Doesn't work for me. Unity doesn't seem to finnish loading.
Just a general tip would be to add more in the description and image department. :)
I myself did the absolute bare minimum so can't really complain there myself but one of you 5 guys should take that respoinsibility.

Hey, nice game! The music and story is very nice! The UI can be quite buggy at times, and the Z order isn't always correct. I think I also broke the game because I can't go to sleep if though I did everything. But stull, I really enjoyed playing it!

Really cool game. It kinda reminded me of Disco Elysium in terms of the atmosphere and how bleak the tone felt. Only criticism is that when you get to put the herbs in the bowl you have to use the arrow keys to move the selector, but you use WASD to move the character so that took me a little to figure out.

As mentioned above, love the bleak atmosphere. And the art looks beautiful. Well done!

@shahinm Hey, sorry for that. The first build of the game had a critical error and it didn't simply run for some reason. We fixed it in accordance to the jam rules, so it works now. You can give it a try, if you want to! ;)

Such a strong experience! As a huge fan (and dev myself) of adventure games, this was a must-play for me. Very strong story, amazing atmosphere and music, cool gameplay elements (such as wood chopping and fishing), and I really liked the little details like changing music and petting the dog. These little details are what makes these games on another level.

One of the coolest entries I've played, for sure.

Note: I had issues with some of the dialogue windows. It happened to me like three times that either the text was moved to the bottom of the screen, or the dialogue window was completely empty. I think it was just a minor bug and didn't really ruined my gameplay, but I still wanted to let you know about this.

@iluvatar Thank you for your opinion! It's so nice to hear from Eru Ilúvatar himself. ;) We will certainly take care of bugged dialogue windows in a few weeks, as we plan to make a polished post-jam version of the game.

PS. I already had your game in my must play list before you posted. I will surely give it a try in a few days.

Very grim atmosphere, I love that. Though the Fishing mechanics are incredibly confusing, I didn't know what to do.

The game's mood is great, the music helps a lot with the atmosphere of the game too and I like the wood chopping mechanic. The dialogue UI in fullscreen can be a bit buggy, but overall good job!

This broke me 😢 I love how much you can feel the atmosphere. My only complaint would be that making herbs uses arrow keys instead of WASD so it took me some days to figure it out.

I tried a couple times to get different endings without killing the dog, lol. Kept dying in my bed. Never found another ending. Too frustrated to try a 4th time.

It's extremely unclear how much you need to do wood per night, etc. Why can the kid and I survive multiple days without food but the dog instantly dies (or runs away or we eat him or whatever)?

The golden coin neighbor is a scam. Didn't give me any fish. Or, is he feeding my kid for free for that night specifically? In which case, don't need to feed him that day lol.

The hitbox on Ann's gravestone is too big. Keep hitting it when I want to go fishing.

And as far as fishing goes: what is the point of having a counter in the bottom right if it is literally only possible to get 1 fish per day? Just get rid of the counter, it decreases the moodiness of the situation by making it seem like it's possible to get more fish if I do the minigame right. But I've tried waiting it out to see if better fish come, they don't. Fish, can, can. Can, fish, can. Can, can, fish. Can a fish do the can can? How can a can-fish do the can can? I'm getting ice-fishing madness over here listening to the wind howl and reading Ann's giant hitbox, lol.

There's a lot of potential in this game but as it stands it's just lacking enough information about what your choices do, which makes finding more than 1 ending hard. I really want to keep the dog alive so I keep starving instead lol. Wish I had feedback on how much food I can skip without dying at the end.

And does the apothecary medicine color puzzle even do anything??

The game seriously needs more feedback in general. I don't mind every choice counting, if the consequences are obvious. Otherwise, it doesn't actually feel like the choices matter at all.

@papabirb sory sir we were also planning to hire keanu reeves to do main character voice acting but we ran out of time and funds

@papabirb Thank you for the detailed critique. You are obviously right, the game needs a lot of polishing. And perhaps the balance is not the best -- however all 3 endings are surely achievable.

The fishing is rigged, yes. We should have made it achievable to get 1 or 2 or 3 fish, but we didn't have time to implement it. This must be frustrating to play, sorry. The dogs runs away and we even had dialogue prepared for it, but yet again -- no time to implement it.

