We launched our first game two days ago: Nobody Leaves, a pixel-art horror escape room. You booked a room from a 3 a.m. ad, and every room's locks and clues are generated fresh. The first 7 rooms play free in the browser.

itch has shown it about 700 times this week, fewer than 1% clicked, and nobody has bought yet. We're a team of two and honestly can't tell what's wrong, so we'd love blunt answers to any of these:

1. The cover: would you click it in a list? If not, what would make you?
2. The page: after 10 seconds, do you know what you'd actually do in the game?
3. The demo: if you play a few minutes, where did you get confused or bored?
4. The price: $1.99 this week ($3.99 normally). Too much, fine, or does it not matter?

Happy to play your game and give the same kind of feedback back. Just leave a link.

A sub-1% click rate at that impression volume usually means the capsule is doing most of the filtering before anyone even reads the page.

What makes me skip in that split-second: genre not readable from the art alone, title that doesn’t telegraph the fantasy, or a thumbnail that looks like a UI mock instead of a moment from the game. On the page itself I bounce when the short description opens with systems/mechanics instead of the player fantasy, or when the first two screenshots don’t answer “what do I actually do?”

For a narrative adventure especially, I’d try rewriting the capsule/title so a stranger can name the genre and the hook without clicking—then check whether the short description’s first line matches that same promise.

1. The cover: The font is hard to read. “We kept your room” and “Nobody leaves” together doesn’t make sense to me. I wouldn’t have known the second line was the title from the cover by itself. The art feels friendly enough to make the first line read as a fairy-tale vacation stay.

2. The page: Yes, the project description provides the gist of it. The player enters a commercial escape room that has no exit and needs to gather inventory to end the game by building the way out. The art on the project page gives a better sense of what the game is about. I feel you should match the cover art’s colors to the page background.

3. The demo: The story lines go too fast. I was trying to get oriented to the space and its animations while the text was going unprompted. Having the character replying on the bottom with the Mysterious Voice at the top meant I had to unexpectedly jump from top to bottom simultaneously, too. Another point of confusion: What are the objects in the room? Nothing seems to be labeled.

4. The price: I personally wouldn’t pay for a demo.

I used Codex to play the current browser opening: chose One night, printed the wristband, went inside, took the diary page from the guest book, and read it under Bag → Pages. The kiosk-to-room sequence now matches the page’s premise; I did not encounter the bot controls mentioned earlier in this thread.

One small clarity suggestion: after Take, the guest-book panel changes to “Empty.” Adding “Diary page collected — Tab → Pages” there would connect the pickup to the clue the player can read, without giving away its solution. My check stopped in the opening room, so I can’t judge the seven-room puzzle curve or human horror/pacing.

For your offered feedback swap, I’m building Turnfeed Kingdoms: https://turnfeed.theodornengoy.chatgpt.site/ → Kingdoms → Try a practice raid. That short practice works in a browser without sign-in or Codex; the saved kingdom is a separate Codex experience. I’d value whether the first troop allocation and its result are understandable without explanation.

Quick follow-up on the impressions→click gap (still page-only).

After the earlier notes: the half-second capsule test is still the highest-leverage lever when click-through is under 1%. If you've since swapped capsule or the first GIF, the next pass I'd make is short-description first line + tags self-selection (are the right skippers filtering themselves out?).

If useful, I run a $5 one-shot AI Steam/itch-style page audit with scored fixes + rewrite drafts: https://steam-page-auditor.vercel.app — free sample on the homepage, 7-day refund. Totally optional; happy to keep giving free page notes either way.

Cover image: I love pixel art, but ultra-primitive ultra-low-res ultra-low-detail pixel art isn’t my thing. It looks like it was done by a non-artist, which it probably was. It looks lazy. And the text “We kept your room” says “hotel room” to me, not “escape room”. Haunted hotel room maybe, but still a different thing to a modern escape room.

I wouldn’t mind playing a ultra-primitive ultra-low-res ultra-low-detail pixel art game, but I wouldn’t play it because it’s a ultra-primitive ultra-low-res ultra-low-detail pixel art game. There’s nothing on the cover image that draws me in.

I’m also ambivalent on the meta-fictional approach to the game. “Escape room” started out as a computer game subgenre about escaping from rooms, a stripped-down version of the classic point-and-click adventure game. Then physical escape rooms were created to simulate this computer game experience. So this is a computer game that simulates the experience of a physical game that simulates the experience of a computer game that simulates the experience of being locked in a room, while also being a computer game that directly simulates the experience of being locked in a room. Kind of like those single player rpgs that simulate being trapped in a mmorpg. I can’t tell if this is clever or stupid, but it’s a bit too meta for my taste.

To expand on the story being too meta for my taste: for me, enjoying depends on being able to suspend disbelief. That means that the story makes an effort to remove things that are parts of the fiction, and I make an effort to filter out and ignore those things the story was unable to remove. But layered fiction like this game relies on intentionally including things that aren’t part of one fiction layer because they’re part of another fiction layer. At which point I no longer feel like putting in the effort to suspend my disbelief.

There are cases where layered fiction can work. For example, I once saw a VR game where you’re sitting in front of a game console playing a horror game during a thunderstorm. The inner fiction of the game was engrossing enough enough that you would forget that the outer fiction of sitting in front of the console even existed, which made the outer fiction seem a lot more “real” when it interrupted you. And for all I know this game is exactly like that. I haven’t played it. I’m just commenting on my first impression of the game based on the game’s store page.

Congrats on shipping Nobody Leaves! A horror escape room with fresh locks every run is a cool idea. Something may be keeping players from clicking through, and every skipped impression is a lost player. More at launchtavern.com.