itch.io

I hope you're still out there, making games. This was excellent, and I'd love to see more like this (or anything else you care to make).  Below are my full thoughts about it, formatted in an incoherent ramble, which reads more like something an axe murderer is mumbling to themself than a comment by someone who enjoyed a thing someone made:

Came for the gameplay, stayed for the story

I find that storytelling in webgames can be fairly influenced by the simplistic storytelling of retro games, to put it nicely. Unfortunately those retro games had an excuse: hardware limitations, webgame devs should ask what theirs is. If you want to have a fun game, it doesn't need to have a generic placeholder story about a character who has a two-dimensional problem so they need to find the magic maguffin, or another princess that's been kidnapped. "Maybe it's for kids," I hear you say; yeah well, maybe kids deserve a modicum of respect--just because something's for them doesn't mean it has to be shit. Listen: Super Meat Boy is one of my favorite games of the millenium, but the story fucking sucks; it's just a waste of everyone's time, and adds nothing of value to the experience. Just let me play the fun jumpy game. 

I'm not saying all that just to vent, but to explain the mindset I have when approaching pretty much any webgame. I was looking for a fun distraction/time-waster to play, and I happen to love platformers the most. That's when I came across To Take Root Among the Stars (on lexaloffle.com, but I don't have an account there, so you get a write-up here).

In spite of my usual cynicism, I instigated dialogue and unwittingly started the story. I didn't know at the time, but the dialogue is entirely optional, and only one character's dialogue affects the gameplay at all (IYKYK). I wasn't immediately engaged with the story nor characters, but figured there may be gameplay instructions, or sidequests; technically there are a few sidequests, but you don't receive anything for them other than the sense of a job well done.

Without the story, you have a game where you explore an area, collect a few jump upgrades, and then scale a mountain. It's like Celeste, but shorter and less difficult. It's perfect, I loved every second of the gameplay; chill, but not so simple as to be boring. The physics feel good too, which isn't something that's easy to do with platformers; I'm very forgiving of bad physics, but this honestly just feels good to control. 10/10, no notes.

But honestly, the story is the best part. After playing through it, I felt... A lot. I was saddened, I was hopeful, I was pensive. The story functions as world building, it gives motivations to your character's actions, it also provides you with sidequests; basically it does what a story within a game should do. But it does provides depth: things to think about and ponder; and it doesn't just hand it over on a silver platter, a lot remains unsaid and up to interpretation.

More precisely, it touches on grief and coping with it, it touches on isolation, it touches on the uncertainty of the future, it touches on both death and new life, it touches on art and the purposes it serves, it touches on the struggle of building a society, it touches on climate change. And it does all this in the context of exploring what it must be like to colonize somewhere distant and remote.

And here's the kicker: it does all this in less than 100 lines of dialogue. That's it, that's all you get. No, it doesn't make a philosophical deepdive into any of the aforementioned topics, nor does it provide any answers to the questions it raises; but what it does do, and masterfully well at that, is provide a quick view into the lives of a handful of characters in a way that will guarantee you connect with at least one of them. And it will give you something to think about, even if it just leaves you--like me--imagining how it must feel to be stranded on a planet countless bajillions of miles from Earth, slowly running out of supplies, knowing that you will never see it nor your loved ones again.

...

Also, that's right, I got you with the clickbait. These ramblings are coherent, and there's nothing close to axe-murdery about the way I mumble to myself while making unblinking eye contact with you across the train. I know what you're thinking: by the gods, aren't they cool. I wish I could be as cool as them. Well, I've got good news for you, poppet: play To Take Root Among the Stars, and you too can be waking up in a puddle of your own piss and blood at a Love's Travel Stop. In the parking lot and not the bathroom of course, that would be unsanitary.

I played around until I was reasonably sure what the criteria to wake up each little dude was, then I wrote down each criteria. Then I spent several hours writing a haskell script to comb through a ~480,000 word dictionary I found on github, and filter by each criteria...

Except that I couldn't be bothered to figure out the best way to filter by yellow's criterion, so instead I just filtered by everyone else's and manually scanned the remainder until I found the first one that fit. I'm tired, give me a break.

What I learned:

1. I'm still an extreme novice in Haskell

2. Rust would have been several hours faster

3. I would have been done yesterday if I just used Python

4. a lot of other nerd stuff about Haskell that is probably better left to a personal blog than the comments of a cute webgame

9/10 needs more programmatically-solvable challenges that I can waste entire days on, otherwise it was perfect

Edit: I added the final filter (for yellow), it wasn't as hard as my sleep-deprived mind made it out to be

Holy moly... Molleindustria is still around and making bangers? I haven't heard that name in 15 years!
Great game as always!

