Keep It Alive by Deadwave Games

Keep It Alive - by Deadwave Games
CONTENT WARNING: Death: of children and animals, Blood, Murder, Body Horror, Swearing.
An interactive horror story.
It has music - so get those headphones on!
Apologies to any non-English speakers, there's quite a bit of reading - so if you struggle, maybe skip this one, but thanks for stopping by.
Please, if you could avoid any spoilers in the comments, we'd really appreciate it!
| Youtube | https://deadwave-games.itch.io/keep-it-alive |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/keep-it-alive-36 |
Ratings
| Overall | 228th | 3.984⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1258th | 3.3⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1053th | 3.371⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 661th | 3.922⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1345th | 3.531⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 91th | 4.172⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 6th | 4.594⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
And the way player progresses through the game works so well, adding a lot of suspense and tension.
As someone who occasionally enjoys the musical works of Myrkur, Chelsea Wolfe, Vàli and similar, I have to say I loved the music, it fits so well.
And it is freaking terrifying. I hate it, in a good way. I was horrified by the inevitability, the choice to make it that way really works.
To be clear, I found the game so terrifying that at some point I almost could not keep going. I do not read horror stories and I have to say that this felt a lot more scary than Amnesia. I did manage to finish it but oh gods.
Extremely well done horror text game, simple but so on point. Much better than the same story in static text, the game format helped so much.
Notes: I had to look away from the game and the music ran out. I think the music running out did hit the mood but writing was so good I still felt it strongly.
I also really liked the few artworks, it fitted nice in the story.
BTW: are there different engings? I'm asking because there were different options sometimes
My only complain is that sometimes music was too loud and I had to turn it down a little and then the ambient sound was too low.
The writing was really good. Please keep exploring this genre.
It did seem a bit light on interactivity for interactive fiction. When it offered choices they didn't seem to impact the story much (I replayed it to confirm this, but even on first playthrough it felt like the story was quite on-rails). Obviously that's quite understandable for a jam game, but if you're planning to expand on this it would be great if the story could branch a bit more.