You know, I hadn’t thought it was important, but I had some evidence, I think maybe I had everyone at low? I’m actually intrigued to here there’s another ending if you don’t have any suspicions!
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Huh, so I guess “lol you timed out” isn’t an ending despite the “you have unlocked two endings” message I got; otherwise the math doesn’t work out. Curiouser and curiouser.
I’m guessing “Leave It to the Experts” is probably “have you touched the murderboard at all” then, yeah.
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Thanks for all the insightful comments on this game, and an extra thanks to anyone who has pointed out bugs (here and in DM).
My entire September has been a mess of meetings and sick leave, but I’m going to try and address the bugs next week if I can.
Spoiler-ful comments on the two endings that aren’t tied to a specific character:
Space… Space Never Changes - run out of time without changing your murderboard at all
Leave it to the Experts - end the game without any character’s murderboard level at high
(Essentially, what @Lionstooth guessed above!)
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I had similar experiences to many above, where the game’s structure confused me a little. It definitely suffered from me playing it directly after Winter-Over, which is a much more traditional murder mystery (I love mystery games and went straight for them in my IFComp playthroughs, which I realise is perhaps not the best strategy).
At 25 minutes in I’d found plenty of reasons to be suspicious, but not enough to conclude that any one person was most likely the murderer. The evidence I had all felt rather flimsy. I kept looking for clues either rule people out or confirm their guilt, and was rather disappointed that no such additional evidence existed, I could accuse anyone and have that be accepted.
I think the game would benefit from setting player expectations better, perhaps tweaking the summary or game intro to reflect that there are many possible versions of events? There’s definitely a lot I enjoyed here. The writing is strong, I loved all the moments of Pearl’s introspection, especially her one-sided grief-stricken conversations with the captain. All the endings I’ve seen are fascinating stories in an of themselves. But I came into it expecting a usual murder mystery structure, and that’s really not what you’re getting.
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A couple of bugfixes:
Bugfixes (blurred for spoilers):
- Storage now displays the correct “Side Shed” description when Pearl is a child.
- Fixed Primus’s hints section (he will not stop speaking to you no matter what options you pick)
- Fixed a couple of typos and small bugs (extraneous characters in the footer; footer showing up at the bottom of Petro’s ending)
- Music should be less glitchy now (this was the cause of the (if: that sometimes showed in the footer – I failed to add the closing parenthesis!)
- Updated the tutorial section using Victor’s suggested language to hopefully be a little clearer
I’ve been unable to reproduce the bug with the endings – I’m able to unlock all endings above 6, and the number never goes down, and endings don’t disappear for me. Since I can’t reproduce that, I’m not sure what to do with it.
I haven’t managed to get the timer to stop kicking people to the “time’s up” ending either, even though the code I tried seems like it should work… I’ll keep poking at it!
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Bumping this thread to mention that A Death in Hyperspace won “Best Game Writing” in the Nebula Awards 2024, a prominent SFF award.
The shortlist included a couple of other games IF-y enough to be on IFDB – The Ghost and the Golem and Restore, Reflect, Retry (both ChoiceScript) – as well as other works, such as an Elden Ring game.
I think this might be the first time an IF work from this community has won a ‘trad’ SFF award?
(Although there have been a fair few nominations for the Nebulas previously.)
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How wonderful and brilliant!
Congratulations to the authors: Stewart C Baker (@bakerstewart), Phoebe Barton , James Beamon, Kate Heartfield, Isabel J Kim, Sara Messenger, JingJing Xiao, Natalia Theodoridou, M. Darusha Wehm, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor!
I found no aliases for the other authors so I hope Stewart C Baker will let everyone know that some random guy at intfiction said “Kudos!”
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Thanks, both! 
We are all a little stunned, to be honest, but excited to be representing IF on a non-IF stage!
(Plus I’ve only seen like 3 people on Reddit with “ugh, [my favorite] was robbed” hot takes so far. And I’ve even seen a few people I don’t know at all say they liked the game after they played it. So that’s nice! 
)
The ChoiceScript games in the running are both fantastic, by the way. The Ghost and the Golem is immaculately written, and Restore, Reflect, Retry goes in some unexpected directions that aren’t typical of a Choice of Games title. I recommend checking them both out if you haven’t already–maybe even if you don’t typically like Choice of Games stuff!
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