I already wrote a fairly ridiculous review on your original post, but I'll re-iterate here: you affected me with this work, but I'm not sure how much I liked the experience. I'm not sure you wanted me to.
It was incredibly powerful, and I understood what you where trying to achieve (I think) but I always have trouble with works without a single glimmer of hope. That said, perhaps it is in there somewhere, hidden away, or then again maybe it was consciously extracted and bottled up in your other entry!
Despite this, I think it's incredible just as a portrait of despair, looking right into the maw of the pit... You did portray these kind of emotions with an incredible synergy of light and sound, and I suppose I'm glad to have had that experience.
It's hard to review an 'game' like this. But congratulations on having the balls to produce it.
I like how you don't explicitly state what the advancing wall of darkness represents - it rather generates a feeling of fatality and a sense of regret.
Everything from sound to visuals works beautifully together here.
Very neat, and quite stylish. I really like what you did with the camera. The whole experience reminds me of passage, but darker.
It seems that tigs people tend to do more "art-games" than the usual LD48 crowd. It makes for an interesting experience, but I suspect that your fun rating is going to suffer. :-)
Super-themey. I think the only issue with the text boxes is that they stay up twice as long as they need to. One-sentence cards can be read at a glance--and if they go too fast for some, well, that just leaves you with a semi-subliminal effect which people would think is arty and special.
Jason Rohrer called, and he wants his schtick back. ;)
For that matter, Rohrer's stuff, esp. Gravitation, is closer to what I'd call a "game". Heart does fit the formal definition of "game", but in such a loose way that I have trouble considering it one. As it is, your blog entry seems to suggest "it is a game because I intended it to be one", which really doesn't sit well with modern notions of art. Further, the very fact that there is a simple way to make it more gamey without sacrificing the artistic value (I'm sure you can guess what that is) kind of underscores the un-gameyness of the work.
Still, this is an excellent work, and I'm confident that people who try to use it as an excuse to submit flash movies for LD will be summarily scorned.
i like that the advancing wall in this game is psychological: that it's an advancing wall of despair. that the player has the ability to look back but never to retreat is very effective. i think the text could stand to repeat itself less, though it was smart to use those text cards to mask the protagonist's transformations.
Very stylish, I loved the music, the use of color, blurring and effects (though some guys turned upside down with seemed more like a glitch). However I wouldn't really call it a game.
Very moody, like most people I loved the style, effective music. I feel I would have been even more impressed with it if I hadn't already played Defect, but since you credited that influence there's no problem with that. Also, the rotation was a nice twist. The text cards did stay up for too long (and might in fact have worked better as pop-ups, thus not interrupting the flow of the game). On my first (and so far only) playthrough I felt that I didn't grasp the "story" fully, but that's probably my fault.
Conceptually interesting and a daring take on the competition. While I like a good story as much as anybody, this just about crosses the line to short film for me. I certainly wouldn't say there's any gameplay to speak of.
Great graphical style though. The music is nice and moody, and the game is impressively polished.
Enjoyed the polish and style of this piece. Definitely agree with the other comments that the text screens were too long and kept pulling me out of the experience.
Not sure how much there is to this that I may have missed either control wise or message wise but that is ok.
The rotation and the approaching wall were subtle and nice and the music fit it well.
Oh yeah and I think if you add leaderboards to this you've got a real winner on your hands. ;)
Beautiful visuals and a great tone. I love seeing those giant gray sprites parallaxing over each other. I'm pretty curious to see how you coded some of those visuals up, since, though I work in Flash, I don't have a lot of experience coding visual effects.... Are you going to share the source at some point? :)
I'm haunted. Your game challenges the definition of a game as it draws its effect from the user interaction. Although the actual interaction is minimal, I wouldn't have been far as affected if I had just passively watched a video sequence.
It was incredibly powerful, and I understood what you where trying to achieve (I think) but I always have trouble with works without a single glimmer of hope. That said, perhaps it is in there somewhere, hidden away, or then again maybe it was consciously extracted and bottled up in your other entry!
Despite this, I think it's incredible just as a portrait of despair, looking right into the maw of the pit... You did portray these kind of emotions with an incredible synergy of light and sound, and I suppose I'm glad to have had that experience.
It's hard to review an 'game' like this. But congratulations on having the balls to produce it.