kseon 2025-04-08 08:40
visuals are great thanks for the game :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD57 → The Way We Left, by Elien Pathcarver
By alyd-asmar, Nuelijarma, fae-pdf and Grizembrrr
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 349 | 3.66 | 42 | |
| Fun | 556 | 3.20 | 42 | |
| Innovation | 243 | 3.58 | 42 | |
| Theme | 164 | 4.11 | 43 | |
| Graphics | 98 | 4.37 | 43 | |
| Audio | 162 | 3.80 | 41 | |
| Mood | 116 | 4.08 | 42 |
visuals are great thanks for the game :)
I really like this! The soundtrack is so cool, I love how it evolves really slowly as you work your way through the scroll and adapts to the intensity of the scenes playing out. The game also does really interesting things with the structure, I thought the labyrinth section wasinteresting and I like how it leaves large gaps of whitespace to build moments of tension. The way the impact of the choices ebbs and flows from tiny character moments to large impactful decisions is satisfying. The world building and story were really intriguing and pulled me through!
This is a great piece of work! Thank you for making it!
Our submission is here if you want to check it out :) https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/eurydive
Beautiful music and visuals, with strong atmosphere and well-written text. The ambiguity around the identity of “I” is interesting, but it also made it harder for me to understand the motivation behind the choices I was making.
The handwritten font fits the narrative and visual style, but it was quite hard to read—especially before I realized there was an option to change it. Maybe consider letting players choose a font at the beginning, like Pentiment does.
I also encountered a bug where the scroll jumped back to the top and got stuck at a certain point.
Anyways it's impressive how much you achieved in such a short time. Keep it up!
This was beautiful. Smart to have seeking deeper into introspection as a reference to the theme!
A great example of storytelling done well! And the artwork was really neat too - all in all a solid game :)
I’ve never experienced a choose-your-own-adventure game quite like this before. The stunning visuals, atmospheric music, and captivating story. I’ve used Ink for a project myself, but I never imagined it could create something like this. Great job!
Truly touching. At times it does get hard to know what the consequences of an action are which makes it feel like the choices are arbitrary.
Absolutely loved the drawings! My compliments to the ~~chef~~ artist.
A very atmospheric piece! Beautiful storytelling and captivating visuals. At times, the choices didn’t feel very different from one another, but overall it’s a solid game!
These illustrations are absolutely exquisite.
Incredibly creative idea, absolutely love how you create this one giant scroll by the end. Super unique stuff, and the art, music, and writing all support that system perfectly. This is one of the rare jam games that truly pushes the bar of innovation, great work and I look forwards to seeing what you make next!
Wow, I really like the effect of scrolling through the longer vertical illustrations: it creates a surprising feeling of depth even in a browser window. Cool music too. It's an interesting style of choose-your-own-adventure: the choices are quick and snappy, and it gives it a rare urgency and instinctivity, maybe at the cost of feeling totally in control. Nice work, all!
@caeonosphere Omg we're so proud you felt that! 🤩 We were precisely trying to achieve this "depths by scrolling" effect!! Thank you for you comment 💌
Thank you very much, @jack-turpitt , for this exhaustive feedback. I's really helpful as it underlines precise features of what made it worked. You rule 🌟 (I went I played your game, btw 🫡)
Hey, @foxecho! Thanks for your feedback 💌 Good point, we'll put a sentence about changing fonts option at the beginning of the scroll, thanks for telling us!! By the way, we're sincerely interested: what ambiguity around the identity of “I” are you talking about? 👀👂
@fredrik-andersson how nice it is that you noticed this subtlety, it means it's working. Thanks! 😊🪄
@balimaarthebassfish 'solid game'... 😳👉👈
@xwilq HEHE, THANK YOU!! @fae-pdf is our sworn ink goblin, that's thanks to her! She made an inventory, knowledge tracking, and the exiting-the-labyrinth-chase-against-the-beast 🤩 Your comment is particularly touching since you know how ink works ~
@providence Thank you for this comment, it's one of the challenges of choice games. 🙄 if you remember them, you can tell us when you felt this way!!
@coffie The chef is honored, they've been cooking for our studio games since the beginning!! 😉 Their Instagram profile is ✨ @ alyd.asmar_art ✨, if you're still hungry 🍜
As for our talented music cooker, she can be found on bandcamp : https://nuelijarma.bandcamp.com/
@floppynub Woah. Your comment is really heartwarming (it's been screened and put on our discord server). Thank you very much. 🥹✨
@grizembrrr most of them honestly. Don't get me wrong, choosing the traits of the characters was really nice, but it could maybe be represented with tooltips giving a little glimpse into the future. For example when choosing the behaviour of the girl, you could see what that would mean for her demeanor towards danger and towards you. Beside that I'd say the left right center minigame should have some more hints. Even if it's a little vague like "the left path looks damp and dark, while you can hear some dripping noise from the right path". Jonas Tyroller made a cool video about choices in video games you could perhaps take some inspiration from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_qQ76ouWXI
@grizembrrr Hi again! I’ve been thinking more about what I meant with the “ambiguity,” and I’ll try to explain it better here.
At the beginning, it seems like I’m someone writing a scroll—someone who woke up in a cave and is reflecting on their situation. Naturally, that puts me in a kind of role: am I this character who’s writing? Or am I myself, just making choices?