Love the vaporwave 2000s aesthetic, it makes me feel nostalgic af. The music is also perfect. The puzzles are just the right blend of clever enough to puff my ego, but not hard enough to make me get frustrated. And the story is really moving, and sad. RIP Liz. I feel sorry for her. I also appreciate that the horror wasn't too unsettling, and no jumpscares.

I love this genre of low-res surreal indie games with banger soundtracks and memorable characters.

I had the same issue as clansing.

Using MS Edge (version 112.0.1722.39) on Windows 11 Pro (22H2 / build 22621.1413). I've attached a video of it happening. Let me know if there's any other info you need

Great game! Love the mechanic, the story is compelling. Simple to play, difficult to progress and intriguing enough to make you want to finish.

My biggest gripe is the way evidence is grouped. The "anchor" piece (the piece of the main thread) that the next group needs to connect to seemed arbitrary for a few groups, which pieces constituted a group seemed arbitrary, and the current group not completing if it was connected to any pieces from upcoming groups (or the wrong anchor) was frustrating. Sometimes, two pieces of evidence would be more related to each other than they were to the rest of the evidence in their respective groups. Overall, this gave it an unnatural feel, like the protagonist suffered rapid-onset amnesia if she saw something of interest but didn't already have a crystal clear picture of how pieces connected back to the beginning post-it.

I understand this system is to enable a linear plot progression, and to allow the player to connect pieces within a group any which way without letting them just connect every piece on the board and have every plot-point trigger at once. I don't think a linear progression is necessary nor fits with the "cognitive map" style gameplay that evidence boards inherently are, not sure what could be done about the latter problem. Perhaps every single piece of evidence should have others it is required to connect directly to, and not worry so much about being able to bundle it into arbitrarily connected groups.

I mean, that's fair--I didn't realize this was a jam game. As for my guesses to the questions I asked: I don't really have any, that's why I picked those specific questions; I don't have evidence from within the narrative itself to base any guesses on, anything I offered would necessarily just be based on my familiarity with sci-fi tropes from other media.

To get more in-depth: the player is never told what the device does, we know it interfaces with ???????? and the lack of cell-localization could be catastrophic because ???????? and creates a stasis field that affects everyone, even itself which may be how it has frozen everyone in place and stops itself from ???????? so you need to shut down power to the entire facility; we also know that it trapped David in the network. That's actually a pretty detailed description of what it does, I should have asked what its purpose is. Why would this outcome ever be desirable? Or what was it supposed to do that it failed to? Making a few assumptions that are not entirely based in what the player is provided, we can fill in the blanks above: if we assume it provides an interface between the brain and computers, we can also assume the "cell" in cell-localization refers to brain cells. That might also explain David's motivation: digital immortality as a cure for a fatal illness. But it still wouldn't explain why it causes everyone else to be frozen in place, why that would be a side effect or even desirable outcome of uploading your consciousness to a computer, nor why he is drawing the player character down into a pit from which there is seemingly no escape; if he's to be believed, why would he trap us down there with him? If he's not trustworthy, why should anything he says be taken into consideration when piecing together the story?

fun game, the momentum and physics are near perfect and feel natural for a platformer. There were only a few criticisms I felt compelled to share, to make it even better:

1. being able to move while eye-beaming would reduce the amount of frustration of being off from the targets by a few pixels

2. The camera is annoying when you screw up: if I face backwards to reuse an eye-beam target in multi-screen-long horizontal rooms, suddenly I'm cut off from seeing where I'm headed. This gets more frustrating when going back to a static-cling wall, and now pressing in the direction I'm headed will most likely make me drop from the wall.

3. Had to fullscreen my browser on PC to see the whole screen, it was almost impossible to play without being able to see the top and bottom. My workaround was to just zoom out, but that won't necessarily work for everyone and it made the precision of the eye-beam even more frustrating.

4. SPOILER WARNING: I don't get the story's ending and I'm not sure that's my fault. What does the device do? Why does David's illness motivate him to use it? Who is drawing all the robots there, and why? Yes, I read the PC screens and info-posts, even the ones off the main path. I wouldn't say this is necessarily a problem with the story unless it was supposed to be self-contained.