As a horror anime buff, I can definitely see this as an anime. It's got just the right plot points, just the right art style, and the story has me hooked. I'm itching for the full game, I just need to see this play out. It's like Saki Sanobashi, there's a mystery aspect involved that I need to see played out but I don't have a way for that to be a reality just yet. TLDR; Cute anime girl in twisted world, story good, require more.
I really enjoyed this game a lot! It's games like these that make me want to make a horror rpg game too. every little detail felt well thought out and put together, everything from the dialogue when you interact with items to how the Kat's running animation being different form her walking animation instead of the usual walking animation sped up that I often see with these types of games. The characters all felt different instead having the same personality, and the style of the game was also really beautiful. The story is also really interesting and left me wanting to find out more about everything. The only problem I had was that some areas of the game felt too bright to be scary for a horror game. All in all I would be really exited to see more from you guys. It was a really good game!
10/10 would play again, can't wait to see where this goes! I also liked the small things such as being able to spin the globe, read posters, or things you couldn't see!
theres alot to compliment when it comes to this game, as its a very good example of a horror rpg done right. something as simple as changing the font of text affects the mood of the game alot. my point is that this game focuses on alot of small details and it makes the game feel more explorable even though it is a pretty straight forward game. my only complaint is that items stay in your inventory even when they dont have uses anymore. this wasnt a big problem in the demo but if the game is made longer, the player's inventory could become cluttered very quick.
I do agree but I think it could also be used to a great horror advantage. ex: Running from a monster and then you want to use a key on a door to escape but the key for that door is like 30 items down in your inventory so you are panicking while looking through all your keys as the monster is closing in on you! XD
Don’t say “it’s annoying to ask”. If you believe yourself to be annoying us by asking, we are far less likely to answer. If you’re going to ask, make it clear that you deserve an answer. Otherwise, you simply seem like the sort of person who gets annoyed easily by questions, so you are unlikely to accrue many answers.
Okay, so for a game developed predominantly by a team of two this is very impressive in how sophisticated its design is, leaving just enough room for the player to control the level of suspense while working within cinematic confines. The story itself is charming in its adherence to certain tried-and-true, though not yet trite, tropes. I was amused by the faithful rendering of anime tropes, both in the characterization of the dialogue and the personification of the visuals. The premise of starting the game in an idealized dreamscape and then plunging the player into a nightmare was very effective. The protagonist’s candid attitude serves to facilitate a fluid transition, on multiple accounts: Not only does her apparent mastery of both the physical and metaphysical domains place the audience in a posture of authority OVER the dark developments, allowing the setting to unfold naturally and casually, but also her creeping descent into madness presents a very striking counterpoint by the end. Mechanically, as well as in terms of illustration, the horror is flawless. So let us talk about the horror in the writing:
At times, the prose is fearsome, yet at other times it is frightful. The employment of clichés, while it works in establishing the genre and keeping the audience engaged, ensuring that we adhere to your advice to play the game in one sitting, falls apart by the end as an Enigmatic Antagonist is introduced. For innocent young schoolgirls to be corny is one thing, since it illustrates their native naiveté. Be that as it may: the significance of the Occult Daemon lies in that it passes mortal understanding. This is illustrated very effectively in one principal scene, which to my mind was the finest in its execution: the interim between the lighting of the candles and the burning of the hair. I took the liberty of exploring the familiar map at this point in the game, and I was impressed with several stylistic alterations, most noteworthy of which was the absence of the supporting characters, the broken light switch, (a token dream symbol,) and certain questions which the protagonist voiced, which I had previously pondered, about the Mysterious Door. The reason that these alterations work lies in the fact that the familiar, mortal world has been EVACUATED, leaving the protagonist as the solitary vestige of Humanity. The fear of being alone is one of the most primal fears for communal animals, so this alone(ness) was enough to create a suspenseful and foreboding setting.
However, at this point, several changes to the environment doomed the writing. The first of these lay in a novel map. Running was disabled, so I presumed that there would be nothing to run from. By the time that I returned to the schoolhouse, the whole thing felt like a child’s nightmare about leaving home to go to school for the first time. This quaint, nostalgic sensibility was reinforced by the apparent randomness of the classroom numbers and the extremely narrow corridors, yet what killed the mood were the notes. Up until this point, notices were posted to establish an omnipresent school bureaucracy whose absence said more than its presence; the girls fear the Faculty and Administration as a potential source of retribution, so all of their threats center around it as though it were a ghost story.
