thank you so much for playing. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Some things I wanted to purposely leave confusing, but a lot of the confusion was my panicked patchwork job in the last week.
And yes, not doing the Earth Cavern means you do miss some of the main story stuff. But I thought it might be more interesting to have the main story be optional.
Three things I liked about this game:
Three things I did not like:
Note: I have longer critiques of the things I did not like, but I posted a shorter version in case you don't want a wall of text. Let me know if you want the full version.
Overall, I think this was a good game. I'm sure that it could have been better had there been more time and fewer upsets along the way, but what we got is still a fine entry.
Thank you for playing. Like I said, I was not proud of this entry at all. I had to cut out a lot of things and I didn't have time to do much with the combat system. The problems show horrifically, that's why I almost didn't submit. The story is "short" because I literally cut over half of it out to keep the gameplay to as close to an hour as possible, but I had a lot of hiccups keeping it coherent. That's probably where the dialogue problems came in. All I can say is I tried to make it okay. I'm sorry it turned out so sloppy.
I do want to know how you got stuck. There might have been a switch or something that wasn't pressed, but it depends on what floor you managed to get to. I added the final dungeon skip because, again, trying to keep this entry to an hour.
I'll admit, I am very nervous to know what you have to say. But feel free to DM it.