Out Of Frame

The art was great! Jerry the mouse was my favorite design. The music wasn't perfect... it was a bit repetitive and felt like it could use a more interesting rhythm (and maybe a bass-y instrument). The viewfinder mechanic was cool! I thought it was a fun way to give more depth to the evidence-gathering process. Having the characters be paper cut-outs was a very good choice as well. In a way it felt almost like the entire game was a corkboard of evidence (which obviously works well for this game).

To get a little deeper on the gameplay: my one complaint is that the buildup to the killer reveal wasn't very satisfying. I won't spoil, but when it came to the accusation it felt less like I had built a case against them, and more like they just acted slightly more suspicious than anyone else. None of the evidence really absolved anyone of guilt (EDIT: except for one), or pointed in the direction of the killer.

But overall, I liked it! Very cool stuff :)

Pretty fun short game, really liked the character designs (gosh the mouse is so cute) and the overall camera mechanic, pretty curious and cool!

really lovely artstyle!

Names that starts on the same letter are my one true weakness. For the love of me I can't remember who's who, even though I finished the game and found the murderer.
That was fun! I'm a sucker for detective games. Great artstyle too! I loved all the characters designs.

Liked that detective story is not too obvious, nice experience!

Nice work! Really fun core loop and a clever take on the theme. Had a great time playing through it!
Left full scores across the board. Greetings from the Meow Bomb team!

@capreola You will be glad to hear that we had several more J names for use and even more characters in mind!
It was also a problem while in calls during work, was someone saying Joe or Joel? Who knows!

@nursultan Hi, I know you’ve been putting the same copy and pasted comment on other games too, along with promo for your game. That is against the spirit of ludum dare. The point of comments is to give constructive feedback, not to self promote, and the fact that you’re just copy and pasting regardless of the game is quite dissapointing. I will not in fact be playing your game

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As a Russian, I really loved the KGB bear XD I like the art style of the characters. It's just that, personally, it wasn't entirely clear to me why the hint board is needed. Am I supposed to just look at hints? It would be great if you could read the newspaper in the office. Overall, the game is perfect for a jam — fast, funny, and beautiful :3

@chmoonyka What do you mean KGB? THEY’RE FRENCH!!! As for the hint board, I’m not actually sure. But thanks for the compliments on the story :)

Very cool idea. The controls and gameplay feel intuitive to use and I like the little details like calling a number. :)

Some areas felt a little bit empty, but maybe I was missing something.

The visuals are really great. Nice characters and the overall style is really beautiful. Only the "tutorial screen" after the main menue felt a little bit off, because it was just violet background colour. Apart from that the graphics are so nicely done. I really like how you have an endscreen with your accused murderer.

The acoustic feedback for getting clues was nicely implemented and I really like the concept, that you can put the clues on the board, which helps to sort them. Nice entry! :)

@lllarso Hi, sound designer/composer/writer here, thanks so much for your feedback. All the nice things you said really mean a lot to us, and thank you for playing our game. Your feedback has definitely been noted :)

Someone recommended this game in the comments, so I decided to try it. The art is incredibly stylish, especially the 2D billboards. If it were on Steam right now for $20, that price would feel completely reasonable.

The idea of using an old camera to look into the past is really cool. I love photography, so I always enjoy games that let me take pictures or interact with a camera. This one does it really well.

If you turn this into a full game, I’ll gladly buy it on Steam and leave a positive review. Excellent work. I don’t know how many artists worked on it, but they did an amazing job.

@gamescodedogs Thank you so much! We really appreciate it

Love the art style and the music! I'm glad to see that you addressed the elephant in the room 😉

The whole concept of tackling a cold case 20 years in the making immediately drew me in. I liked the tension of interviewing the older suspects and trying to uncover the truth behind their claims.

beautiful visual style, beautiful atmosphere!

so atmospheric game! Love it!

game looks very cute and atmospheric! i love this!!

I really like the combination of 3D space and 2D assets/textures. It’s clear that a lot of work has been done. Well done!

WOWWW the art style is amazing and i really love 2d textures

oh the artstyle!!! cant help but to be amazed how the 3d space and 2d objects (in general) are combined into a lovely game like this :]

cool artstyle

ok it was funny experience :) culprit becomes obvious once you look at what they were doing during murder and evidence near them in present. i like how music becomes quiter and lower when you turn on the camera. its authentic. Overall great game for 72 hours!

@lastyw Sound designer/composer/lead writer here - thanks so much for noticing my music effects, people don’t tend to give the music enough love so it really means a lot to me. As for the story, I didn’t want to make it too difficult, rather I just wanted a nice story, and we thought it would be fun to address the elephant in the room (Please tell me you did in fact get the elephant, and I didn’t make the other endings to ambiguous over whether it was correct). Again, thank you so much for your kind words

@technicalitycreations Wait IT WAS THE ELEPHANT?? omg i accused sheep because she looked like Miss Bellwether, and I thought she poisoned guy because russian fries bear ordered her to. Anyway you guys did a great job, visuals, camera mechanic, sound design were great, and detective mystery entertaining enough. I love detectives, and actually plan to make a detective of my jam game right after. It is about steam train, and I want to make it something like Murder on the Orient Express. Would be glad if you tried out mine :>

@lastyw the evidence was planted at her desk by the Chief. She was busy playing billiards at the time of the murder. Also, I’ll go play your game later

The art style in this is so good. I love the mix of 3D and 2D. I love a good murder mystery and the mechanic of the camera literally taking you back 20 years to the old time is a really interesting mechanic. I think the evidence board makes a lot of sense unlike one of the other comments. When there's so much evidence it can be hard to keep track of the flow and what exactly happened so that was a good way of helping me remember.

The Website is playing up and duplicated my message so i'll just edit this message to finish.

I did find two small bugs but nothing that impacted the experience. At the areas where the evidence is in the viewfinder it says to talk in the current day. Maybe that's not a bug but it felt a bit confusing to me. Secondly if you get close to the walls the lighting can bug out a bit. I think it's maybe an issue with one of the shaders.

But those are both very minor bugs. Overall great entry. Well done.

@roitchie Thanks so much for the detailed feedback

Oh the confidence of putting a guy on a case of your own doing. Truly something to aspire to 😄

The main mechanic made me think of Return of the Obra Dinn. I liked the effects you used to implement it. The dense fog was a good choice, as you couldn't see everything that changed in the room at a glance. Although it also made me go through the whole hotel in "scanning mode".

When it comes to the mystery itself - I wished there was a bit more to uncover. I felt like the main piece of evidence came from the telephone, instead of the camera. Although I did get the telephone at the very end, because I tampered with it early, and after I got the code it only worked after I left the hotel and came back in.

That said, obviously the scope had to fit into a jam, and I had a good time. Enjoyed the writing and character designs, and the audio side of things was quite pleasant too.

@hexstart thank you for playing!

there was a lot more in the initial script but unfortunately there was not enough time to fit it all within 3 days so we had to simplify it a little, still happy that you enjoyed it!