While it is creative to use such notes as a means for communicating between the Daemon and the Protagonist, this places a weight upon those slips of paper that tears right through them. Left alone, Kat has only one Other with whom to communicate, and the manner in which this Other is presented must be flawless. If we are to experience Fear, the Other must be menacing above all else, meaning that its Intent is alien to our own, its Nature must pass our understanding, and its Power must be overwhelming and unpredictable. These three virtues are exalted in the visual design, but they are absent from the prose. The dialogue between Kat and the Daemon feels campy and lame, only because of how much it pales before the setting of the stage for its arrival.
What comes out of this is nothing more than a defiant adolescent striving to defend her individualism from a confining force, oblivious to the irony of the fact that her very defiant individualism was what doomed her to this prison, the latter of which functions as the perfect and most visceral allegory for the former. By contrast, her interlocutor is transparent in its intent: to contain her, observe her, torment her, and then finally to annihilate her. It is OBVIOUS that the antagonist is some sort of a predator, and by this point the clichés alone prove this, so for the predator to identify Kat as its prey is unnecessary. A redundant antagonist who must state the obvious mirrors the fears of the protagonist a little TOO well, tempting me to wonder: can this Daemon become my friend? He certainly doesn’t seem to be hiding anything up his sleeve, after all.
One of the greatest frustrations I’ve encountered as a writer and designer looking to develop video games lay in finding programmers. A great many computer technicians have been possessed of the illusion that, as coders, their ideas ought to take priority over the ideas of novelists, philosophers, artists, and poets. Part of this emerges out of the extreme individualism of a competitive industry; some of it is literally programmed into the nature of the code. It has been made clear to me that the desire to do it all yourself has become a sense of entitlement, precluding team efforts from coming to fruition or even from taking root. The presumption that a coder can also develop and actualize Great Ideas implies that those who come by other Ideas ought to be regarded as adversaries, and if they do not possess the technical know-how to develop those ideas within this medium, they are dismissed as lazy or pretentious. Is this not ironic? The pretension to begin with lay in this: that a brain which spends an entire work-week coding is NOT the sort of brain that produces poetry. One is a very literal, Aristotelian discipline; the other is Platonic and Inspired.
By this review I do not mean to knock your game in the slightest. It is only when something so proximately approaches any sort of professional perfection that I feel tempted to spend two hours playing and reviewing it. I hope to help you push the boulder off the edge to its final refinement; you are already so close to finding a formula that will make this a groundbreaking innovator in multiple genres. I am already deeply impressed with the synthesis of mechanics. A game that feels so postmodern should be developed under the supervision of an oligarchy of specialists. This is why my chief recommendation for you would be to hire several staff writers to proofread and revise your prose. You could make something that works as well as a Stephen King novel here. You already have the Vision; it’s only a matter now of cross-pollinating between different media.
In case you wish to expose any recent versions to a new audience, it is still not too late to sign up for Dream Jam. I am sending you this invitation because of both the quality and the relevance of your game’s content and subject matter. Good luck delving deeper:
I've been looking for a good RPG after Witch's House, Mad Father, etc. This game did not disappoint!! Keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to more!
Hi I love the game! I am currently working on a game of my own with the same software tho i cant figure it out so any advice would be appreciated. Anyway I like the graphics I can tell a lot of work went into it and if you need any help im up too it.
Hi! Thank you so much ^^ Figuring out new software can be difficult! If you have any specific questions you can always send us an email and we'll try to help~
Hi Leef6010 Or Strangers Can Anyone Translate Tam Music Factory Chinese Language To English Please I Really Like The Soundtrack I Hope Their Is Full Soundtrack I Really Like It Please Help Me and I Really Like The RPG Pixel Game 5 Star ⭐️
Thats japanese my good friend, the characters translates to "Cloudy Skye" which is this song. the website for the artist https://www.tam-music.com/ (it is in Japanese) who is also on spotify as "TAM music factory" hope this helped :)
Hello I would like to know whether it is possible to open the purple door with a hairpin ? and will it somehow change the story in the demo ? I am trying very hard and would like to find out if it is worth the effort ?
