Bedlam at the Harvest Festival by VictorRypl
A short deduction game (in the vein of Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol) where you need to follow documents and clues to find the culprits.
The goddesses were not pleased with this year's Harvest Festival.
The skies woke red, the wine turned sour and the crops began to rot.
This only happens if all goddesses are displeased.
Find out what went wrong at the festival and name who offended each goddess.
They will be sacrificed.
Spare no mercy.
All citizens of this village who erred, either through intent, disattention, weakness or the guidance of others must die.
*Made using Gamemaker 1.4, Photoshop and 1BitDragon. *

Ratings
| Overall | 266th | 3.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 282th | 2.857⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 109th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 224th | 3.381⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 294th | 2.886⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 253th | 2.614⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 169th | 2.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 209th | 3.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
In case it helps, I got 4/5 solved in a bit over an hour. I got stuck on the 5th and had to come back in a fresh play session, but eventually brute forced an answer (see below).
(*minor spoilers*):
First, most of the people in the play seemed out of order, so I couldn't figure out who to blame. Second, I got confused on the hearsay mentioning a director because there is also someone with the title of festival director, so I kept trying to sacrifice that person.
But hey, by the end, I felt like I had a special connection with some of the characters I was trying to sacrifice :smirk: and overall I was sad when it was over.
Love the oldschool art. Music gets repetitive after while, but hey it's jam game.
Good job!
Regarding the family trees, it seemed like some people had 2 mothers which made things rather confusing with working out the number of bags of grain?
The game was a nice change of pace.
Overall I liked it and spent a long time trying to work it out so good job!
I think that finding a way to give information more progressively could help to ingest information, step by step, because there is a lot to take when launching the game, and it can be hard to go through every page for lots of people (kids nowadays don't read anymore :older_man:), but i don't have any specific idea on how to implement this
Also i think that some kind of tools integrated in the game (like maybe the possibility to write custom notes or draw on the pages to make diagrams or arrows) could help players in their reflexions, and also help with attention and commitment to the game
I'm very curious, how do you design a game like this ? are you starting with the rules first ?
I enjoyed working out the puzzles, some of which were definitely tricky. Keeping my notepad window at the ready certainly helped! I particularly enjoyed the twist of logic that helped me solve the "mother" sacrifices, that one was very clever.
In this kind of game, I expect that the presentation of the game is intentionally a bit hard to interpret (like with some folks' sketchy signatures, or the sometimes tricky-to-read fonts). Trying to present the information as flavorfully as possible is the goal, any obfuscation we pick up along the way is just upside :smile:
I think that the only major hiccup in the logic of the game was related to the line:
> All citizens of this village who erred, either through intent, disattention, weakness or the guidance of others must die.
Some of the goddesses (thinking of Slainte in particular) didn't seem to quite be as strict as that rule would indicate - not that it's a problem, but I imagined that more people were involved in the chain of failures that made the problems occur. The blame game certainly is a tricky one, but when I did land on the accepted answers I was reasonably satisfied with the logic that got me there.
Related to that, I appreciate how lenient the results-checking was. My minor concerns with the little fiddly details of my answers were almost completely mitigated by the ability to just check my theory directly without downside.
Stepping outside of the direct experience of playing the game, I also appreciate what you were able to put together while keeping the game's technical implementation straightforward. It's hard to balance that sort of complexity against story, flavor, and writing, and usually the non-"gameplay" elements are first on the chopping block. The fact that you picked a design that let you flip those typical priorities upside-down makes for a refreshing entry.
Great job, thanks for putting together such a cool game submission!
Music was fine, if a repetitive after a long puzzle.
Nice work!
Really enjoy these kinda of puzzles, thanks for making one! I realise I made a few obvious mistakes (the rake for example..) Congrats on the great entry!