Regarding the choices -- you have a sound that implies that the choice you made was meaningful. And I assure it matters. So is the medicine puzzle, but you need to get the right colour, which might be hard. :)

Yet again, thanks for your detailed opinion! We will try to implement all of proposed changes sin the post jam version of the game. I hope you had some fun and it wasn't that bad after all!

@thomasward I'm glad to hear the dog just runs away! I thought it died for sure :crying_cat_face:

I don't mind the rigged fishing so much as I do having to sit through the cans lol, I'd rather get my 1 fish and be done with it.

I heard the sound a few times, far as I could tell the only impact I felt was keeping the gold coin, but it didn't really feel like the neighbor actually gave fish.

Despite my frustration and complaints, I did end up going back to play it 3 or 4 more times to find a different ending. I managed to outlive my son a couple times, but the 3rd ending still alludes me lol. It's not too bad, it just definitely needs a lot of post-jam polish :smile_cat:

Really solid game, i think you should be able to renter choices though

The overall design, setting was nice. Have a fairly unique experience, music and atmosphere mix well. But game itself need much polish. I wasn't know select herb need use Arrow key instead of WASD. The game can be nicer if control is consistent, and need more information at UI.

I love this draw style and music. Its create really interesting mood. Thanks for game =)

Wow that was probably one of the moodiest Ludum Dare games I have ever played, bravo. With that in mind, though, I did have some pain points in a similar vain to Papabirb's feedback above.

The pain points were:
- I kept getting stuck on the bottom snow outside, I think this probably shouldn't have a collider
- It was really hard to tell at first what was and wasn't intractable, some sort of prompt would have been nice (I know jams are hectic and things get cut in order to finish)
- It seems things are only intractable once. This makes sense for the dinner and such but a few times I accidentally hit space not realising I was confirming, and worse to me the UI made me think I had a choice - one time I went to go sleep first accidentally instead of talking to my son and when I hit 'No' on the popup I wasn't able to go to bed again and became soft locked and had to start over.
- It wasn't obvious to me what the point of putting wood in the stove was since it seemed my son only needed the furnace
- I didn't realise at first I could interact with the herbs, and how the herbs were different from the food
- I had to figure out how to play the minigames myself, which was fine they were for the most part self-explanatory
- The fishing minigame you can just spam the spacebar on, and it is annoying to sit there for a while only to get one fish as papabirb mentioned, it was my least favourite minigame
- I felt the minigames should auto-exit after they were done
- My dog....


Despite that this game was still awesome! The art is absolutely beautiful I loved the backgrounds and the characters, they were so well drawn! As I mentioned before the mood was amazing, the snow particle effects I loved and the audio just hit it out of the park for me. Between the little sound queue on important decisions, and the way the music changed throughout the day, all the audio was crisp and clear but really minimal in a good way. Some games overdo audio but this game used it in all the perfect spots. The story was well written with no typos I noticed, the biggest thing dragging the game down is the interaction system/lack of feedback on actions. Over all neat little story game!

Hey @sharks, thank you for a really detailed opinion. Yeah, it seems like we need to focus much more on the UI/bugs/game's feedback and overall playability on the next jam. :)

I played the game 3 times, and try to get another endings and.. I just die 3 times.. Dog is always dies (or run away, idk), so in 3rd time I don't feed dog, but it's doesn't help.. I liked the atmosphere, graphics and style of game. It's a really sad story about dad and son (and dog) until war.. There are some bugs with ui and fullscreen mode, and the music box has a really critical bug, when I turn on music near the dog, always when I press "space" after, open music menu, and this made me restart all game. Neighbour with food is piece of.. very bad people, scammer. After all I think this game is really cool, history is very sad. But some bugs are very critical, and I wish you fix it. Good work!

