itch.io

I know I'm chiming in pretty late here, but I still wanted to comment with some suggestions that I jotted down while playing this. But first let me say that overall, this game is a big improvement over Escaped Chasm and serves as an effective introduction to an intriguing world that I'm  now interested in learning more about through your future works! The following notes are meant purely as CONSTRUCTIVE criticism and suggestions for the future.

• Even with the run option, movement still felt a little slow, and especially many of the large, empty, maze-like areas (which I wish there had been a bit less of) felt pretty long and boring to get through, especially while going back and forth or combing for anything you missed. In my opinion, I think the experience would have been better if your running speed had been just about 50-100% faster. Or, ideally, there could be a setting in the options menu or config settings to adjust how fast your running speed is to whatever the player  is most comfortable with.
• I think that, for the purposes of making the game's overall goal and the player's progression through it more evident as early as possible, the graveyard hut with the journal should have been placed much earlier in the game; even though that would have required some kind of justification as for why the girl had probably never come across it before. Or maybe you could find journal pages EVERY time you make progress, rather than only when you've unlocked a new journal scene (there could still be a separate message for when you cross those thresholds).
• This one is probably a matter of personal taste, but I feel like the game is really held back a lot by the deliberate game-boy-style graphical limitations; maybe I'd feel differently if I had a lot of nostalgia for the game boy graphics, but I don't, really. I think this would look a lot better at around 16-bit resolution.
• The block-pushing puzzle in the "Fire Crystal Dungeon" should definitely have SOME kind of visual distinction between the boxes that you can push and the ones that you can't; it's quite confusing and frustrating in its current form.
• This one is VERY subjective, and there are certainly benefits to this approach for introducing these characters and this world; but I'm not sure if there was a good reason this story couldn't have been told in more chronological order. It feels like it would have been more interesting seeing the past events we head about events unfold in front of us rather than just hearing about them in hindsight, IMHO. I'm reminded of a prompt that serves as a piece of advice for storytelling: "Is this the most interesting part of these characters' lives? And if not, why aren't you showing us that, instead?" The lack of any real conflict or drama with this approach makes things relaxed, but provides little tension or direction and makes it difficult to sustain interest.
• I'm disappointed that we never learned anything about these previous nightmares from Zera that were alluded to, or got more specifics as to the past relationship between him and Yoki; and it was very unclear to me why, if Yoki truly believes that she could take Zera in a fight, she doesn't threaten him to knock off the nightmares or get his ass kicked. It also seems unclear why she's OK with leaving the RPG heroes to their implied doom at his hands when he  refuses to agree to any mercy for them. It's not a problem that Zera remains a pretty mysterious figure by the end of this game; but I think it IS a problem that we seem to still know so much less about him than Yoki does by the end, because it leaves many of their interactions feeling frustratingly confusing.

Really interesting game with, I think, some very important messages. This is the kind of game that I think it's genuinely valuable for people to play; it's even entirely possible that it will save some lives, by the improved awareness it raises in its players. [spoilers ahead] 

It's kind of brilliant how the game at first just seems to be some kind of lighthearted romantic story, or at most like this "goth gf" is going to turn out to have some personal issues that need working out; and that makes the sudden turn with your roommate hit you completely off guard, which is the perfect way of evoking in the player the emotions of how sudden and devastating an impact suicide can have on everyone around the victim. I can see an argument that it's kind of unfair the way it's basically impossible to catch your roommate's issues on the first issue even if you're trying to pay attention to anything, since you can't do anything without stepping away from your computer in the middle of your conversation (which there are no hints to do and which is kind of awkward with the interface); but I think that lends to the point of how hard (and maybe sometimes impossible) it can be to catch the warning signs of suicidal thoughts. 

Honestly, when that dream sequence started at the start of my second playthrough I was expecting this to turn out to be game like "One Chance" where if you try to start a new game it just puts you back into the ending where she's already dead, emphasizing that there are no second chances after someone dies; and that might have been effective, but allowing you to go again and talk to your roommate and help save her by listening to her and supporting her DOES send a more proactive sort of message about how you CAN reach out to people in that sort of situation, which is probably a more important lesson to put out into the world. 

