Where The Light Dies
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Nothing could stop us.
I was the V8 engine and he the driver. I gave us ideas while he chose the good ones. At least that’s what I said when I told people about me and my best friend Ashar. In reality, I was a bored rich kid with nothing better to do and he was an old friend who couldn’t let go.
I never realized what that meant until it became our last source of strength.
This game contains around 10,000 words and two possible endings. The art assets were all made by me and the sound effects and music were sourced from pixabay.com, so no copyrighted material was used.
This game is licensed under a CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), meaning it and all its assets can be used for any purpose so long as proper attribution is given. Linking to this page or my itch.io profile is good enough.
Warning.
This story contains themes and feelings of disorientation and claustrophobia. If this is distressing to you, put your mental health first and do not play it.
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Comments
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Hello! Thank you for this experience, well done for the work.
The main menu is surprising, I like the idea that we don’t have the possibility to save or load a game.
We have time to get attached to the characters, and the flashbacks from the past are touching and relevant, I think.
I really liked the endings as well, which break away from the usual perfect hero cliché. I like the idea that he becomes aware of his flaws, accepts them, and builds his own philosophy of life from that.
The narration is short and straight to the point, while still taking the time to develop the character’s emotions (I should take note of that haha, I now understand better what you were trying to tell me in your review).
In terms of areas for improvement, I would say:
- Create more of a horror atmosphere, creepy ambient sound design that stresses us out. Creaking sounds (more than just the knock door you added). I also think you could have added echo sounds, and at the end, sounds that match the action you’re describing. Sound really has more impact than we think!
- For your backgrounds, I think using darker colors would have been more interesting , sometimes it feels like it’s broad daylight, which can contradict the story where we’re in a strange and abandoned place.
Congrats on your efforts, for now this one is my favorite. I really like this short novel format and this fast-paced storytelling (that’s a personal opinion in this case!).
See you soon!
Thanks a lot for the kind words and the feedback!
I indeed was trying to flip the idea of friendship overcoming everything and seeing how imperfect people might act if given the choice. The shorter format was somewhat of an experiment as well, so I'm glad it paid off. Personally, I prefer longer stories but I might experiment with more short ones in the future.
Similar to your project Painpal I wasn't able to give as much attention to this project as maybe I should have due to a lack of available time on my end. As a result, parts of the project were rushed and made without proper attention to the visual and sound design. I probably won't change it now either, because I'm happy to just move on, but I still appreciate your feedback a lot.