MV - Ashwood fables: lunar veil [Mini demo]

SYNOPSIS
A 2D exploration game set in a quaint yet eerie village.
This is only a prototype, so it is only day 1 of the full game, serving as a prologue in certain ways. The estimate gameplay time is around half an hour.

In this small demo, step into the shoes of Bell, returning to a home that feels both welcoming and eerily distant. Players spend the day exploring the village and interacting with its inhabitants. However, as dusk approaches, the atmosphere of the village shifts. The once-charming village becomes a place of unsettling tension, where shadows stretch long, and the air grows heavier with a quiet sense of dread. Each day is split into two phases: daytime, where exploration and connection with the villagers are key, and nighttime, where psychological horror elements begin to take hold.

The gameplay is non-combat, focusing on exploration and dialogue rather than fighting. Player choices subtly influence the relationships and environment. It's a mix of exploration, psychological horror and character-driven storytelling.

Key features of the game include:
-a day/night cycle, where the village shifts from peaceful during the day to eerie at night, creating a dual atmosphere.
-a to-do list, where Bell stores the tasks he chooses to take on, mostly completing small tasks for villagers during the day.
-a love/hate relationship system, as Bell interacts with the villagers, his relationships evolve based on his choices. Track these dynamics through the bonds system, where every interaction builds or weakens the connection between Bell and the people of the village.

This mini demo offers some of the main ideas to be expected for the final release the game, focusing on the initial day of Bell’s journey back to the village. As development continues, I plan to expand the story the nighttime cycle, as well as introduce some mechanics to the game such as item trading and gifting, as well as crafting items by cooking and sewing.

Right from the title screen, the colors look off. It’s like I was playing a game where the gamma slider was set too low - there’s so little contrast between the shades of brown and black that it’s hard to see what stuff is supposed to look like. The cursor to see which item you have selected in the window is basically invisible.

The text is also hard to read, especially since sometimes (I guess for non-dialogue?) you make the font an even darker color. The game is just uncomfortable to look at, it feels like I’m straining to make out the text and details the whole time.

The BGM once you first get into the game is…odd. It isn’t too loud, volume-wise, but the bells sound like they were too loud when the music was recorded/mastered and they’re distorted. There’s also a slight glitch when it loops back to the start, it sounds like there’s a little bit of extra space on the end of the track.

Your writing is generally good, the prose has some complexity and there are no blatant grammatical or spelling errors (I noticed one misuse of “everyday” with Yniphora). That makes it all the more jarring, however, when you throw in modern Internet anachronisms. If this is in the 1800s and you’re using formal prose, it just seems wrong to have your main character saying “Welp” and using a tilde as punctuation.

The character sprite is drawn in an interesting way, using the idle animation to have a sort of film grain look. I don’t think the sideways walking animations look as good; the way the legs only go forward and neither extends backward makes it look like a marionette pretending to march. Especially since when going up and down both legs do move.

It’s a bit unintuitive that to leave Yniphora’s house I had to walk down into the doorway and also hit Enter. It seems like that should be a Player Touch event.

I stopped after the second conversation, at the post office.

I feel like this game could be really charming due to its unique art style and the writing; however, both have some unfortunate flaws. The entire color scheme, in particular - for a game that seems to be entirely driven by its text and artwork, you really don’t want the players to feel like they’re struggling to understand those things.