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Anima Perpetua (DEMO)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Aesthetics | #1 | 4.484 | 4.667 |
| Innovation | #2 | 3.683 | 3.833 |
| Stakes | #3 | 3.683 | 3.833 |
| Audio | #3 | 3.843 | 4.000 |
| Horror/Spookiness | #3 | 3.843 | 4.000 |
| Theme | #7 | 3.843 | 4.000 |
Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
specs:
- mac mini m2, 32gb ram, 12 cores
- windows download, played via GameHub emulator
overall:
- beautiful visuals, atmosphere, and very creative use of 2/3D. well rounded with some minor visual/functional jank. would def continue/finish playing.
intro:
- the atmosphere and lore/story/worldbuilding were great, but despite it saying right click is the dialogue/text advance, the scroll button i accidentally hit immediately ended the intro. i appreciate the history factor to go back but this def needs a skip confirm and some tuning/re-factoring for the controls. even the actual FF button you know you're clicking on is instant-end w/o confirmation.
audio:
- LOVE the atmospheric ambience & the music. SFX could've been a bit more varied, only one i encountered was the menu click.
display/presentation:
- absolutely gorgeous artwork here. especially characters and setting, but the UI/menu/etc also deserves praise.
customization/accessibility:
- immediate huge plus here. a bunch of options for audio/visual/acessibility, how to play instructions with controls, settings
- mouse only interaction. makes sense for a visual novel, but since it uses a hyrbid control system i would def add the ability to nav with keyb as well.
- save system! big plus. esp auto save
gameplay:
- talking to sister clara crashed my window the first time, huge delay load second time i tried.
- some REALLY bad jank in the controls/visual load. i have a powerful computer but no matter what settings i was on, layers were constantly popping in and out. maybe due to the hybrid dimensional displays and FX and such, but it was really disruptive.
- interactivity with objects needs a little more scale and rendering/tuning. the backgrounds/environment were amazing but because everything is monochrome and there are no highlights on objects, i had no idea where i was supposed to go or what to do at points. i had to get basically on top of/inside of people/objects to get the E popup, and some things like the doors were not where they should've been (a building column was the "door" to )
- great systems in place: relationship, journal, schedule, map
- nice amount of interactivity in-world, where i could find it. a slight glow/highlight would be beneficial.
Thanks for your comments! Those techincal issues are news to us, maybe it's because of the emulator. We don't really have experience with graphics and renderer options so it's all on "default" (the default being my Windows 11 laptop with an RTX 4070 and my partner's semi-gamer Windows laptop), but we'll consider those issues for the next version (maybe including a Linux version since it's the OS I'm more familiar with after Windows). It's not really a graphics-intensive game so maybe there's an optimization issue in the depths of the code. The highlight is a good idea, and we already plan to improve navigation and make doors and paths more clear. The biggest offender there is the garden, but we didn't have time to handcraft the 3D models for it so we resorted to bought assets, that's why it's confusing to navigate. The other locations were modelled by hand tho, so they're easier to understand.
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! 🫀
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
Nice idea, I like the holiness meter, it could be great to have more actions to affect it; I loved the art of the game and the atmosphere. There is some room for improvement in the garden, I got confused at first about where to go but I figured it out. Personally, I don’t support GenAI usage in any form (including code), but I appreciate the disclosure. Good job!
Yup, the idea is that the meter will have influence in the endings (the full game will have 4 days). The garden was done with bought assets because of time so that's why it's a bit confusing. For the next version we intend use our own assets for it (like in the room and chapel). And well, Claude helped me create the dialogue system (more like a customized tutorial) because I was too ambitious and wanted to do that from scratch. Never again lol, I'll migrate everything to Dialogic from now on, I've heard it's good for that. The rest of the code was done by myself, reusing code from systems we used in previous games
I really like the game, the mechanics and the art, personally I read a lot (books and comics) I think the narrative is good. I have to mention that the end was so scary!
I’m not a fan of visual novels either, so I’m not really gonna talk about the gameplay. The visuals are beautiful and the art direction fits perfectly the tone of the story. The sound design is well made and feels organic. The writing is very good, and the only small downside is that sometimes it wasn’t easy for me to know which character was speaking, but it might be due to my lack of experience in the genre. Also, it could help to know ahead if a conversation is gonna make you move to the next moment of the day, but if it’s a design choice I respect that.
Warning the player that a conversation is gonna advance time is a good idea, thanks! There'll be some interesting conversations and easter eggs so we want players to explore
While I am not a big fan of VN - I liked the aesthetic of this one.
Really got one pulled in with the various locations and its design.
I feel though some of the locations (one accesses through the courtyard) - really could have used some signaling or some significant building/asset for showing where to go - I got a little lost sometimes.
Maybe thats a bit on purpose
But its a lovely game - and can definitely see its direction