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Review
This is a maze-like Twine, where you're meant to explore all the endings. But one of the endings, the ending that seems most likely to lead to a decent-ish outcome for the main character, ends in a Twine error message:
There isn't a temp variable named _E in this place.
Temp variables only exist inside the same passage, hook, or lambda in which they're created.
As for what's here, the main character is often confused, and writes/thinks in a confusing way, making it unclear when big gaps of time are elapsing, what's happening right now in play vs. what's already happened, or what's at stake for the main character. (In many of the endings, you select the option to do nothing and die, because the main character's life is meaningless.)
I can't tell whether the author intended this to be confusing (the error message inspires little confidence).
Maybe with that bug fixed I'd have a better sense of what the author intended.
Comments on this review
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In its current state, this game is a draft of a draft of the game — and the route that I've uploaded to introcomp.org is the most developed one of the multiple routes I intend to have in my game. And even then, this route is 20% finished at best. Ambitious, I know.
I am sorry that I've not debugged the endings properly; there is a typo in the naming of the very last scene. It should have been "space_49-1-09-E", not "space_49-1-09_E".
There is no option to re-upload the game to IntroComp, so unfortunately, I cannot fix that.
You, however, if interested in seeing what is hidden there, could fix the HTML a bit and check it out!
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> As for what's here, the main character is often confused and writes/thinks in a confusing way, making it unclear when big gaps of time are elapsing, what's happening right now in play vs. what's already happened, or what's at stake for the main character.
The state of confusion is wholly intended, both for the player and character. Though, in the future, I would add options/routes that, based on the player's action/inaction, would enable the character to be less confused and shell-shocked. There's a murder mystery in the background, which I have not yet developed in the game I've sent.
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On time — it's a fair point I agree with. Adding time would probably ground the player better + give an estimate of how much time, in actuality, was spent here and there.
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> In many of the endings, you select the option to do nothing and die, because the main character's life is meaningless.
That's the whole point of the "doing nothing" option, though. If the player is not actively trying to rescue themselves, but chooses to do nothing/brood/give up — the character dies.
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I appreciate that you've played through my game, no matter how raw/unfinished it was, and also provided constructive feedback. You gave me valid points to work with.
Thank you!
Max.
