We are two of friends with a shared love of storytelling and games that decided to try our hand at a (simple) IF game. We made it over the course of a couple of months in between work and other commitments. All the illustrations and instrumentation are 100% human made (which is why there might be a little bit of jank involved haha).
You are lost in the Wood, you don’t know how you got there, or how you’ll leave. if you’ll ever leave at all. There are two paths ahead of you - the only decision you can make is which one to go down first.
There are about 4 significant endings you can get, and we really wanted to reward patience and exploration - so keep going down paths you’ve already travelled - you never know what you’ll find!
This is our first post, so we unfortunately can’t post the link - but when we’re able to it’ll be right here!
Auld Wood was a delightful little game which encouraged exploration, something IF can be especially good for and has a long history of doing. The music and sound effects were well chosen. I enjoyed the simple low-res graphics, especially the animated donkey. Whether intentionally or not, the story brought to mind several other surrealist classics “Alice and Wonderland” (from the rabbit and themes of royalty) and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (from the donkey and lost in a magical forest). I liked that picking the same choice repeatedly often gave a series of different responses; it made the choices feel more authentic and gave some sense of agency, even while the character also feels a sense of helpless confusion. I have only played the game once, but can already imagine where one of the variant endings might appear.
I liked it! The atmosphere in general was great, and the graphics and sound really added to it.
There were two points where I reached a dead end with no available choices, once after leaving the forest and returning and once after completing the ritual. Those did seem like natural stopping points, but the other two endings I found were clearly marked. Was that intentional?
I also had a frequent issue where the page would forcibly scroll up to the top and remain there, making it impossible to continue playing. Looking at the console the culprit seems to be the scrollDown function in main.js, which would make it an issue with Ink rather than the game itself, but it still made the experience of playing the story much less pleasant than it should have been.
You should add a margin to the bottom so the bottom link isn’t right at the bottom edge of the screen. I’m also having the issue with the forced scrolling.