Such a lovely game. I surely need a break after that but I'm gonna play again soon to check some other endings! So awesome!

well, i went through an entire session without interacting with anything inside, and, to my great frustration, got a bad end, despite having done so well on the outdoor mini games.

then i read the comments, and there's all this talk of herb games and cooking games and the dog, and i realized i had missed basically more than half of the game.

i just didn't know there was anything to do inside! there wasn't a "todo list" that slide down like there was for the outside, and no visual indicator that something is interactive. just confusion that my son keeps getting worse and worse despite me chopping and fishing like a good daddo. it was quite frustrating!

it was definitely more satisfying to play through with doing the indoor tasks as well. i must say though, that fishing mini game needs to be "canned". it feels like it takes way too long, involves no skill, and i have no real influence on how it goes, just waiting for the line to bend.

i also agree with some other commenters that the grave hit box is too big.

other than that, i consistently got a really loud and harsh audio glitch around the beginning of the dialogue with the son, so i had to mute : (

i liked the record player, and petting the dog. it's the little things...

overall, it's a good little experience, but i'd really try and make sure interactive things are more clear, or maybe give stronger hints like the boy saying "i was cold last night, could you make a fire? i'm starving, and so is the dog, please feed me!"

That was quite moody, but understanding how to interact with most parts of the game was a bit of a crapshoot, the oven, the herbs, the dinner table, I thought they were all incompleted parts of the game because WASD did nothing in those menus, but apparently they were controlled with the arrow keys or something, why does the mouse just do nothing for these specifically?

Quite confusing, I think @papabirb and @sharks already outlined anything I might already mention though, and definitely contextual hints as to what would help you do the right thing to allow people to live would be lovely.

Also more of a visual bug, but when playing the game in the itch player in not-fullscreen, some dialog was simply entirely offscreen as it was I guess vertically aligned to the bottom instead of the top or something? So some of the dialog I initially thought was either broken or just empty, until I fullscreened the game again and noticed that the dialog was indeed there, just waaaaay down at the bottom of the screen :)

The mood, art, audio, dialog however though all come together to form quite the picture.

It's a definite outlier though, with some polish, I'd love this, nice work :)

EDIT: because I liked the game I wanted my girlfriend to try it out as well, however she has a laptop with a 1600x900 screen and it seems like even if you fullscreen the game there, it cuts off like half the text you need to read, two examples:



So the text issue is definitely pretty severe :)

I really like the atmosphere, i mean i hate it but in a liking way... Its a bit confusing what do the fireplace and the oven do? Like what is the difference between them. And when fishing was i pulling out trash because i was trash at it, or because its always 1 fish+2 trash? Get it, trash cos of trash. :upside_down: Oh and the music of the game should be lowered when playing the gramophone, which i have to say has really great music choices for the games mood. All in all i love hate it, and i will play it again to see all the endings probably. So great job! :D

Resolution 1920x1080 played in browser and there wasnt txt being cut off. (adding this so it might help with troubleshoot from the previous comment)

I love the art and the general mood of the game and I am sure that it would tell me a very intriguing story, but sadly the technical part of the game lacks a lot. I had several cases of textboxes being cut off or texts not appearing at all and just presenting me empty text boxes (especially sad for a story-driven game). Also it is very hard to guess with which objects you can interact and in general what you have to do. The first time I got into the house I interacted with the table and the fireplace + oven but didn't do anything, because I didn't know how to. Through this my dog disappeared/died (?) after the first night, which hit me hard, because I was very happy that you could pet him. :slight_frown: At the second day I tried again, didn't manage to give out any food and only then at the fireplace I realized that you have to use the arrow keys when interacting with objects, opposing to WSAD I used to move around. After another few empty textboxes, I honestly gave up.

I hope that these words are not too harsh, I really would have loved to enjoy the game, because the screenshots, the idea and the general mood are very appealing. If you plan to continue working on the game (after the Jam), I'd love to be notified to play a more polished version of this game. :heart:

great to see a story driven game at LD. the artstyle is great and loved the athmosphere.

I enjoyed this a lot! Most of my critiques have already been said up top, but I do have a different suggestion that I haven't seen others make, and that would be to have some up notes in the piece.

Right now it's all down, right from the start. It would help sell the relationship if we got to see a bit of this family in better times, I think. Even if it was just on a start screen.

Think of the impact of seeing them happy, then hitting start game and it cuts to the bleak winter, for example.

@fromage That's a nice idea, thank you for that! We planned to make this game a bit longer (two extra days) and the son would fall ill after the first day, however we had to cut it out due to lack of time. But yes, you are obviously right, showing a happy family and then ruining their hapiness is quite a dirty trick. :D

Graphics and the gritty, unsettling atmosphere reminds me of the Rusty Lake series, which is one if my favourites. Great entry!