Honestly even if it is short and prologe, this game was amazing. And i will explain why.
First the way developers mixed Visual Novel and RPG is really really good.
Second RPG by itself is pretty well done.
And Third and final. Whoever is doing the script is the real deal. The transition between non-beleaver Kat to Kat submitted to the horror is amazing. You can feel the "realism" in the character reactions.
@developers. Guys you really have the potential to show the world something awesome. All you need is more people to see this game and stay tuned for the rest of it :) So try your best in managing things ;)
this is quite a cool demo! one thing i would note, though, (and yes i know it sounds stupid) is that i didn't know i could open doors by pressing z. i got out of the club room by blind luck
Thank you for the advice! We've actually considered for a long time whether players should have to press Z to open doors or not. We're not sure yet what's best, so it's definitely subject to change :)
Being a fan of horror games, i have to say that this game is pretty good! you guys did a nice job! The mood of feeling unsettling was on point, with the music, the graphics were great, not too simple but not to horrifying!
You can get this game to be really really big! I can't wait to play the full game!
I just finished playing it and I LOVED IT! The story, the graphics, the music, the art and KAT!! And I was so happy to discover that this is a prologue qwq
i love this game! the stiry is well-written albeit still too short. the characters are good, i love kat myself hehe such a badass. i hope you guys will make this a one long game :")
omg I just finished the first play through and I'm definitely going to play again to see how different decisions would alter the story. But I absolutely loved it, from the story, the style, to the mechanics, its seriously amazing, every detail. I would 100% love a longer version <3
I specifically created this account to write to you that this game is very impressive. A very interesting game that kept me in suspense until the very end. Looking forward to more!
Wow, it's really cool. I liked the intro, I liked the heroine's character, she's like the horror buff that I am too, always curious. As for the story, I wish we could know a bit more about what the character has gone through, why she lost her father and how did this insidious voice taunt her, as she mentions, is in her head, so it's more psychological? I'm just taking it as that for now. I wish there was a way to have better relationships with the club members though. It's so cliche for horror games to leave the character alone in these types of situations. I imagine those girls would have been interested in the ritual Kat was setting up. Otherwise, game play is smooth, I liked the bendy hallways and subtle scares, atmosphere was great. I would have preferred to have a save button though. Nice job! :D
About the girls - they were interested in the ritual in fact, and even asked Kat to take part in it. She refused of course.
By the way, we don't really know what happened to them. Maybe they haven't gone home but hide instead in one of the rooms to get a revenge on Kat. So the ritual was disrupted and consequences for them were not very healthy. Especially if Kat took the hair from one of them.
Thanks so much for the comment! As Alienka mentioned, you can in fact "have better relationships" with the girls ^^ The story for now was left vague for reasons we can't mention yet ;) And also we are considering a manual saving system as well so it's subject to change!
Loved the artwork, the character interactions and the many varied ways you can approach problems. Exploring how many different approaches there were was a joy.
Very reminiscent of Ib/Witch's House; I'm eager to see more!
As criticism, these above factors also mean the first half (setting up the ritual) is stronger than the second half (post ritual otherplace). In particular, the character interactions all fall off and the choices stop mattering, since you're just going to get haunted by passive-aggressive omnipotent post-it notes anyway.
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☝THIS MAN WANTS THE FULL VERSION!!!
As a horror anime buff, I can definitely see this as an anime. It's got just the right plot points, just the right art style, and the story has me hooked. I'm itching for the full game, I just need to see this play out. It's like Saki Sanobashi, there's a mystery aspect involved that I need to see played out but I don't have a way for that to be a reality just yet. TLDR; Cute anime girl in twisted world, story good, require more.
I really enjoyed this game a lot! It's games like these that make me want to make a horror rpg game too. every little detail felt well thought out and put together, everything from the dialogue when you interact with items to how the Kat's running animation being different form her walking animation instead of the usual walking animation sped up that I often see with these types of games. The characters all felt different instead having the same personality, and the style of the game was also really beautiful. The story is also really interesting and left me wanting to find out more about everything. The only problem I had was that some areas of the game felt too bright to be scary for a horror game. All in all I would be really exited to see more from you guys. It was a really good game!
10/10 would play again, can't wait to see where this goes!
I also liked the small things such as being able to spin the globe, read posters, or things you couldn't see!
