The Lonely Captain by nander

About
This is a little game in which you control a vessel in a strange world. It's a game about enjoying a downtempo mood, with a (hopefully nice) story.
Installation
For windows, download either the 32bit or 64bit zip file, and unzip. Then run the EXE file.
For Linux, install Love2d 0.10.2. Then download the .love file, and run it using Love2d.
Controls
Control by clicking on the compass, or on the options. You can very much navigate when outside the control room.
Doesn't have a pause feature (on purpose).
More explanation will follow soon.
Downloads
https://github.com/LD38-nanderv/LD38
http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptain.love
http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptainWin32.zip
http://nander.net/assets/TheLonelyCaptainWin64.zip
Credits
Game made by Nander Voortman
Audio made with a Yamaha PSS-570
Game runs on Love2d.
Ratings
| Given | 8🗳️ | 1🗨️ |
Writing was nice, good vocab, but the ending was really anticlimactic (especially after those space things referenced in the story) :D But yeah, can't have much writing in 48 hours
@euske These are distances to objects you die if you collide with them.
It was a lot of writing in a short time.
Ending was a bit meh, but has lots more potential.
I'd still consider it to be kinda text-adventure, or at least, CYOA.
That thought aside, I loved this experience. A minimal control scheme which distracts you from a text adventure is not something I've seen before, and I do adore it. Every other instance I've seen of a game merging long text narratives and action gameplay, the two have had a solid dividing line. One has always been paused while the other was going. But this merges the two in a really satisfying manner. Great work on that.
One concern about the story: after all the dialogue is finished and I'm on the ending screen, I get to keep playing. Based on how the story ends, my course of action is obviously to aim for something to crash into. And what I'm expecting is a final piece of dialogue that accepts death as the final solution to the predicament.
While the story's still unresolved, I'd be ok with the death scene being "I didn't want to die. Press space to try again", but once the story implies I should kill myself, I want a longer paragraph accepting it.
Some more nitpicks about the mechanics: I wasn't too clear on what the 3 red numbers meant. I didn't know if their order mattered, if the objects were some distance to my left/right, or directly in front of me presented in random order. Also, it seemed like sometimes I'd be getting really low numbers (~300), then turn a couple degrees and suddenly get really large ones. I just wasn't sure how to map the numbers to the actual map I was navigating, which meant avoiding obstacles mainly came down to clicking around the compass until the numbers got big again.
Maybe that was in line with your narrative though.
Still, I really enjoyed this game, and would love to see more like it, with the act of reading and absorbing information itself a realtime gameplay mechanic. I'm looking forward to seeing more games you end up making.
I kind of purposely didn't fully explain the mechanic, because the character doesn't know what's going on either. I didn't want to 'ruin' the story by having to explain mechanics.