OK, just finished it. Congratulations on the release, Andail! It's very impressive work, particularly for a one-person project. I definitely hope to see more from you in the future. (I had to go look in the db to see that you'd even done any AGS games before -- apparently they were mostly before my time.)
In terms of feedback... (There might be some very general spoilers here)
Praise:
-The graphics are very attractive, particularly the atmospheric backgrounds. There's a wide variety of scenes, and they're all convincingly depicted.
-Lots of solid puzzles, well balanced to be neither too easy nor too difficult. I only got really frustrated a couple of times. You've also come up with a story where some of the more preposterous adventure game logic makes sense (or close enough).
-I think the story is for the most part well told, and you've managed to mix in the different elements surprisingly well (e.g. the conspiracy/thriller component).
-As I mentioned in the post above, I really like how you introduce Ord. I think with the gradually revealed but tastefully backgrounded backstory, how he relates to others (giving him a friend to call just to chat was a great design decision) and how his character is written in general, he's very easy to like. I also like that he knows his own limitations and is happy to hand off certain tasks to others more qualified.
-I also love it in general when NPCs actually behave as people with their own agenda and intelligence, not just passive hotspots waiting for you to click on them. So it was cool that Sara was getting on with selling the estate and packing things up while you were investigating, showing up in different places and rooms. (Though it did seem a bit odd of her to try to have both things done at the same time.)
-The hide-and-seek sequence was properly tense and hard-boiled PI stuff. That felt to me like the climax of the game.
-Sweden! I like when a game is grounded in a real place and a real environment. Even thematically it felt "Swedish" in many ways. I would have enjoyed even more distinctive Gothenburgian details like the trams etc.
Criticism:
-The game didn't feel quite as polished as I think a commercial title ought to aim for. Nothing really big (that I came across), just a lot of small things that felt a bit off: a few glitchy walkbehinds, some awkwardness with the UI (for example, it's possible to have multiple inventory-item closeups on top of each other), missing responses to quite a lot of actions (e.g. if you click/rightclick on Ord, you get some boilerplate response, but if you click/rightclick on Freyja, nothing), hotspots awkwardly placed (sometimes so that the label was off-screen and therefore not visible, more often just too close to the inventory), that thing with music playing for a split second in the middle of conversations (which turned out to be a problem throughout the game), backgrounds that are just a bit larger than full-screen and therefore scroll
slightly, as well as scrolling backgrounds with black bars that scroll as part of the screen, a few misspellings ("abbandoned" in one place), different voice actors pronouncing the same names differently (very noticeable with "Ithyn" in the finale), etc. etc.
-The ending was abrupt, yes. In my case, so abrupt that I wonder if there's a bug and I missed something:
After finishing Ch. 3 and not knowing what to do next, I decided to go look for Sara the last place I saw her: the cabin. There I run into Veronika, and out of nowhere accuse her of having murdered Jonatan, referring to photos I have absolutely no knowledge of. (I still don't know who "Max" is or what actually happened when Jonatan was killed.) Then shooting, and the game is over. Huh. There must be something missing, right?
-I question your color theory. Green + red = brown, dammit! (As a more general objection, how do you suppose the mixture gets lighter by adding more dye?)
-Oh yes. Swearing. So difficult to do right (both for the writer and the actors) so that it doesn't sound forced and artificial. I think you would have been better off omitting it, because IMO it doesn't quite work here.
-The voice acting was pretty variable, with a lot of good ones and a number that were... not so good. I hesitate to single out individual actors, but the guy playing the shopowner seemed to be in a completely different genre of game from most of the other voices. (I also found myself wondering why the inhabitants of a closed-off village all had different accents.)
-When all is said and done, I don't quite understand the point of Jonatan's secret book, what he was trying to express or why he was so keen on Sara reading it. It's not just that the ending is WTF-y, but that it doesn't seem to fit with the preceding narrative. This guy was a successful author, after all, and I would expect some internal logic to it. Some more/clearer symbolic or autobiographical links to his experiences and interests would also have helped make it seem like something this guy would actually write. As it stands, it feels more like you're just switching to a fantasy game world for a bit, Longest Journey-style.
Overall, definitely a game worth playing. Thanks for having made it!
