Peace of Mind

When a friendly adventurer goes in a cult hideout, he ends up picking up a tome of eldritch lore. As is typical of such things, the vast knowledge contains inside starts to infect his mind and drive him to madness. The problem is that this time, the infection is contagious.
When he goes back to his home, everyone around him is driven mad, one by one, and the hospital is desperately stumbling over itself to treat it--and making absolutely no headway. The city is quarantined, everywhere is closed up, and people are dropping like flies.
As the town's resident healer, it's up to you to enter inside the hero's mind, purge out the madness bit by bit, talk some sense into the man, and see if you can get sanity reigning once more.

- 45 minutes of playtime
- Lots of talking!
- A (simple) active battle system
- A few custom graphics made by a dude who isn't an artist
- Semi-original soundtrack
- Weaponized discussion system
- No, seriously, a LOT of talking
- Surreal environments
- Not a horror game
- Horror games are pretty cool though
- Egregious use of ellipses
- I think someone says a swear word somewhere

Story;

You are a healer who delves into the mind of an ill adventurer in order to stop a terrible plague turning villiagers into mindless (what I assume are) zombies. But this simple story belies what an absolute triumph this game really is, because it is so... It's just...

I believe anyone who plays this will get something out of it, because everything about it is just wonderfully perfect.

Graphics;

RTP Graphics for the WIN, because they were used in such a wonderful way that may everything fit. I admit I was expecting the graphics to detract from the game a little, because they didn't seen to be the right sort to make the story really work, and yet... it really did work.

Gameplay;

1. The whole gameplay idea was marvellous, delving into the mind of an ill adventurer, traversing that mind and healing them from the inside out. It was such a wonderfully clever idea and it worked so very well.

2. A combination of on map battles was fun, and a little heart pounding. But the real winner was NEGOITATING part. It was inspired and awesome and I loved it so much, because I was so very frightened of picking the wrong thing to say, of making things worse, and it was such a heady feeling.

Final Comments;

This game hit a spot deep inside me, and I love it, I love it so very, very much. My only quibble is that sometimes the sprite walks in such a way that it looks like she's floating over the walls, but to be honest I hardly noticed save for the fact that I was keeping an eye out for imperfections, but seriously, a bit more polish on that score and this game would be... well... Perfect beyond all perfection.

Play this game. I kid you not. It is the best!

-The ground situation is great; it gives you a lot of room for characterization since you're literally in someone's mind.

-That said, I found the adventurer's backstory to be a little stock.  Your take on the existential issues a typical adventurer might face is a nice turn from the norm, but I wish he had a bit more going on in his past than the sadness of losing a loved one and the anger he feels towards the townspeople.  The death of his girlfriend in particular is a really stock device that could have at least been handled in a unique way.

-I do like his mood swings, though, and I particularly like when he fell in love with the specter.  I like the initial confusion of the entity appearing as you, and I wish that his infatuation with you (rather than just the entity) was explored more (that expectation was dispelled pretty quickly), as it would have been an interesting scenario, since you would be impacting his mind in an unintended way.

-This also might have set the story on a more interesting course, as the final act hurt the narrative a lot for me.  I didn't mind the entity's oppressive nihilism, but Jadranka's response of the undying hope of humanity is about as standard of a theme in JRPGs as they come.  I felt like this game took a great ground situation and began to ask some important philosophical questions, but it didn't deliver on those by the end.  Again, if Jadranka ended up unintentionally causing the adventurer to become infatuated with her, this would have been a great turn in your narrative, and think about how this would impact her character in interesting (and also existential) ways; that first scene got my mind spinning in all the right ways, but then it got shut down pretty quickly, which sucked.

-The physical combat didn't mesh with the narrative for me.  I think I wouldn't have minded it, though, if it were handled better, but I think you were probably dealing with the limits of a script.  It suffers a bit from "Lagoon syndrome," i.e. the swordplay almost requires you getting hit.  There wasn't much strategy or intrigue involved here, and it was balanced to be so easy that it wasn't particularly fun.

-The debate battles were much cooler, though, and I think you probably could have centered the game around this and taken out the physical combat altogether.  I never felt in danger of losing a battle (save for the last one, which seemed intentional), though, so I don't know if I was just making the correct decisions or if the game pretty much forces you to win.  This was still a cool aspect of the gameplay.  I've noticed a lot of others with verbal battles in this competition, so I hope that their abundance doesn't hurt the novelty of it.

-Sometimes I found your work to be a bit too much tell rather than show.  The debate battles of course required lots of dialogue, which was fine, but other times--such as Jadranka's impressions--could have been conveyed to the player through visuals and atmosphere rather than told to the player.  This is one of the strengths of this medium, so make sure to take advantage of it.  The "love" section, for example, is conveyed really clearly from the atmosphere.

-Speaking of that, I found that section to be the best in terms of visuals, which I'm sure you'd agree with.  The RTP stuff in the earlier sections didn't work as well for me.  Since you're exploring a mind, this is a game that really requires visuals that break away from the RTP's blocky, tiled nature, and your pixel movement script would have fit right with that.  By the way, sometimes that script clashed with the tiles, either by making small entryways a slight annoyance to navigate or by having your character graphic overlap with walls.

Overall, this game was definitely stronger than I expected from the screenshots, but the story took some easy ways out both with characterization and plot, and there were some iffy design decisions.  I think for this type of game, the story was everything, so I wish it would have cooked for longer, as Jadanka's likable and your ground situation is compelling.