I love the style and the vibe of the game, i enjoyed it a lot good work!

This is amazing. You have a great work flow here obviously. The style and atmosphere is amazing. I love it!

The art, UI, and dialogue is really good! Thanks for making this! :D

The art style and music in this are so, so good.

Very cute style and warming story! I've pass the game but there are some bugs: items places "under" inventory panel and I've used them by feel + I got ending cutscene while interacted with only two characters out the house (several times) (it works even with one character)

Very cute and atmospheric. I did things in the wrong order the first time (picked up everything in the house before realizing that I could go outside) which triggered a lot of out-of-context dialogue options. But it's a sweet little game overall. "Friendly exorcist" is a great job title.

@3lstmsinatrenchcoat Yup, we've just been made aware of this issue. I've added a note about talking to all the characters before picking up any items.

@uboretsky Ahh sorry to hear about the bugs! Thanks for pointing them out.

....My heartstrings.... ouch, that hurt. You just yanked out all of my heartstrings and I'm completely fine with it. I'm feeling ~~a little~~ extremely emotionally touched right now....

I've been playing games about wizards, and sentient tables (by the Keyboard Cowboys of course), and Hatsune Miku with jetpacks for hair, and then I play this. This is a piece of pure emotional perfection: a beautiful story as always, spectacular music setting the mood (once of the best game atmospheres I've experienced), and fittingly adorable graphics. This thing is a total heartstring puller, I'm absolutely speechless after playing it (which is why I'm glad this is over the Internet, because when leaving comments no one can see how dumb you look when your heartstrings have been removed and you're left speechless). This thing has such an atmosphere to it, Mood shouldn't be capped out at 5 stars for this.

These games are always such a big highlight of Ludum Dare for me, it's one of the things that makes me so excited for every Ludum Dare (also the whole "Ludum Dare will bring back my motivation for gamedev" part). Every Ludum Dare I've been a part of you've always left me speechless, and this game went above and beyond. Thank you for once again giving me the chance to get extremely emotional over a several-minute game!

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Sincerely, the random non-binary person who has expressed immense love for these games,

Peace Of Cake Games

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Also, I did the anti-bug game plot advice on the Itch page by the way, it worked flawlessly like that. 👍

Very cute game! I love the art style and I appreciate that you got a lot of story content in here, that's not easy to do for a game jam. There did seem to be a decent amount of bugs, I wasn't able to give any items to characters or use them where it felt like I needed to. It also felt like I was getting wrong slices of dialogue for where I was in the game. The main character kept saying things like that she'd talked to the ghost or talked to the husband when I hadn't done those things. Nevertheless, it's a really charming game that I'd love to play more of.

Really charming game! I was surprised how long the dialogues were, nice work! One thing I wasn't a big fan of were the dialogue bubbles always resizing, I feel like it would be less jarring if the text was at the bottom of the screen. Nice job!

The game's atmosphere and music is spot on, and the end was very touching, great job! The character is maybe a bit slow, but other than that I liked the game a lot

I really love graphics and atmosphere ! Good job, it's a nice game and the story is well done :)

I really love the art style! its really cute! Also loving the music! It's a vibe!

Game looks really high-quality and atmospheric, it was nice to spend time in it. Thank you!

I love love love the art of this game! It's super cute! :3 But I think the inventory system somehow didn't quite worked while I played it ^^' The items never left the inventory even if they triggered dialog with other persons.. so... that was strange ^^'

I love LD for a chance to discover little story driven gems like this one, with it's own pacing, depth and atmosphere. Nice job!
I wish you'd add names into speech bubbles or extend dialog triggers a bit, cause characters overlaps and I found a bit hard to catch who's talking.
I have similar concept with unstable relationships and a ghost, btw =)

Was a bit unsure what to do at first. Reading through some of these comments helped get me started, impressed by managing to pull of a story game like this in such a short amount of time

I liked the music and cute graphics! However I couldn't figure out how to use the items. The characters say "thank you" for giving them the items, but it seems like they are still in this character's possession.
The atmosphere is great!

Great music, audio, art, and overall mood, and the story is touching and interesting. I especially love the music. In general, I think the controls and the order of events could be tweaked to give a little bit more clarity to the dialogue. By starting in the house -- with all the objects, the first inclination of a new player is to pick up and examine everything inside the house before going outside. It also isn't quite clear if/how items are "used." With a little bit of polish on these elements the flow of the story could more easily take center stage. Even so, great work.

the sound design was so cute:
i love the ghostly sounds when pressing buttons
and the dialogue boops
and the raccoon noise when you pass the raccoon
the music is so precious too!

the art is really good, the character sprites are very cute!

