Really good.

I thoroughly enjoyed this - I chose the white orb and left it in the fire. I am not sure if there is a different ending if you pick the black orb.

I love the two intertwined narratives going on and while the literature was a bit thick at times, the choice of passages was really well done.

Overall great job and the only text based game I've seen so far.

It's the first time I've read interactive fiction during a game jam, and the feeling is really strange, yet enjoyable, a complete mood swing. Your piece feels really eerily quiet, with the quaint and sometimes morbid descriptions interleaved with Jeffries' deep observations. I couldn't finish the story without looking at the source (is that cheating or skimming?), but the feeling I got, that the dead were more alive than the living, was something new.
Thank you for that!

@morphine I don't think it's saying too much to say that although the ending is the same, the black orb takes a separate path, so you haven't seen everything without it. Thanks for the feedback!

@Damienp One huge improvement that I think the game needs is some better hinting for the final leg of the game, so I totally understand skimming. Thank you for the kind words.

well executed. it is a classic text adventure, which is not that common in ludum dare, and with the theme this time, I wasnt sure if you can do it at all. But you managed to do so and I have only one minor complaint, a "help" command to get a list of verbs might be cool, especially for a ludum dare event. At least a short list for the most common verbs would help to get to the fun part of the game faster :-)

Nice self contained text adventure. The essay sections were a bit long for me but this isn't really my genre. I played through to the end. As noted some more verb support would make it a bit more complete, but time is short in these comps!

Great game. A help on what actions you can use would be appreciated

I went with the black orb, and read through to the end. This is really not my literary genre - I'm a skeptic and atheist so reading about souls and faux-immortality didn't strike home. And probably for that reason I found the ending really unsatisfying. At the risk of spoiling the ending, there's no closure as to what the thing is, it's just described as "inexpressible". The others have words, but this didn't.

I don't know how much of this was yours and how much was borrowed from the public domain, so it's hard to rate this fairly from a Compo perspective, this feels like it belongs more in the Jam. For what it's worth the wordsmithing is compelling both in the weird introverted descriptive things (which did make me hate the protagonist, but objectively they're just well written) and in the more direct "here's what happens" adventure game stuff.

I would have also liked closure on the people in the cottage and garden. I didn't understand what role they were supposed to play, or what they were supposed to symbolize. But again, not my genre, there's probably something I'm missing.

The puzzles were surprisingly compelling and logical. The world was small enough I could navigate it easily and find all the items I needed easily as well. I did get a bit lost after I picked up the orb (tried putting it in the cottage, boathouse, sea, brook, and outhouse). I think you could have given a bit more direction there. But it was the last real puzzle so it's not the end of the world.

I tend to avoid word-heavy games, and I tend to avoid supernatural/spiritualist literature. But this pulled me in, for some reason. Nice work.

At first I didn't realize the text/essay wasn't your original work, and was impressed. In contrast with the last commenter, the subject matter did strike home with me (more so; as a Christian I can't say it hit the mark exactly either). I especially enjoyed the continuing narrative mixed in with the parallel 'gameplay,' and the divergence with conventional wisdom which assumes the 'super-natural' is actually 'super.' However, as also noted by others, I'm not sure I can really praise that as your own work...

Anyhow, I'm not usually one for text adventures, but this being one, gameplay was smooth as silk and very intuitive. Any issue I had was not at all to do with bugs or difficulty in interaction with the UI or whatever. Actually, the only issue was after getting the orb.

Kudos on contributing in a unique way, with a good playlist going in the background this was an interesting and unexpected path/adventure to go on.