itch.io

This is an excellent story! Horror's not usually my thing, but this story was still enjoyable regardless. I love the way it's written, and I love how balanced the game is, since there's a whole spectrum of endings you can get and it's not too easy or too hard to get a decent one. I also appreciate how you foreshadow what could happen when I make each choice, so the outcome never feels like it comes out of nowhere. It all makes a lot of sense. Incredible work!

I can't play this game- the window's too small to see the options and you didn't enable the scrollbar

Great story, great game! My one complaint is that my choices don't often feel super impactful? There's realistically only two or three instances where the decision I make really matters to the outcome of the story, and often only one of those two choices actually leads to the story being continued (and the other one just leads to an immediate ending). The lockpicking sections are definitely a cool addition! There were also a lot of grammar and spelling errors, but to be honest, I think that kind of contributed to the casual, silly vibe of the game, so that's not necessarily a bad thing! Aside from it being a bit linear, I think this is a great game. 

I love the vibe and the pacing of this game! It's very immersive, and I could really put myself into the shoes of the main character.

I do have a couple bits of feedback though. First off, my choices feel way too committal. For example, on my first playthrough, I decided to go through the door in the pit and I reached the sleeping beast. At that point I would have wanted to bail and look for another way through the dungeon, but my only options were to attack it or try to sneak by. Realistically, there's no reason I couldn't have just gone back through the door, so that took me out of the narrative a little. Same thing with the final chamber- if I choose to fight the boss and win, I automatically take the treasure and run. I don't have an option to keep exploring (even if that would end in my death, I'd appreciate the option), I'm kind of just placed into the ending even though I feel like I'm not done.

Additionally, there's a bunch of ways to reach the final chamber, but there's never any closure after making the choice that gets you there. Using the same beast as an example, on my first playthrough I ended up stabbing it in it's underbelly, and then I was just dropped into the final chamber after clicking the option. There wasn't any narrative closure for how I beat the beast, I kind of just had to piece together that 1) I must have survived attacking the beast and 2) I must have gone through the door after defeating the beast. Same thing for when you can throw a stone across the room to divert the beast, there's no narrative closure for how that went down, I just have to assume it worked since I'm in the final room. 

Another complaint is that there doesn't appear to be any way to fail an interaction in this game? I think I've explored all the possible paths, and not a single choice I've made leads to my death- every single one just works. Maybe you didn't want it to feel like a cheated death, but that leads to my last minor complaint- I'd appreciate some foreshadowing as to the outcome of certain decisions. Many of the decisions just plop you down in a random other room in the story, with what seems to be no rhyme or reason. There are a few instances with what appears to be foreshadowing- like the clicking of the traps in the key room, or the color of the lights in the starting room, but they never end up meaning anything. 

One final complaint- you can go into the blue room and obtain the key, but you can't use the key on the door! I'm not sure if this is an oversight, but it seems pretty unintuitive. Overall, I can see that this game has some potential, but I feel like it needs a few changes to really feel great. 

Also, for future reference, you can make the game playable in the browser, so I don't have to download it.

Great game overall! I only have a few nitpicks. First off, after freeing the worker on my first playthrough, there wasn't really anything warning me not to keep investigating so I kept investigating and got lost. For games like this, I like it if there's some sort of foreshadowing when it comes to non-obvious loss conditions like that. A line in that passage telling me "You can see the tunnel lights go out up ahead" or "you think you can barely remember the way back" would have been appreciated. The fact that the maintenance worker kept running into the tunnel baited me into thinking there was more to do there, so the instant loss felt a smidge unfair, especially since it doesn't seem like there's any way to save that NPC. I did like how you gave me the option to gather some information by talking to the NPCs before committing to any decisions, and I loved the general noir vibe of the game. The game's a bit small, but besides that one thing with the maintenance worker, I liked it! Good game. 

Cool story! My one complaint is that as the main character, I should have already known what I was up to. For my first two playthroughs, I didn't even know that I was planning a surprise anniversary dinner! Since I didn't know what was going on, the outcomes of my choices felt kind of arbitrary. If I had known from the start that I was planning a surprise anniversary, I feel like I could have had a much smoother experience. Instead, my experience became much more about figuring out what was even going on instead of figuring out how to handle the tense situation. I like the premise of the story though!

Good take on the traditional poker gameplay loop. It played really well, and I liked the element of trying to predict what cards your neighbor will try and give to you. I think this game has a lot of depth! My one concern is that certain cases aren't made clear in the rules, such as do we do another round of calls and raises after the last cards get passed around or not? I've played poker before, so I just went based on what happens in regular poker, but if I didn't already know about the edge cases in regular poker, it would have been nearly impossible to figure out. I also would have liked it if there was a graphic on the PDF with the poker hands and their values on it. I liked the game a lot, but it is carried a bit by how fun regular poker is. Nonetheless, great variation, I might even be playing this with some friends instead of regular poker on occasion!

Love the concept of this game! I like how it has two phases, the dungeon building and the moving phase, and it's cool how a lot of the depth of this game would come from the information game- trying to gather information about what cards your opponents put down and trying to use the information to outplay them. This game seems like it would be a lot of fun at a high level after a couple games once everyone develops a real strategy. My only complaint is that at a lower level, when you haven't played it as much, it feels pretty random and just like "whoever chooses the correct path to go down wins" and since the way we played it ended up with only two real paths, the people who chose the harder path just lost on the spot. I also can't attest to the game balance since we only played one round- so who knows if the optimal strategy turns out to just be something like "make a straight line and put all your cards in it- whoever gets luckier wins." Overall, though, I absolutely love the concept! Easy enough to learn and remember the rules, and a good time when you get into it. 

The game seems very well designed and it was very fun when we played it! My one complaint is that the whole "branches" system, where you put cards next to other cards to build out the branches, doesn't seem like it adds a lot to the game. It takes three whole cards to surround another card and block it off from being paired with, and when we played, we just kept claiming whatever card got placed down into a pair, so the branches never really grew past a single card. The social aspect of the game is fun, and it feels like it works perfectly as intended. The rules are a little difficult to read through and it's not always intuitive how it works. so maybe the rules document could be better written, but the underlying game seems very fun and well designed. Well done!

The rules were extremely confusing and unclear, we weren't able to really get into the game. I can't attest to how fun or consistent the game is when you do understand the rules, because we couldn't really figure it out. It was difficult to read through the rules and figure out what we were actually supposed to do at any given point in time. It feels like the rules need to be explained in a better way for us to actually get to the meat of the game. I'd love to try this game again sometime, but since none of us really knew what was going on, it was way too difficult to decipher the rules and what they actually meant this time.