here's some critique:

i think the fade transition that happens, i.e when pressing settings or clicking through the letter, could go faster, because it felt kind of soporific

it seems like the text speed setting doesn't do anything unless you put it all the way to the right, in which case it shows all the text immediately; I would've preferred to be able to set the text speed faster but not all presented upon being shown the next dialogue

sometimes i felt a bit lost in the dialogue; like when the husband says "if you can show me proof" - what proof? and something about "I see you have that photo of my wife and our kids" - i was like, i do? i don't see anything like that in my inventory? and then when he was like "how did you find this?" and you're like "she wanted me to show you this" or something like that, I was like, what item are they talking about? lol.

some strange phrasings I noticed: "I'm here because I noticed something missing from your relationship with your mother" (I think if someone said that to me I'd be pretty offended and not want to continue talking lol) and "I saw your her ghost"


some confusions:

there's a strange sorting bug: when my character is all the way down at the bottom of the map, the husband and the son are on the wrong sorting layer (i.e. the husband seems to be under the tent)

also i wasn't able to get to the end because the white-haired daughter needed another item (which I couldn't figure out what since the dialogue is clipped in half) even though I'm like 99.5% sure I'd gotten all the items?

I didn't notice the "You can get duplicate items by exiting and re-entering the house" bug - maybe that got fixed?

in conclusion i wish that the characters were more specific when referring to items, so i knew what item each character wanted from me before i left the conversation; i left each conversation getting a good vibe check from them regarding how they felt about the ghost (i.e. mom was cold and caring, i sacrificed a lot for my wife's dreams) which made them feel 3d, but i couldn't remember which item they wanted, which resulted in feeling like i didn't have a clear goal throughout the game, just to pick up as many orange outlined items as possible.

i think this was super good for being made in 3 days, i love the creepy/cute vibes it gives off and it was actually pretty relaxing and enjoyable to play despite it being about exorcism! and I always love a good family drama, so thank you for the tea 🍵 if you ever make another version of this i'd love to play and see the end!

I definitely feel like a few tweaks are in order to make sure users go through this game as intended. This is an exceptional effort with high quality artwork and audio, not to mention a surprising amount of dialogue... but unfortunately the structure makes its shortcomings the first thing most players will see.

I had a difficult time getting through this due to the items bug where characters refuse to register anything you do correctly if you picked up the related item before speaking with them. This issue is made worse by the fact that you start the game in the house with no guidance, and don't have the ability to interact with the ghost-- I promptly picked up every item I could because I assumed it was what I was supposed to do.

It was only after replaying and forcing myself to avoid all items that I got through most of the game. I like the range of characters, and the sheer amount of dialogue in the game is staggering for an LD entry-- with branching options, too! My only real narrative criticism is that it could have been funny to give the exorcist no knowledge of the author, mirroring the player's experience.

Mechanically the game presents itself as a point-and-click, but I wonder if this was truly necessary as it feels like the drag-and-drop applications are very limited. I feel that this game may have been better suited as a pure dialogue-driven adventure instead of having a drag-and-drop inventory. A point-and-click adventure typically lets the player interact with lots of things that aren't necessarily game related just to get a sense of the world, and that isn't really present here-- no doubt due to time constraints for Ludum Dare, which is totally understandable. Scrapping this mechanic would allow the game to be entirely focused on the characters and dialogue.

For a postjam, I would recommend the following:

- Add a small notebook-themed questlog that updates as you talk to the NPCs.

- Move Alice slightly to the left.

- Add a check to items to make sure you already talked to the related NPC; if the check fails, give a small description of the item and avoid picking it up. Start items as simple interact points with a different material, then highlight them _after_ you need them or add a sparkling particle effect. An example would be that the Sketchbook is not highlighted until you talk to Harper, then if you interact with the sketchbook anyway you get a simple self-dialogue saying "It's some kind of sketchbook. There's a few pencils and other art supplies here, too." Then after talking to Harper, the sketchbook has the yellow outline indicating that you can pick it up.

- When referencing an item in dialogue, the item should appear in the character's hands. This is the best solution I can think of to the question @angela-he brought up as I had the same issue talking to Delilah's husband.

- Force the player to leave the house immediately after starting the game. Maybe add a scripted dialogue from the exorcist to herself along the lines of "This is haunted, no doubt. I should look for anyone nearby to find out more." before leaving the building automatically. This could potentially cause confusion about whether you can interact with the house or not, so I would highlight the front door when you go near it from the overworld as well.

- Either remove the click-and-drag functionality and purely base dialogue on inventory contents, or add special dialogues for giving the wrong item to certain individuals. This would either improve the feedback for clicking and dragging, or remove frustration from trying and failing to interact with the world.

- Add a Quit Game button to the pause menu that runs Application.Quit(), a small but welcome addition for downloadable versions.

Hopefully this comment doesn't feel too focused on the negatives. You had an interesting narrative for this entry and there's so much to appreciate about the submission, I just feel that some of the bugs will prevent others from seeing any of that since I felt encouraged to cause those gamebreaking bugs without realizing it.