If I have one criticism, it's that it's a little TOO easy to get your roommate to confide in you and to help her out once you actually talk to her, and that some the dialogue in the good endings is kind of cheesy and a little too saccharine.  That, combined with the ability to replay after getting the bad ending and change things to a happy outcome, makes the good endings feel more like a bit of dreamy wish fulfillment than like reality; however, if this really was based on true experiences, and for anyone who's really had to deal with someone they know committing suicide... I can completely understand wanting to include the chance to end on a bit of cheerful wish fulfillment, rather than the dark finality of reality.

Interesting concept; I tried it after starting to watch Markiplier's video, and wanting to play it for myself before finishing watching how his playthroughs turned out. I have to say, however, that after putting in the time to try to find every ending and line of dialogue (because I'm a bit of an obsessive completionist), I'm disappointed with how little any of your choices in the main conversation seem to actually matter. Of course, that seems like it could be a sort of moral of a story themed around suicidal thoughts, that sometimes there just really is no right thing for you to say, nothing you can do to help someone who isn't ready to accept help (although that seems like a rather non-constructive message compared to, say, a game that might take inspiration from the conversational techniques employed by actual suicide prevention hotline attendants in terms of what does and doesn't help the caller to hang in there and seek help, and actually sort of train the players to be better prepared to help out a suicidal individual if they should ever meet one. That's what I was expecting this game to be, and my disappointment with it isn't so much because it's bad as because it seems like it could've been so much better and more important if it had been that. Maybe you could try an approach closer to that in the future, if you were interested.). But there's also the fact that your conversation path can seem to leave him in a variety of different degrees of optimism, cheerfulness, and determination to live (with several endings explicitly saying he won't hurt himself or has decided not to do anything hasty, and others leaving with him ruminating on how the world will be better off without him), yet they all lead to the same "bystander" ending if you don't start texting with him, and the exact same texting conversation if you do (save a few minor changes if you told him you loved him but wouldn't go to see him). Almost all the variation in endings was within the weird visit to his apartment which, while interesting, made absolutely no sense for the player to go through for a stranger they'd never met (and is bad advice for players trying to consider how they would deal with an actual call from someone suicidal), especially the "love" endings (unless it was a sort of Undertale-esque satire of players' tendency to do everything possible to try to get a good ending and/or see everything the game has to offer even if it leads them to extreme or unorthodox behavior; I sort of got that vibe and it was kind of interesting, but it didn't feel explored well and I'm not sure if it was intentional). It's also very conspicuous, as others have noted and especially considering the way ending 1 seems to imply you should be trying to find out his address, that after you say you'll visit and he gives you his address (the only way to learn it) you have no option to give it to the police or suicide prevention instead of just marching down there yourself. If this game were ever to be revised/expanded, I'd like to see at least a couple different endings and/or text conversations based on your phone dialogue choices. Also, it was weird how much the guy seemed like three totally different personalities by phone, by text, and in person; and he didn't sound drunk or high on the phone, so he must have downed his stuff pretty quickly as soon as he hung up to be that messed up by the time he's texting you (unless there's an implied time gap in between).

I probably sounded very critical with all that, but I hope it was constructive, and I hope I'm clear that it's only because I think there's a lot of potential to this concept that I'm wishing it was better and have spent a while thinking and writing about what critiques I have. The voice acting was great, and the apartment visit had a splendidly creepy atmosphere, yet I think Mr. Nobody remained mostly sympathetic by virtue of the fact that he never actually attacks you or forces himself upon you, no matter what you do to him or how threatening he might seem, which is tremendously valuable for maintaining the apparent tragedy of his situation. It was also interesting the way that, although you could only get a little bit of his character from a single playthrough, you could put together an interesting picture out of exploring the different dialogue branches; for instance, he implies in several routes that he's a killer, but exploration lets you infer that he's specifically killed for money in order to get out of debt.

Finally, and unrelated to comments about the game itself, I notice a number of other users commenting about issues getting the game to run; I had a lot of trouble myself with my antivirus software (Norton Security Suite) repeatedly trying to delete the game with overprotective paranoia, despite my attempts to restore and exclude it (I ultimately had to temporarily disable my whole antivirus protection while I started the game up!). Perhaps some others, even with other antivirus, are having similar issues. I think these kind of tiny indie games can trip false alarms on antivirus software easily, probably owing to being unusual files with little established history of other users using them safely, although that should diminish as the file ages and more people download it. In the meantime, it might help to make the general recommendation for users to try disabling their antivirus software while extracting the .zip file and running the .exe if they're having trouble getting the game to run.