Woosh.. super deep take on the theme, really loved the arstyle and the mood of the game. Very original, congrats on your game!! I loved it

I experienced some bugs that prevented me from seeing some of the dialogue and I found the voice sound effects to be distracting but i really enjoyed the general mood of the game as well as the pixel art. Nice job. Cool concept!

I think on the 26th it stopped working. I could only talk to the doctor and she doesn't say anything. I can't get into any doors.

Good job with the amount of polish! I can tell a lot of care went into trying to convey an emotional, thoughtful story. The visuals were really cohesive, the sound was great, and the voices were nice!

I noticed half way through the second day that some of the dialog was missing. I can't tell if that's because of a bug or if you ran out of time.

Either way, fantastic first jam! I hope you choose to do many more!

its a great idea.. i just see a bug (the i cant see all the text in the top screen)
good visual novel, good idea and good team

Really nice take on the theme, and I always love seeing visual novels on jams ! However, was kinda disapointed when I experienced some bugs where I missed some dialog and from day 26 I couldn't do anything anymore :(. Would have loved to see how it developed !

Thanks for all your comments and reviews ! The game is indeed not finished, but we did our best :)

I recorded myself playing, message me on the Jam’s discord and I’ll send it to you if you want. The "narrative experience" was promising but since it's not finished, yeaaaaah. I mean I'm sure you had a great vision. I didn't finish my narrative game either on my first GMTK jam, those things always take time.

Great entry especially for your first game :D

Very original take on the theme! I really liked the overall mood. Great job!

hahah very funny voice acting :smile_cat:

Very nice game with a kind of bitter/sad take on the theme.
The game felt very polished and you can be proud of it especially considering this is your first gamejam!

Overall very nice entry. Good job!

Nice take on the theme, there are a lot of stories that could be told along these lines and I think you all did a pretty good job making a sincere project.

I do have some points I want to make on the dialog system, as it is a significant component of the game:
- In almost every game, the idiom is: press the dialog button to display all of the current message, and then press it again to advance to the next message. But in this game, pressing the dialog button will just advance to the next message without finishing the current message. This meant that I accidentally skipped a message on day 11, and at that point I just restarted the game so that I could get back to where I was.
- The text is line-wrapped as it is written out, which means that it tends to flash out the side of the box temporarily as the message is written. If the text is pre-formatted to fit in the box from the get-go, it will look better. (This is somewhat tricky to do completely correctly, but if you have time to polish a text box, it could be worth getting this working right).
- There was one spot where the dialog did not fit vertically in the box.

There was also one inconsistency I noticed in the story, I believe on Day 45, where the doctor told me I had exactly one patient for the day, but then when I was talking to the patient I said I have to go help my other patients.

Now these things didn't really affect the experience for me that much, they're just the things I think are most valuable to point out as possible areas of improvement. These nitpicks do not really affect the story that much overall.

As far as the story itself is concerned I really like how it focuses on a small set of characters, and how the third patient comes back for the end of the story. The idea of ending up in the exact same spot after being literally a month away from death is just pretty compelling, I think, and it is especially compelling in this format. The relationships that are developed between the player character and the patients are compelling as well; I think you did a good job having enough reoccurring narrative elements that it feels like a connection is being built, while also having developments in the plot over time.

As a "writer" myself (having no ability to do anything else game related) I'm psyched by games that go all in on the narrative approach in such a short amount of time. Rather than point out some of the bugs and hick-ups others have I'd just like to commend you for broaching such a unique approach. In the future you might consider condensing the depth of a single story by setting up story trees to create the feel of player agency.
Overall, great job!

That was a very very good narrative jam game!

The graphics are simple and work fine, the sound is well done too. The text are well written and not too long, and the rhythm of emotions during the story is very well put together. Not having choices was actually not a problem for me, I liked it.

Good job on your first game jam!

Congrats on your first Jam, very interesting take on the theme.

I didn't mind not having choices, but this seemed like the perfect kind of game to have some hidden story elements - there was the message behind the photo, but it was a bit of a shame that wasn't developed a bit further.

I like the graphics and think they fit well.

The music was nice and surprisingly relaxing given the narrative.

Good job on submitting your first jam game!