Ok, so it’s quite short, hopefully the clues are good.. feedback wanted.
I know the generated images aren’t always consistent with the scene. Feedback wanted on the story, writing, clues, structure.
Oh I can’t send links - well that sucks as it probably means nobody will check my story out because they would have to manually go to qynari dot com slash play/13724b76-8a90-4308-b86e-2b9f5c72f519 - will anyone actually do that?
Lol, thanks - I guess that’s a new user anti-spam thing or something. Appreciate the help 
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I played it. I managed to escape, eventually. It was drawing the background twice, and would flicker. otherwise, no problems
Ok… feedback on the platform is good too. Regarding the story though, was it fun? Did the failed attempts give you the right clues needed to solve it?
I escaped after around a dozen attempts. I realised after a couple of tries that getting the fire axe is a red herring, but I was confused by how the game mentions that picking up the samples case calms you, yet I still kept dying at the airlock because of being too panicked.
I haven’t come across this platform before but if there’s some way of adding an indicator of roughly how much breath you have left, that would be nice to have. And if you don’t feel that it would be too much of a spoiler, an indicator of your mental state to maybe suggest that even after picking up the samples case you’re still not as calm as you could be - e.g. “panicked”/“anxious”/“collected” or similar .
I didn’t much care for the AI images but it seems I didn’t need to look at them to know how to win.
Thanks - that’s useful. It’s hard to build these things to be not too trivial and obvious, but also so that the clues land. I’ve built the platform myself too with a friend, so I will add those features to the backlog. We’re trying to broaden the scope of this kind of content and make it more accessible to wider audiences.
I got stuck and only persevered because i knew it was solvable. Without that information, i would have assumed i was at a dead end. I think the bits about being made calm should have been stressed slightly more as that’s the clue.
Great feedback, thanks. I’ve updated the text to emphasise clues about panic, both in the intro and in the various endings. I also added better “closing thoughts” in the failure scenarios to make red-herrings clear when you reach the end of those paths.
The writing is perfectly serviceable but too clinical for this particular purpose.
Clinical prose and tight player-character integration- works great.
Emotive/subjective prose and deliberate player-character separation - works great.
But here we have clinical prose and awkward player-character separation, where the character’s mental state is very important but it never comes across to the player in a way that doesn’t break immersion.
Same thing with having new options/things to notice appear just because the character’s mental state changes. Fine if the player/character separation is very clear and deliberate, but it comes across as arbitrary and counterintuitive in cases like this.
Wow - yes you’re exactly right. I’m really just learning about writing and I never even noticed that there is the clinical vs subjective styles in play… and it is arbitrary, I guess because I wasn’t really aware of the difference while writing it so there’s no deliberate or consistent choice between the styles.
While deciding what story to do, and while writing it, my internal experience was that my imagination felt restricted because I couldn’t think outside of an “escape” or “puzzle” scenario. It felt rather contrived but I couldn’t figure out how to escape (heh) that box myself. My experience in programming and games seems to guide me down that route, and I’m trying to see it as an “easiest path” rather than an “immutable boundary” - but I wanted to press ahead despite writing not being my forte, as that’s how you improve.
Anyhow - great constructive feedback, really appreciate it . Now that I can see the issue I can try to avoid it in the next one. 