For anyone that isn't sure about the time loop mechanic, we have an update coming that will have an Unlimited time option.
Yay! No timer/alarm SFX! I like the pressure the timer puts on the player, but the ticking sound gets a bit annoying after a while, to be honest, and I rather have my character die before the alarm goes off. If possible, adding a timer/alarm volume setting, or sound on/off option for it, would also be welcome (I think SFX affects the game overall, that's why I'm mentioning it as a separate setting). The game performs well, but after playing it for about 30 minutes (maybe more, maybe less), my phone got a little hotter than I'd expect it to be with a game that, apparently, isn't too heavy on graphics processing (they're great, but I think they're static and prerendered(?); am I right?). It's not an overheating case, it's not too bad to make it unbearable, but just warmer than expected. I'm using an iPhone 8, running on iOS 16.7.6, maybe it struggles to run it or something. Currently in Chapter 2; initial puzzles had me scratching my head and I didn't know where to start, but then it clicked and made some decent progress in a few loops (I set the timer to 5 minutes). The camera system is VERY useful (I take pictures of everything haha) and new mechanics introduced in Chapter 2 are cool. Looking forward to some more of it, this is a good escape/puzzle game.
Agree the timer is an interesting addition, though had to increase from 5 to 10 minutes to work out solutions in first chapter. The ticking clock can be turned off in the looping menu settings, deselect ‘play sounds’. Not obvious. Maybe the setting could be renamed ‘turn off extremely annoying clock sound’. As always, great puzzles, and have avoided hints so far.
Thanks for providing the solution to my biggest issue! I hope this won't disable any interactive sounds like clicks, opening or locked doors, mechanical sounds and everything else that's not annoying. I can stand the song playing over and over, though; it sounds great and it's possible to stop it if needed, so I have no complaints about it. I also play these (all sort of) games without using hints other than the ones implicit in narrative events, item descriptions, etc. That offers a great challenge, I think it's the way they're meant to be played and I rather stop playing and come back later [or completely give up and drop them] than "cheat" my way through. Once again, thanks for the soundlution.
You're right the 'Play Sounds' under Looping really should be renamed to 'Play Obnoxious Ticking Sound' or something to make it clear as you're not the first to have trouble finding it. For hints, in the next update you'll be able to hide the HUD button just to fully remove all temptation. Really glad you're liking the game though! Re the camera, have you played any of our other games? As we have the Glitch Camera in all of them ( we just gave it a time based acronym in this game ).
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I do, thanks! A bit of feedback about the hint system: I generally appreciate it, it reminds me a bit of UHS from back in the day. I first used it because I hadn't noticed the screws in Chapter 1. And figuring out that to do with that mug. Now that I'm in Chapter 3: Compared to UHS, since this is in-game, it would be nice if hints for things I've already done were soft-hidden or marked somehow, so when I open that menu I don't have to poke through the things I've already done to find the minimum viable hint. Also, some of the hints don't seem to be numbered in order. I just took a screenshot with Hint 22, 23, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31 EDIT, right after posting: I also love the camera system, being able to stick them onscreen, etc. -- it might be an unnecessary UX complication, but the only thing I feel like I'm missing with the pictures is being able to crop them. For example, the glowing runes in chapter 2 are spread across several pictures where the part I need is relatively small in the middle of the picture, so it's hard to have them on screen together in a way that I can read them (iPhone XR).
Yea the Hint system really needs work. In our other games the Hints are automatically hidden when complete, as you'd expect. We also only show the ones that are valid for the area you're in. That way you're never too overwhelmed when looking for hints. Then we decided to make a game with a timeloop mechanic. And things got complicated. Because now you may have solved a puzzle, but the flags that tell us "yup that's complete" will then get reset on the time loop reset, by design, so that puzzle can be solved again. Which means the Hints will then say "oh look, this puzzle isn't solved, so this is what you need to do." Then for reasons that I can't quite remember now, having hints locked to specific areas combined with the looping also caused issues, so we made an 11th hour decision to have all hints visible regardless of location. This all makes for a less than ideal situation. Oh a cropping ability, that would be great! I'll add that to the to-do-maybe-based-on-difficulty pile as that really would be cool.
Heh, fair. Hmm. My idea was for having a loop-durable copy of the flags, so there could be three levels of visibility: Totally unsolved: visible Solved, but not in this loop: Maybe marked with a Checkmark, maybe hidden behind a button like... "Show hints from past loops" (naming things continues to be hard) Solved in this loop: hidden (Oh, maybe this is why the IDs skip around in my screenshot) Totally understandable! It's entirely possible that this next idea would be really annoying to implement with the current data model, but: It seems like there are two types of hints: I'll call them clue-hints and answer-hints. Maybe it's more blended than that, but it could maybe still be modeled as a tree? Suppose there's a puzzle that needs you to find 6 letters, and, uh... pick them out of a set of 20 letters. The clues like "One of these letters is an E" could be perma-flagged once you've solved "The letters are QWERTY", leaving the "Letters are QUERTY" clue available for reference in later loops... ...unless the "QWERTY" result is a clue ("Pick the [square] on [the bingo-board]") instead of a door-unlock, in which case it could be part of a next level of auto-flagging once you solve [the bingo-board] Honestly the biggest risk here is probably mis-categorizing the relationships between the hints, so this might be more of a lift than is worthwhile, at least for this game post-release. And, y'know, priorities.