10/10 good game
theres alot to compliment when it comes to this game, as its a very good example of a horror rpg done right. something as simple as changing the font of text affects the mood of the game alot. my point is that this game focuses on alot of small details and it makes the game feel more explorable even though it is a pretty straight forward game. my only complaint is that items stay in your inventory even when they dont have uses anymore. this wasnt a big problem in the demo but if the game is made longer, the player's inventory could become cluttered very quick.
9/10 gonna play it again
I do agree but I think it could also be used to a great horror advantage. ex: Running from a monster and then you want to use a key on a door to escape but the key for that door is like 30 items down in your inventory so you are panicking while looking through all your keys as the monster is closing in on you! XD
cant wait for the full game !!
this looks promising, please keep us updated <33
Don’t say “it’s annoying to ask”. If you believe yourself to be annoying us by asking, we are far less likely to answer. If you’re going to ask, make it clear that you deserve an answer. Otherwise, you simply seem like the sort of person who gets annoyed easily by questions, so you are unlikely to accrue many answers.
Okay, so for a game developed predominantly by a team of two this is very impressive in how sophisticated its design is, leaving just enough room for the player to control the level of suspense while working within cinematic confines. The story itself is charming in its adherence to certain tried-and-true, though not yet trite, tropes. I was amused by the faithful rendering of anime tropes, both in the characterization of the dialogue and the personification of the visuals. The premise of starting the game in an idealized dreamscape and then plunging the player into a nightmare was very effective. The protagonist’s candid attitude serves to facilitate a fluid transition, on multiple accounts: Not only does her apparent mastery of both the physical and metaphysical domains place the audience in a posture of authority OVER the dark developments, allowing the setting to unfold naturally and casually, but also her creeping descent into madness presents a very striking counterpoint by the end. Mechanically, as well as in terms of illustration, the horror is flawless. So let us talk about the horror in the writing:
At times, the prose is fearsome, yet at other times it is frightful. The employment of clichés, while it works in establishing the genre and keeping the audience engaged, ensuring that we adhere to your advice to play the game in one sitting, falls apart by the end as an Enigmatic Antagonist is introduced. For innocent young schoolgirls to be corny is one thing, since it illustrates their native naiveté. Be that as it may: the significance of the Occult Daemon lies in that it passes mortal understanding. This is illustrated very effectively in one principal scene, which to my mind was the finest in its execution: the interim between the lighting of the candles and the burning of the hair. I took the liberty of exploring the familiar map at this point in the game, and I was impressed with several stylistic alterations, most noteworthy of which was the absence of the supporting characters, the broken light switch, (a token dream symbol,) and certain questions which the protagonist voiced, which I had previously pondered, about the Mysterious Door. The reason that these alterations work lies in the fact that the familiar, mortal world has been EVACUATED, leaving the protagonist as the solitary vestige of Humanity. The fear of being alone is one of the most primal fears for communal animals, so this alone(ness) was enough to create a suspenseful and foreboding setting.
However, at this point, several changes to the environment doomed the writing. The first of these lay in a novel map. Running was disabled, so I presumed that there would be nothing to run from. By the time that I returned to the schoolhouse, the whole thing felt like a child’s nightmare about leaving home to go to school for the first time. This quaint, nostalgic sensibility was reinforced by the apparent randomness of the classroom numbers and the extremely narrow corridors, yet what killed the mood were the notes. Up until this point, notices were posted to establish an omnipresent school bureaucracy whose absence said more than its presence; the girls fear the Faculty and Administration as a potential source of retribution, so all of their threats center around it as though it were a ghost story.
While it is creative to use such notes as a means for communicating between the Daemon and the Protagonist, this places a weight upon those slips of paper that tears right through them. Left alone, Kat has only one Other with whom to communicate, and the manner in which this Other is presented must be flawless. If we are to experience Fear, the Other must be menacing above all else, meaning that its Intent is alien to our own, its Nature must pass our understanding, and its Power must be overwhelming and unpredictable. These three virtues are exalted in the visual design, but they are absent from the prose. The dialogue between Kat and the Daemon feels campy and lame, only because of how much it pales before the setting of the stage for its arrival.
