knatterton 2023-01-09 18:49
Could've sworn it was the frog!
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Menagerie Street
By evan-charfauros, Ang, cat chef and tangents
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 174 | 3.84 | 48 | |
| Fun | 381 | 3.41 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 491 | 3.16 | 47 | |
| Theme | 692 | 3.09 | 49 | |
| Graphics | 70 | 4.38 | 50 | |
| Audio | 136 | 3.76 | 49 | |
| Humor | 223 | 3.36 | 46 | |
| Mood | 83 | 4.07 | 49 |
Could've sworn it was the frog!
What a cute game! I really love the art and music. Even the cursor is themed around the animals! The aesthetic of the game felt really homey even though you're accusing your neighbors of crimes.
I found it kind of difficult to figure out exactly how to progress the story. I figured the beaver's wife would come home eventually and I'd find out more info on them, but even after clicking through all of the dialog choices on all of the neighbors, she didn't show up. I was pretty confident it was them, so I accused them, but I turned out to be wrong. I figure that's because I didn't have enough evidence to make a case for my accusation, but I couldn't really tell whether I was gathering any evidence at all. Who knows? Maybe I wasn't!
Overall though, I had a good time with this game. It was a very chill time.
Is there any good ending?
Commenters, thanks for early feedback! There is one good ending, but our early uploads had some bugs that might have locked you out of getting it. If you're still interested in playing, make sure the zip file you use is labeled 1.0 or later. Happy sleuthing!
Pleasant text adventure. Nice writing and plausable music, worth a shot!
Adorable art, but man do I get social anxiety from it lol. Just in that sort of "neighborhood politics" sort of way. It does a good job of portraying that sort of thing.
Dont' work on widescreen :/
Wow, I haven't find the culprit but it felt like a nice story and I was just missing something
Bold move to create such a text heavy game in a jam, where critics have attention span of a dandelion, but this works. Interesting writing, some good humour, graphic style is solid. Nothing bad to say.
Tried accusing everyone of stealing berries then realized I maybe needed some evidence and started talking to the neighbors. Love the art and and music, really fun!
Thanks for all the feedback everybody! Something important about the gameplay: No dialogue options will ever be locked, even if you anger a neighbor. The mystery will always be there for you to uncover. Good luck finding the good ending!
Super creative game, I love the art style atmosphere and audio. A lot was put in in such a shot time frame.
Cute little game with great writing! The characters really felt alive. I loved all the dilogue, like how the queen of busybodies thought it necessary to require people to RSVP to a fucking harvest festival, or the beaver girl trying desperately to rationalize her faithlessness.
But at a certain point I got to thinking, what exactly does all this petty small-town gossip bullshit and intrigue on an extramarital relationship have to do with MY ludumberries! I just want them back, dammit! Then I realized that all of the shoddy excuses for how they're *not* all cheating with each other actually made for good alibis, so I tried to make a list of who was where. No dice. Only two of them had real alibis.
I thought, hey maybe it's the turtle woman. Maybe she wanted to use them to distill exotic liquors. I should talk to her one last time to check if she had an alibi. Then a new dialogue option appeared that revealed the solution and the end of the game. It kinda came out of nowhere. I didn't come out of it feeling clever, just like I learned a life lesson. Lame.
In all seriousness though, great writing. I was really sucked into the story here and trying to learn more about these people!
Very impressive game. I really loved the art style and it felt like a very polished and cohesive story. I really like the idea of interrogating all of the villagers and the dialogue system was great. It really felt like a load of neighbours gossiping with each other and learning about their scandals was pretty fun. Good job on such a clean and complete game.
Wow, I really liked this story! Played this together with my daughter and we were both really intrigued by the mystery and liked the ending a lot. Also the different characters and personalities were really well written, especially for a jam game but even just for video games in general. One of my favorite entries so far!
Very chill vibes to it and like previously mentioned - really polished. The art style is splendid and everything fits together so well - also with the music. Gameplay was fun and the story was engaging, so in total it was a nice & pleasant ride!
Great work!
