Oh my, wish I played this one sooner! I was totally led to believe that this is a pure visual novel based on description and screenshots, but oh boy was I mistaken.
I really like what you did here, making it exactly more than a standard click through dialog game. Adding actual environments, a map, even mechanics under the hood, is an amazing spin on this genre (which I tottally lack experience in, but only experienced some of it's worst, i guess).
Regardless, I was still a little overwhelmed by the amount of text, however not to the point that I'd quit, I actually managed to beat the whole game. I'm always craving and lacking, a sense of purpose, an overaching goal in these kind of games, I really to believe a player needs this, to make sure they know what the point of conversations is. I would try working on a sense of goal in this one too, as I wasn't sure where is all of that talk leading me. However I still liked the little intrigue, and the monster the protagonist was fighting with.
Overall, you made a player that doesn't like visual novels finish your game, which is an incredible feat. Good job, and keep at it! 🫀
Viewing post in Anima Perpetua (DEMO) jam comments
Thanks! Yeah, our vision was to make something more akin to a 3D adventure game but focused in dialogue, like a 3D Fallout but with a heavy focus on the narrative part (and without shooting and combat). We planned to do 4 days from the start, so the idea is that you'd learn secrets, talk to people, build relationships, and change your morality according to your decisions. It turned out to be much harder than we thought, so we decided to release the first day as a demo, and that's why it feels like something's missing, because the narrative is distributed among the entire 4 days. There are more interactions we'd like to add, like more dialogue branches, making the world change according to your corruption, and different endings, but that'll go in the next version. We'd even like to add items to unlock dialogue options and influence what ending you get. Thanks a lot for your feedback, and we hope we can complete the game soon :D