But when the game started asking me to make decisions, I realized I didn’t know what I was choosing for. I didn’t know who this character was, or what they wanted. So even though I was supposed to be making meaningful choices, I felt a bit disconnected—because I couldn’t understand the character’s motivation, and I couldn’t pretend it was my own, either. After all, I’m not in a cave, and I’m not writing a scroll.
So I ended up in this strange space where I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be, or why I was doing anything. Maybe that ambiguity is part of the experience—and if so, that’s really interesting! But it also made it harder for me to emotionally engage with the decisions.
Hope that makes more sense. And thanks again for making something that sparked this kind of reflection!
Beautiful art and great story
@foxecho Thank you so much for the feedback, it's always so hard to know how much to explain in this kind of atmospheric games. Originally, we had thought about some system to make it clearer (like, seeing the thoughts of the writer while she wonders about how to tell her own story), but we lacked UI programing skills, so in the end we prioritized the "writing a long uninterrupted scroll". But I guess your experience could have been avoided with an introductory sentence, we might add that, thanks for taking the time!!!!!
An unusual way of presenting the theme of the jam, it is clear that a lot of work has been done on the plot and illustrations.
This was really well done! I always wanted to make someting using ink, and this game is motivating me even more to try it. You can make really cool things with it! :D
I dont really know what to add that others havent already said. The mood is amazing in this game. Every choice feels uncertain, as I am guessing the main character feels as well. The world also feels dangerous and evil, to the point that you start mistrusting a child. The art and music also enhanced this atmosphere a lot. One small nitpick I had was that the music just cut off at some points to restart or start a new song. A crossfade would have felt less jarring I think :)
Overall this is an amazing submission! I had a lot of fun :D
This is really good. Definitely going to sit down with it at some point for a longer go. Very different from the usual LD fare. I might propose to have sat down and looked around for a free font to go with it.
@ruruie Thanks for your comment! We still haven't highlighted it in the intro of the game, but you can switch between two fonts by clicking on "font" in the top right part of the interface! (I just replaced the dark/light themes pre-implemented in the Ink export to do that, so I guess some people get the "legible" font as a default instead of the pretty one, oops)
@wuppos Oh I would have loved crossfades! Unfortunately the Ink engine does not allow this by default, and we did not have the time nor the skills to implement this in Javascript.
@providence Yes, thank you!
So, in fact the first "left, right, ahead" choices have no minigame to them, this passage is supposed to make you feel getting deeper and deeper into the tunnels. Which made me think that since these choices have no impact at all, I should just put a {write_on} there instead. Or in the future something like "follow the voice"/"leave these tunnels". Thus, thank you.
But then, in the actual "Left, Right, Ahead" minigame, you have in fact exactly these descriptions. About them, I understand that if you just want to get it done, you don't spend that much time inside the echoing dead end, and you don't get the clues supposed to help you to exit the maze without getting caught by the beast. I guess then that the choices for which path you take feels arbitrary and the descriptions abstruse/useless.
What I would really like to know, is that if the players who spent time reading the echoing dead end descriptions, could decide which path to take and exited the maze more easily.
@grizembrrr Don't worry, I did carefully read on. And I did notice there were quite obvious hints as to which directions to go or not to go. These are nice to reward properly reading for sure, but I wonder if a more nuanced trickle of information with a "punish for not reading" system would work too.
This is awesome! Very beautiful storytelling, and I really like the artwork. I love how you just keep writing down one long scroll.
I had seen ink before, but I didn't realize it could be used in such creative ways. The maze section reminds me a lot of old text-based adventure games, I felt a swell of nostalgia during that section.
I really liked the narrative. I did a second playthrough to experience more of the options. The memories/thoughts that can be optionally expanded upon are very thematic.
Excellent submission :heart:
@alchemic Thank you so much for playing, you're too sweet! I'm so happy you enjoyed it. The maze really do be like old school text adventures! Also very happy someone got to see that there is variety on replays, it's a lot of completely invisible work otherwise haha
Always a pleasure to check on the game you made and to get a comment from you! I hope you get an awesome rank and lots of cool reviews! :heart:
Such beautiful graphics! And with the bg music it created the right mood.
Wow, this is fantastic! The art and format are terrific, really drawing me into the setting. The music's changes made me feel more and less tense as I read (wrote). The writing itself is so free-flowing and yet so poignant. One of my biggest fears, what brings on my depression the most, is a loss of purpose. I smashed that "I hope you purpose" option in a heartbeat lol.
Really fantastic work, let alone in a 72-hour jam! This game SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO put me right in that space and pushed me to figure it out, yet it felt like I was creating it at the same time...
An engrossing story, and captivating mood from the sound and visuals. It would improve some of the music tracks if they were edited to loop seamlessly, and there were some silent moments at the end of the story despite having plenty of music tracks throughout the story that could have been used here, too, but overall, everything is very well done. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Wow. Just wow. Can't say more, it's a must play, definitely. The art, the gameplay, the music. Gwen <3
Really enjoyed this! Captivating storytelling, combined with stunning artwork and cool music. Great job on creating such an awesome experience.
Hello there, nice game! It was really interesting, I did not feel a real danger so I explored a lot, I am curious about other possibilities, what could happen if I made different choices :slight_smile: Here is my let's play experience: https://youtu.be/ZmYOIB9teFQ