I love text adventures! And I also love monochrome games. That was a great experience! Reminds me of my neighborhood...
Very cool experience! The soundtrack was quite chill, I liked that you had a second song for tense situations. The art was very nice and polished. I felt that their remained some unresolved plot threads though. Overall great submission from your team!
very good atmosphere, the drawings are superb and the dialogues well written ! Great OST, the music accompanies the experience very well ! I think no one stole the berries (they just flied away as teddy the eagle said) but I don't know how to complete the game without accuse someone. Or maybe i'm wrong ^^"
Wait... Wait. So why was the beaver wife seen with scott then? So many unanswered questions... Adorable game. Kudos to the person who did the art! Was a fun play. I like the idea of walking around the neighborhood accussing people of having affairs in search of berries
@adrien-tremblay unless you can find irrefutable evidence, it's up to your interpretation which neighbor(s) you believe:) Good luck tracking down your berries!!
@roroto-sic @yellowkamel @svenerik @zach-hsu @eddrw @orhu thanks for the love for the music!! Had a blast making it for this world
@zungryware Thanks so much for taking the time to beat the game and leave such a lovely comment--sounds like you had more or less the arc we intended! Unfortunately we didn't have time to implement an obra dinn / golden idol type deduction confirmation system, but hopefully the detective work to get to the end felt satisfying:) Our focus was making characters that were exciting to learn about, so really glad to hear you enjoyed them! Also lovely to get a comment from one of my favorite fellow text investigation jam creators ;) loved ur game
@matank Thank you as well for taking the time to beat our game, and hope sharing it with your daughter was an enjoyable experience!! Warms my heart to hear you enjoyed the characters and story. Writing so many characters felt like a big risk with the small timeframe, so I'm really glad to hear it payed off for you! Appreciate your comment and your time, good luck in the jam<3
Fav game so far by a country mile. This is adorable and so polished, the characters are great and the whole creative direction comes together brilliantly. I also took a few playthroughs to figure out what I was doing wrong but that just made it extra satisfying when I did!
Im glad zungry listed out the solution, I kept getting stuck on some other details that misled me and probably why I couldn't solve it in the end. It was a good cast of character with very diverse backgrounds. It actually made it pretty relatable because I would map some people I knew to the characters and think about it that way.
It felt great chipping away at the mystery chunk by chunk. It's possible I missed a key branch but I still enjoyed what I had uncovered. I also really liked the extra music that played whenever I was onto something. It very much matched the atmosphere of suspicion and mirrored how I was feeling about the subject.
This is a pretty unique LD game. Don't think I've quite seen a mystery game where you're looking at people's arguments/stories and then choosing based on that. Nice job!
Although the game was fun in it's own, not getting anywhere except for pressing the exact right buttons in the exact right order grew a bit frustrating, especially as I had the bugged version before.
The ending was also less than satisfying, as it was obvious for a while what had happened. The only thing standing between me and the solution was, again, pressing the right buttons in the right order.
Also, a lot of the times the dialogue choices did not seem to flow well, and I found myself going back to the house I just left from to talk to the same person again. This could easily have been prevented with a back button instead of a quit button in the conversation menus.
Having said, I did fall in love with all of the personalities of each of the characters quite quickly. The writing was quite good, and the characters felt like they should. Although, accusing someone of having an affair and them greeting me at the door happily afterwards felt a bit odd.
Overall, I think the game shows the amazing potential of whoever wrote the dialogue. The rest, however, could use some work.
Really beautiful experience, the artwork and character design is fantastic. Love the animal characters.
As someone who beat the game, LMAOOOOOO WHAT A TURN OF EVENTS! Would've loved to see more with this cast of morally ambiguous animals, maybe another mystery?
Very cool idea for an investigation/mystery game! I love how the simple premise leads to all sorts of deeper dialogue developing between various neighbors. The writing is really good, and the dialogue system is flexible and interesting. Great art and character design, too. The relaxing music and ambient sound does a great job of setting the tone. Great work all around!
Nice game. Beautiful art style. Good work.
Wow, incredible work! Polished, interesting, interactive unique story. Loved style of the game!