Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD56 → Forgotten (a tiny horror game)
By thisisspy, vinogradovivan and koroleva olya
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 729 | 3.36 | 24 | |
| Fun | 970 | 2.75 | 24 | |
| Innovation | 1018 | 2.45 | 24 | |
| Graphics | 459 | 3.77 | 24 | |
| Audio | 310 | 3.56 | 24 | |
| Mood | 135 | 4.06 | 24 |
Nailed it on the atmospheric aspects! The textures and visuals are especially nice, and the sound design really works. I can't think of anything that would improve the atmosphere beyond things happening to build suspense. I think you had a vision and matched it.
I realy love this VHS atmocphere!
The atmosphere is creepy! Great job on that, from the music, sound effects, and the environment. A bit hard to see at times with the heavy pixelization and dark lighting. Took me a bit to find everything. Overall quite a creepy experience.
I don't have a lot of experience making horror yet, but these are just so things that came to mind. In general, this does a good job at limiting the information it gives a player.
Visually, the pixel filter was much better once I discovered zoom, and better once I had explored the space once. Just barely enough visual detail when needed. Make sure the dialogue is prominent on at any resolution, but I think it's okay to keep interaction prompts in the center and dialogue below that. The interactable object red highlight was vaguely jumpscare inducing, since the bright red is jarring compared to rest of the palette (maybe that's intentional though). The classic thing to do is to change the scene when the character goes to sleep, but if you don't want to add a fade in/out for the pills transition, maybe only change the map when the player isn't looking or is in another room. You'd need to make sure the effect was noticable in multiple places so the player could realize what was happening.
Audio-wise, maybe mix the footsteps a bit quieter. I liked the short sounds instead of voice lines for the POV, and their tone matched the vibe. The ambience background music is great, especially the low Hz parts for me personally. Consider filtering or transitioning the ambience inside the hidden room to imply that particular area is different, or changing the audio as more items are collected. You could filter out mid tones and a player might experience that as an absence or something being missing.
Input-wise, I think the movement should remain janky, but slightly less to keep it from being distracting. Maybe reduce the distance it takes to turn the character or make the space slightly bigger.
Map-wise, small spaces can be made to feel big with containers and doors. I'd say keep that direction. I had to backtrack to the bedroom for the photo, but I think that's a good thing in an enviroment like this for 1 or 2 collectables.
This feels great--keep going. For vibesmithing, I think you should listen to your gut instincts for what to add or change. Make it exactly how you think it should be.
Those are some big cockroaches.
Overall the atmosphere was very creepy. The graphics were good but I felt some parts were far to dark for me. Although it might be because it is reasonably sunny currently and i had some glare on screen. But I struggled to see clearly part of the game. Also the next step was not entirely obvious with the reasoning behind what the player is doing not clear. Some visual story telling would have been nice and leaning more into using light as a tool to direct the player to certain areas.
From a nice to have perspective being able to scale the audio would have been nice.
Graphics, sounds, animation, perfectly create tension and fear, good job!
Great audio to create a creepy feeling! Took me longer than I'd like to admit to find the "secret" end area. Reminded me of the different "figure out what happened" - walking simulators, like "everyones gone to rapture", "What Remains of Edith Finch" etc. Great atmosphere! Well done!
Like the visual filter/post processing effects and audio. The walking bob did give me a little bit of motion sickness though.
Loved the visual style. God job!
I got some Silent Hill 4 vibes playing this but I didn't feel any horror. It was just some dude walking around a dirty apartment. I had a few horror games queued up and had the lights off with my headphones on ready to get scared but it just didn't work.
You did a good job of creating a setting for horror but I think you left out the horror. I never felt like I was in any danger or felt like anything was at stake. Even the main character seemed unfazed with his seemingly uninterested grunts and loud stomping footsteps.
If you want to make a horror game, you need to add something to keep the player on their toes. I don't necessarily mean a gameplay element or a monster, but at the minimum some writing to set up the scene. Some guy woke in a locked apartment whose girlfriend died years ago is not horror. Maybe write about how the girlfriend died under mysterious circumstances or something and the game could have notes scattered around that were written by her.
I know a game jam is not enough time to create a complex narrative experience but I think if you decide to keep working on it think about a way to make the player actually feel like something is not right rather than just writing it out in the description.
(also the default unity skybox reflected on the tv screen kinda broke the immersion lol)
great creepy vibe going on with this! awesome atmosphere!
Thanks for all of the feedback! We have updated game on itch.io with more polished textures, less pixel postprocessing and a bit brighter map.
Really nice ambiance ! I got a bug when crawling in the ritual room, when trying to stand up near a wall, I clipped through it, and started falling infinitely 😅 Good work anyway !!
Love the graphics and the sounds! The jumpscare in the ritual room got me wiht the sound. it Surprised me that the game closed when i gave all the necessary items to the pentagram. Oh and Seems like the walls left and right in the ritual room don't have collision, so you can fall into infinity.
Great idea and pretty scary atmosphere. A bit short, and the ending is nearly not there. But overall a fine little jam game.
I played the itch.io version, the atmosphere was great, I liked that when you were trying to use items the game was displaying hints about what to do with them, I liked that the key items had a red outline. I never felt lost in the game which is great! I feel the game could use some dark spots in the map to make it scarier and wish I could see some ending instead of going back to the main menu.
love how the game brings the theme to life with such a beautiful art style. Good Job!
Nice creepy vibes. I found it a bit too uniformly dark though. Some more subtly placed lights would have been nice. The vertical camera look limits were a bit annoying, made it hard to pick some stuff up. I appreciate that pickups were highlighted. It needed some notes or something to drive the story, as it felt a bit directionless and random. The version embedded here hit an index out of bounds error and wouldn't run.
i just fall down the scene :crying_cat_face: but i realy like all that effects, the game is awesome!