What comes out of this is nothing more than a defiant adolescent striving to defend her individualism from a confining force, oblivious to the irony of the fact that her very defiant individualism was what doomed her to this prison, the latter of which functions as the perfect and most visceral allegory for the former. By contrast, her interlocutor is transparent in its intent: to contain her, observe her, torment her, and then finally to annihilate her. It is OBVIOUS that the antagonist is some sort of a predator, and by this point the clichés alone prove this, so for the predator to identify Kat as its prey is unnecessary. A redundant antagonist who must state the obvious mirrors the fears of the protagonist a little TOO well, tempting me to wonder: can this Daemon become my friend? He certainly doesn’t seem to be hiding anything up his sleeve, after all.
One of the greatest frustrations I’ve encountered as a writer and designer looking to develop video games lay in finding programmers. A great many computer technicians have been possessed of the illusion that, as coders, their ideas ought to take priority over the ideas of novelists, philosophers, artists, and poets. Part of this emerges out of the extreme individualism of a competitive industry; some of it is literally programmed into the nature of the code. It has been made clear to me that the desire to do it all yourself has become a sense of entitlement, precluding team efforts from coming to fruition or even from taking root. The presumption that a coder can also develop and actualize Great Ideas implies that those who come by other Ideas ought to be regarded as adversaries, and if they do not possess the technical know-how to develop those ideas within this medium, they are dismissed as lazy or pretentious. Is this not ironic? The pretension to begin with lay in this: that a brain which spends an entire work-week coding is NOT the sort of brain that produces poetry. One is a very literal, Aristotelian discipline; the other is Platonic and Inspired.
By this review I do not mean to knock your game in the slightest. It is only when something so proximately approaches any sort of professional perfection that I feel tempted to spend two hours playing and reviewing it. I hope to help you push the boulder off the edge to its final refinement; you are already so close to finding a formula that will make this a groundbreaking innovator in multiple genres. I am already deeply impressed with the synthesis of mechanics. A game that feels so postmodern should be developed under the supervision of an oligarchy of specialists. This is why my chief recommendation for you would be to hire several staff writers to proofread and revise your prose. You could make something that works as well as a Stephen King novel here. You already have the Vision; it’s only a matter now of cross-pollinating between different media.
In case you wish to expose any recent versions to a new audience, it is still not too late to sign up for Dream Jam. I am sending you this invitation because of both the quality and the relevance of your game’s content and subject matter. Good luck delving deeper:
https://itch.io/jam/dreamjam2020
[({L.J.)}]
I've been looking for a good RPG after Witch's House, Mad Father, etc. This game did not disappoint!! Keep up the good work and I'm looking forward to more!
Hi I love the game! I am currently working on a game of my own with the same software tho i cant figure it out so any advice would be appreciated. Anyway I like the graphics I can tell a lot of work went into it and if you need any help im up too it.
Hi! Thank you so much ^^ Figuring out new software can be difficult! If you have any specific questions you can always send us an email and we'll try to help~
Thats japanese my good friend, the characters translates to "Cloudy Skye" which is this song. the website for the artist https://www.tam-music.com/ (it is in Japanese) who is also on spotify as "TAM music factory" hope this helped :)
https://open.spotify.com/album/3UOJr9BSj5RoQZAxhaz3y6 is an album by them which can be found on spotify. some great music
Thanks For The Advice Now I Can Find The Full Soundtrack DeltaHexlet Your The Best
Thank you so much!! And we're happy people are noticing the small details (like spinning globe, etc) :D
Hello I would like to know whether it is possible to open the purple door with a hairpin ? and will it somehow change the story in the demo ? I am trying very hard and would like to find out if it is worth the effort ?
It is possible to open the door with the hairpin! However, this prologue technically only has 1 ending :)
I opened it and yes I was a little disappointed that everything is the same there) but I still wait for the full version of the game
Love the game,wonderful,can't waiting for full stories
Amazing game with such cute graphics. The end made me shiver which hasn't happend for a very long time. Keep going, can't wait to play full game ^-^
this game is really amazing I cant wait to see the full game
well done game, looking forward to further developments.
Honestly even if it is short and prologe, this game was amazing. And i will explain why.
First the way developers mixed Visual Novel and RPG is really really good.
Second RPG by itself is pretty well done.
And Third and final. Whoever is doing the script is the real deal. The transition between non-beleaver Kat to Kat submitted to the horror is amazing. You can feel the "realism" in the character reactions.
