A comical and absurd idea, but executed very well! It's hard to run without overloading your computer, but overall it's a fun game. Great job!

That was definitely an experience!

I think the surrealism of the situation together with the level of graphic for mostly text-based gameplay created the atmosphere that makes the game.

I also appreciate writing in the game, the level of psychological depth is 10/10.

A small note on the gameplay: the different approaches work when player has control over them. E.g. if I could've done something to improve my chances in certain dialog options, I'd prefer a certain strategy and started to use a certain approach. In this game this was mostly a game of numbers for me: choose whatever has higher chance of success (which is not much of a challenge). In most cases I had only one option to choose, I guess in such cases it might be better to just continue dialog, without requiring the user's input.

However I understand that this might've been the idea as well: you can't really control anything when you are dealing with a dictator.

Now I am super curious what were your intentions with the game :)

I’m really curious about how long it took to render this game — the visual rendering is truly impressive!
The game of polish is very high, and the background story based on the Holodomor. is deeply thought-provoking.
The script also seems to be written with great detail, and I can really feel the creator’s dedication.

However, since I’m not a native English speaker, I found some of the dialogue a bit challenging to understand — some lines used technical term(I think), which made it harder for me to follow the story fully.
Also, the female voice sounds a bit weird due to the use of AI, though that’s totally understandable bc time constraints.

Overall, the game is really well made!
Some dialogue options didn’t seem to display all lines, which might cause confusion for players unfamiliar with the historical context or for non-native speakers like me.

Great looking game! It's an interesting take on the text adventure genre and cleverly combines it with psychology. I really appreciate the amount of work that went into working out the dialogue paths and recording voice-overs for all the dialogues. Unfortunately, I'm not very good with psychology, so I'm not all that persuasive :)

I think the idea of this game is very good. However, since English is not my native language, I rely on the translator to play it. Some of the dialogues were not understood, but this did not affect my enjoyment of it. I think the text work is excellent.

An educating game by educated authors. Thanks for bringing psychological progresss and historic knowledge into gaming.

@einfach would you be ok with included subtitles? In the end I will have to speak about 10k sentences (3k for me and about 7k for my GF for 2 hours of gameplay), so having it also dubbed in other languages is not doable.

If you are Chinese/Japanese, I know you can be stingy with proper subtitles and will DEFINITELY notice that the text translation is not professional-grade (talking the final product here).

Einfach sounds German tho, German translation should be easier, text-wise

(btw, I translated that quote on your profile, "Don't be too idle". Funny, Quit stalling is similar in meaning.)

Very well written game, and quite educational. Loved the concept. The gameplay itself didnt really work for me though, the random chance dialouge options never seemed successful and you cant influence their successs.

Very creative idea! The gameplay is especially interesting to me, since I’m directly connected to this branch of history. I think this one has a lot of potential.

Fantastic rendering and art, congrats on piecing this together in a weekend!

I found the dialogue tree a bit difficult/surreal to negotiate, but I also felt that leaned into the theme of having to placate a chimeric maniac :)

Good 3D art and the idea of game is interesting but i think dialogue options should have include summaries of what will be said instead of beginning of sentences. That way it could be easier to follow the direction of where its going.

@schatzi good idea! Thanks. Currently it's this way because of some corner cutting

how come u did it in just three days!???? great!!

@nassshie my 4th unreal game, and gf is a professional 3d character artist. The hardest part was actually writing the system for dialogue. The rest was fairly quick.

It’s a bit hard for me to fully appreciate your project — I downloaded and tried to play it, but there’s quite a lot of English text, and my English isn’t very strong, so my play session ended up being rather short.
Still, I can’t help but acknowledge the impressive amount of work you’ve done: 3D models, animated dialogue, and even voice acting — that’s solid work. Well done!

very good graphic, but gameplay not good for me

All I can say is — that was weird XD

You really nailed the "collector" theme in the most unexpected way.

It's truly amazing that you've accomplished this is such a short time. Please keep it up. You're achieving some truly remarkanle things.

It looks like a lot of effort has been put into the graphics! The picture is very delicate

Crazy graphics here, I was really surprised. It would be even better if you added real voices though, as it ruins the atmosphere a bit, but overall good game

Great looking game!

It turned out great, I didn't expect to meet comrade Stalin...

Wow, sorry bud but your game seems to have nothing to do with real collection or for that matter a collection game.

It is Unreal engine so it pretty much sucked every CPU and GPU cycle I had and my box is pretty beefy. It pulled so much juice that it set of my UPS.

So, I really never played your game because it try to kill my computer.

