Lemma Soft Forums

I think you created a great atmosphere through a conjunction of your writing, backgrounds and music. The empty city felt a little bit intimidating, but not necessarily scary. I liked that; it's probably how I'd feel if the same thing happened to me, so it really helped in drawing me into the story. The visual novel I'm in the middle of writing now has the protagonist in a similar situation to yours- so that made it all the more interesting!

It's probably because you wrote this in just 48 hours, but narration is straight and to the point, for the most part. That's definitely not a bad thing, though; sure, we didn't necessarily get to know much about our protagonist or anything, but it feels more like we were defining his (I dunno why I was convinced it was a he) wants, needs and personality through the actions he (or she!) takes. I think I've figured out what was going on- but I also reckon I'm embarrassingly wrong so I'll wait till other people post what they think happened before I put my theory out there!

Overall, like I said, I thought it was very good- especially considering the short time frame. This kind of psychological-supernatural story is right up my street, though, so I'm pretty biased! It was quite short, and I felt like it would've been nice if one or two of the paths was longer (I was egging my character on to try and break into the movie theatre with a lorry or something instead of just looking for a key!), but I'm sure that was probably because of time constraints.

- The transition from "I'm alone" realization to the planner is ... lacking. I suppose I have no grasp whatsoever on the narrator's personality, but he seems to take this in HUGE stride. There was zero emotional reaction from, and it's just matter of fact "oh, I'm alone, time to practice my Spanish."
- Which, by the way, is kinda hilarious. That and cleaning some random person's house. He's doing it just because why not. Here would be a case where he should be LOOTING, not cleaning. But those people sure aren't going to want to be bothered with all that dust (nevermind the breaking and entering).
- When I got the key from the movie theatre and it didn't work on any door, I thought "AH HA!" because you mentioned the pump thingy in the park being padlocked. I thought you designed some awesome puzzle solving. But I went back to the park and nothing happened. Maybe the park was just not salvageable by that point.
- I finished the game with what I assume is a bad ending, since I "never wake up." Maybe I should've taken a box of Cheerios with me from the grocery story instead of starving. xD I feel like this is a game with a lot of complexity and more to see, especially if gameplay is on a short timer like this. I feel like this is a challenge I need to figure out, and that the choices I made during dreaming were very important. Maybe more important than what I did each day (picking the most emotional responses to the questions seems to be wrong, and I suppose that does fit in with his ... seemingly disabled personality).
- Playing it again, going to different places more often ... Answered differently on the dream questions ... wound up in the cafeteria! Got a different end. Woot. Time to peek at your code. Sorrrryyyy, hehe.
- Ooh, I see that going to different locations secretly raised stats. Wow, did not even expect that.
Grocery Store, Park, Movie Theater - Curiosity
Library, Newspaper, Spanish - Memory
Radio, Cleaning, TV - Empathy
That makes a lot of sense! Now I see why you had them clean a house, to keep in touch with their humanity. Though it's still very odd and it would be looting (at least begin as such), but I'm also not sure ... if this is even reality for logic to be necessary. I'm assuming it's just all a dream, since that's what it feels like, though you could easily say no, it's some government induced coma experiment or whatever, since you're the author, but the ending lines do more explicitly say "dream." Which makes the behavior make a lot more sense, since that's how I act in a dream. "Oh, everyone in the world has disappeared. I need to go to the movie theater." That's dream sense.
But the question remains, what do these stats do?
- Looking at your Dreams ... oooh, the choices gave you bonuses to your stats! So by choosing the most emotional responses (but by being mostly curious in my planning), I got a bad ending since my stats were wishy washy.
- Oh, lol, I'm stupid. I said before that I got a bad ending because I said "I never wake up" but I think I misread it and it's still "I HOPE I never wake up" for every ending. Which leads me to believe ... that maybe it wasn't all just a dream, and that everyone really did disappear, and that this "dream" that he's having is him escaping (maybe dying?) from that world. Maybe it's radiation poisoning or something. Haha. I like that it's really open ended that I could just hypothesize forever.

Okay. After dissecting your game and see that it is a lot more complicated that I first believed, I have to commend you on this. I think it actually has the perfect atmosphere and the narrator is just creepily not there enough to lend itself to being either a dream, that he's traumatized, sick from whatever killed everyone else, or that he's just mentally challenged. I prefer the dream explanation since that's how I would act in a dream, and wake up later and go "I practiced Spanish???" but it made perfect sense while asleep. Anyway. Non spoiler review:

By the way, is there any other ending other than the one with the cafeteria and 'I hope this dream never ends' and the one with the foreign country and, again, the saying of 'I hope this never ends'?

The thing that cemented it for me was the fact that the park still isn't swampy/the library is still fine/the supermarket food isn't rotting on the last day- they only change if you go there yourself. As well as that, each activity felt quite disjointed- nothing carried from one even to the next. That might have been due to the coding, but to me it makes more sense to assume the protagonist was dreaming all along!

curiosity

The whole game I had this feeling it wasn't all real. The choices were something out of a dream. If I were in that situation (after I have fully realized it and got over the sadness/anger/confusion, something the character just skips entirely) I would raid the nearest store, eat all the junk food I could before it spoiled, drive someone's car (I can't drive!), go through my neighbors' stuff, probably break expensive things (because I can!), go on the internet to see if it still works, watch movies I have on my computer, listen to my music at full volume at night and slowly go insane.
This is just what I would do, so someone else might do other things, but I really think most people would just break doors and not fish for keys, or go to a newspaper stand so read a newspaper, not try to read a wet one off the ground. Besides, a pond doesn't turn into a swamp in a week. This is why I'm pretty sure it was all some sort of dream or hallucination, or maybe the guy wasn't mentally stable in the first place? Or maybe... ah, but I could sit here all day and think up reasons.

I got three endings and I guess that's all of them. I was too lazy to look at the code... -_-;
I don't think there was much of a difference between them, but I always think big, so don't mind me. For the size of this game, it was fine.