@developers. Guys you really have the potential to show the world something awesome. All you need is more people to see this game and stay tuned for the rest of it :) So try your best in managing things ;)
Thank you so much for the nice comments!! We will do our best ^^ Hope you'll enjoy what comes next!
Really scratches that high school horror itch, I'm really excited to see the rest!
this is quite a cool demo! one thing i would note, though, (and yes i know it sounds stupid) is that i didn't know i could open doors by pressing z. i got out of the club room by blind luck
They did show you how to open a gate or interact with anything early on though. I think logically that's how you would open a door following that.
Thank you for the advice! We've actually considered for a long time whether players should have to press Z to open doors or not. We're not sure yet what's best, so it's definitely subject to change :)
¡Realmente me encantó el juego! La pase muy bien jugandolo en directo <3
Cuando de repente se paró la música realmente me cague hasta las patas jaja
Ya quiero poder jugar el juego completo ( ´ ▽ ` ).｡ｏ♡
Twitch
Gracias por el comentario!!
Pronto estaremos compartiendo mas detalles :)
really cool game ! loved the pixel animation
Being a fan of horror games, i have to say that this game is pretty good! you guys did a nice job! The mood of feeling unsettling was on point, with the music, the graphics were great, not too simple but not to horrifying!
You can get this game to be really really big! I can't wait to play the full game!
Thank you so much for the nice comment !! ^^ Hope you'll enjoy the full game as well!
I just finished playing it and I LOVED IT! The story, the graphics, the music, the art and KAT!!
And I was so happy to discover that this is a prologue qwq
i love this game! the stiry is well-written albeit still too short. the characters are good, i love kat myself hehe such a badass. i hope you guys will make this a one long game :")
Thank you so much! We'll do our best :D
Thank you so much!! We really appreciate the comment :)
omg I just finished the first play through and I'm definitely going to play again to see how different decisions would alter the story. But I absolutely loved it, from the story, the style, to the mechanics, its seriously amazing, every detail. I would 100% love a longer version <3
Thank you so much!! We're happy to hear that :D
I specifically created this account to write to you that this game is very impressive. A very interesting game that kept me in suspense until the very end. Looking forward to more!
Thank you!! We're glad to hear that :D Hope you'll like the full game just as much!
Wow, it's really cool. I liked the intro, I liked the heroine's character, she's like the horror buff that I am too, always curious. As for the story, I wish we could know a bit more about what the character has gone through, why she lost her father and how did this insidious voice taunt her, as she mentions, is in her head, so it's more psychological? I'm just taking it as that for now. I wish there was a way to have better relationships with the club members though. It's so cliche for horror games to leave the character alone in these types of situations. I imagine those girls would have been interested in the ritual Kat was setting up. Otherwise, game play is smooth, I liked the bendy hallways and subtle scares, atmosphere was great. I would have preferred to have a save button though. Nice job! :D
About the girls - they were interested in the ritual in fact, and even asked Kat to take part in it. She refused of course.
By the way, we don't really know what happened to them. Maybe they haven't gone home but hide instead in one of the rooms to get a revenge on Kat. So the ritual was disrupted and consequences for them were not very healthy. Especially if Kat took the hair from one of them.
Thanks so much for the comment! As Alienka mentioned, you can in fact "have better relationships" with the girls ^^
The story for now was left vague for reasons we can't mention yet ;) And also we are considering a manual saving system as well so it's subject to change!
It's a good game. But I hate the ending. WTF happed!?
What do you think happened? :D
I have small brain
this was really good! i hope to see the full game someday!
Wow! This is pretty good
Loved the artwork, the character interactions and the many varied ways you can approach problems. Exploring how many different approaches there were was a joy.
Very reminiscent of Ib/Witch's House; I'm eager to see more!
As criticism, these above factors also mean the first half (setting up the ritual) is stronger than the second half (post ritual otherplace). In particular, the character interactions all fall off and the choices stop mattering, since you're just going to get haunted by passive-aggressive omnipotent post-it notes anyway.
it's a very good game ! love it ! Want more ~
Great game, had me on the edge of my seat!! Looking forward to more :)
gimme more :)
Fun and interesting, great art. I look forward to more.
Congratulations on making frontpage!