This was one of the strangest and most original gaming experiences of the jam :dizzy_face:
I really loved how the absurd premise is supported by strong writing and a surreal atmosphere, making it feel like I'm stuck in a historical fever dream.:slight_smile:

Great work, especially for a game jam! :clap:

What an absolutely wild concept for a game!🤣 Felt like some kind of surreal dream scenario.

I have to say you did an amazing job with the facial animations. I'm assuming you had some kind of tool to match the lip movement to the audio/script because I can't imagine doing all of those lines by hand in such a short time. Really interested to know how it was done because the result was quite good!

Honestly it was surprisingly educational too. I could see a larger version of a game like this covering different topics and historical figures being used for classrooms and education. Very cool stuff. Minor nitpick though: the subtitles felt difficult to read being in all caps.

I do wish there were more opportunities for using the different psychological techniques. I played through it about 5 or 6 times hoping to see different choices but a lot of them came back to the same topics from before and there was only one option to click so it felt more like funneling down a path than branching out.

The best result I got was "moderate success", but this one was probably my favorite ending:

Nice looking game. The animations tied to the voiced AI are really good too. I'm not that familiar with the history or the psychology, so for the dialog options, I mostly relied on the numbers that were provided. It did make for a neat story. After running through it a few times (because I failed so much), it would have been nice to skip through some of the text that I already heard. Even if the skip option was only available for the text that was read in previous playthroughs.

My best run, I ended with moderate success. I'll take it!

Cool game. Very impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtUy4qp1Wfo

Wow, this was certainly different, what a fantastically absurd idea. Good writing, very good job with the animations and overall visuals. Great job!

The graphics are really impressive, well done! Surreal game.

Comrade Stalin. Please don't.

Well... That was weird

The graphics and lip sink is amazing. Some bugs are present (somehow clicking escape few times gives me "default answer" and the stuff goes south). Also it would be nice to have some kind of dialog skipping (only those which were already played to user). Otherwise its a fun challenge :D

Very interesting take, I would have summaries of the intended dialogue instead of cut-off sentences, but I understand that in a game jam that would have been impossible. Impressive entry!

As answering our dear client is main mechanics in game, it's a pity that we can't see full sentence. I think that giving a choice that would describe the mood of her next talk would be better, overall not the greatest, not the baddest game :). Good mood. Gl hf next time

That's a unique entry to say the least! Well done on the modeling and ambiance, it has its own vibe. For some reason I get a Disco Elysium feeling with the writing, political/psychological/philosophical conversations that stay with you and are thought provoking. Definitely a game I wont forget!

Hey, it has wonderful graphic , the dialogs are very well written too, but for me it lack of gameplay, there is not enough options and when 1 goes bad you almost only have default options that lead you to a loose , but thats a cool concept that could gain by being continued!

Very neat concept and I like it! Since I found your game thought provoking, I'm going to write a long comment. This is not because I think I know what I am talking about, but because I think one of the reasons we all do LudumDare is to share our Ideas. My comments are also based on the assumption that you want to develop this idea to a longer experience. Anyway here are my rambling thoughts in case you are interested:

I don't know how this compares with your other game ("Healing Hitler"'s link Doesn't load for me) but it's clear to me that you are interested in the psychology of history, and the history of psychology. Your basic game play concept is solid as well. It is essentially a visual novel with some luck based outcomes as well as the normal node based conversations. If I had thought of this concept, I would be tempted to experiment with 2 categories of items

Presentation: The models sitting in the therapy room are impressive and realistic, but since we are talking about a video game, we are not limited to reality. In addition to the therapy room, its possible to have surreal representations of thoughts somewhere on screen, maybe Stalin can have a flashback to his drunken dad giving him a beating, or maybe we could see some period photos or artwork relevant to the dialog. We could go the other way as well, stripping away the room and just leaving the chairs and the two characters present. There are many creative choices to make. Just staying in the therapy room with two models is a valid one, but I would just want to examine some of the other concepts before saying they don't fit in. Another presentation item is informing the player. I like history and I know what a kulak was, but you can't assume all players will. This doesn't mean you can't teach them. For example having some kind of encyclopedia where the player can click on a word to learn about it is one way to help the players learn about history and psychology. I think the players will like learning and also enjoy the game more when they have learned more. Then again, maybe I'm just a nerd because I remember reading all of the civilopedia entries as a kid while playing Sid Meier's civilization 3.

Mechanics: Visual novel players will happily sit for hours and read through dialogue, but other engaging elements could add something to the game. Of course QTE are a simple way to add engagement for players, but they tend to get annoying fast so you would need a lot of variety. Trackers and resources are another way of adding engagement. It looks like currently, paranoia should always come down and trust should always go up. That's good but imagine another variable that you needed to keep between two values. Whether it got too high or too low, it would create tension. The player will see this and try and steer the conversation back to where they want it to be. My last item is RPG elements. Over the course of many therapy sessions maybe your character can become better at certain things, for example an increased chance for Freudian school options, or a penalty to other schools. That's just an example. The point is having mechanical touch-points for the role playing, whatever form that may take. I think RPG elements are kind of the interface between the character and the player.

Anyway the TLDR is that I think You and your partner did a great job for the jam, and I think there are a lot of directions it could go in if you wanted to expand on it

Oh my god, the quality of this graphic is so high! 😱✨ It's hard to imagine it was done so perfectly in such a short time! 🤯⏰💯

Such an unique concept! I think the UI could be more clear, to clearly see the entire thing our character will say. I'm looking forward to a postjam version!

interesting game! also the graphic quality is very high

Guys, you've done a fantastic job, thank you for the game!

Don't give this guy any more attention, and don't bestow heart karma on him. You may have come here because he commented under your game, or because he has 285 karma at the time of writing–but he didn't play your game, and I'm half-convinced he has never played a single Ludum Dare game other than his own. When he's active, his "ratings given" counter increases by about one every 4 minutes, which is nowhere near enough time to download and play a game, leave a rating and comment–and comment he does:











These comments weren't selected. They were the first 10 comments I encountered, and that didn't take long. You'd be hard-pressed to find a comment of his that doesn't look like that; I've never seen one personally.

Leaving one-liner comments isn't inherently bad, but if someone collects (!! is this a Ludum Dare 58 meta-game?) almost 300 karma in a few days, and every. single. comment is so insubstantial, so empty that it could have been written after merely glancing at a screenshot, or not even–then something doesn't seem right.

My game can take less than a minute to complete if you aren't particularly committed to it, and the end screen has a little request to the commenter, a request which obviously hasn't been honored by Eugenik who only commented "Amazing art!!!." under an experimental mini-game where art is the weakest link.

Opportunists who game the system show up at every Ludum Dare, but Eugenik is a repeat offender that has done this for years. In fact, if you've been around here for some time, you probably recognize him. Perhaps his most egregious comment was "nice humor" under a tearjerker game about playing the piano:


I will repost this comment every semi-annum until this guy gets in line or leaves the community. Fake rating spammers are a net negative and hurt the spirit of the event.

Wow So Good! 5/5.

:smile:

Great job! I didn’t really enjoy the gameplay; it wasn’t clear where the dialogues would lead. But the visuals are simply stunning. If the characters had some micro-movements and small animations besides facial expressions, the scenes would feel much more lively.

I didn't play your game, but then again, you didn't play my either, you just left a very generic comment.

thanks for the unusual idea! It was a fun, funny, and a little unnerving experience at a time of heightened paranoia.

What a great experience haha I think I always have the most fun when interfacing with weird and absurd ideas. The voice acting and recording weren't of the best quality and I think that hindered the enjoyment quite a bit. Also, I don't think this applied to the theme to well??

Honestly this is just so fantastic haha I loved playing it, the graphics are amazing (is that metahuman or custom? Because its insanely good!) the gameplay was great and the audio. Cracking job in the limited time!

This is such a surreal entry. I never in a million years would've expected it. But it's really well executed. The graphics are amazing but have that uncanny valley that a lot of meta humans do but in this case I think it actually helps sell it even more. Stalin is a very unsettling figure and the lifelessness in his eyes sells it even more. It was interesting trying to explore the psychology of him. Really impressive entry. Well done.

P.S. If I had to come up with a witty name i'd suggest Stalin' for time

Interesting concept! But characters was quite lifeless like it was robots.

Amazing concept for a game and the dialogue was surprisingly really good, especially given the time you had to write it all. The realistic and dark art was also very fitting. Some extra in-game text could have helped me understand the gameplay a bit better (eg what the numbers mean, whether scores carry over between sessions, etc.)

Thanks for uploading! This was a pretty interesting approach to the jam theme that I wasn't expecting. With a game like this, I think it's basically necessary to show the full dialog options in text, especially since there's an actual process of debate, it feels disingenuous to pick an option only knowing the first part of what I'm arguing. Also, the mouth movements, while pretty accurate (I think) felt very uncanny when the rest of their bodies were almost completely still. It was neat to see so many options and paths you could go down, although it seemed like a few of mine more or less ended up in the same place.