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Bye, Shane. You were one of the greats, and I'll miss you.

I'm sorry to say that I find those vines so elaborately animated that it makes the stillness of the rest of the scene look pretty weird! I think to make it really work, you'd have to animate rustling leaves on pretty much all the other bushes and trees in the scene, which seems like a lot of work. And in turn that could involve making the branch locations shift slightly, which would mean the positions of the already drawn vines would move a bit as well! But if you see any value in my assessment of this, then I dunno, maybe it's something you'd be willing to spend time on anyway?

I'm glad to see this get an extra coat of polish! I mentioned a few more less severe bugs over Twitter and just wanted to check if you saw 'em, I thought it might have done that thing where it stops sending notifications for a conversation in progress.

Good job, everyone. This might be the strongest group of MAGS entries I've ever seen. I was torn between Song Animals and Scylla And Charybdis as my favourite, so to see them tied for second place is… not as cool as first place, but still neat!

I look forward to the numerous promised updated versions!

It's probably a roundabout reason why I thought that problematic subtitle-style text was a good idea

For the record, this is something I never had any problem with, but voice acting would obviously still be great.

Did you mean to leave in keyboard shortcuts that jump to any scene in the game?

This is super charming! Gorgeous art and audio, loved the musical puzzles too. Liked the character selection puzzles as well- nothing wrong with them, but you can't be superlative all the time, you know?

It's great to know an update is planned, Eggie! I'll hold off on bloggin' until around the 15th, unless you feel like putting an updated version up somewhere before then... I guess you might prefer to just use that extra time to work on it, though. I'm overly proud of the GIF I made already, so feel free to check that out now if you want.

Also Mandle, I'm afraid all the bugs you've mentioned so far were part of my giganto-list from back on page one. But definitely play the first game too, it's super good!

Pretty and creepy! But I do feel like the sluggish pace you've chosen really tests the limits of player endurance, and perhaps the ending could have been slightly more elucidating.

I'm soo stuck on the first rhyme 

You're missing an item!

Spoiler

Chalk!

Also, can you really pick up a bone? I don't remember being able to do that.

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The bird bug seemed to get worse over time. I was really confused about what to do for a while, and that bird ending up going back and forth about 10 times. For the first 5 I'm sure everything was fine!

I haven't seen it yet. I'd prefer to watch it with ludicrously high picture quality, which is tough because maybe such a thing doesn't even exist. If only I had it on LaserDisc. And had a LaserDisc player.

I don't feel like you've ever let me down.

My bug report list is all in the spoiler box above that maybe you missed?

Yay! I'm so glad to see to story continue. You weren't kidding about this being even more unpolished, though! I prepared a long and obnoxious list of bugs, notes and suggestions for if you ever find time. I left it rough:

Spoiler

Cyclops skull described with 'create' instead of 'creature'

skeleton on right of room called Hotspot 5

walked left from the universal charger (having gone through the pipe but without sliding down the pole) and was transported to the top of it

Font runs together so ellipsis looks like underscores

No mouseover text for bucket (of seamen) to indicate it can be clicked on

If I go back to the starting cave, it's flashing grey and blue for some reason

Gia looks the wrong way when looking at the dripping pipe

Gia's sprite clips through the pipe opening / bottom of the pipe in mildly unattractive ways

I thought I'd be able to fill the jug/horn at the dripping pipe, but no response

Vaguely related to the above, I really thought I'd be able to rhyme drink with think.

You can re-bash Charybdis' body with the jug and it replays that scene

It would be nice if the shadow of Nyx's cage didn't initiate conversation when you click on it.

The bird broke on me, invisible, perpetually registered as being in the same room as Scylla luckily.

Looking at the photograph, text seems off- between lines it reads "my mom who is also my mom".

Cabinet description says 'locked tight' even when unlocked.

Mouseover text for silhouetted Charybdis is 'New Character'

"Game created by Alex Whitington" appears in credits twice in a row at the end, seemingly? And the October typo is in the credits as well!

How is this game over 1GB but compresses to 20MB? That's kind of amazing.

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But hey! Even if this never gets updated, no big deal really... The meat of the game is all there, start to finish. I don't feel like any of the little things I mentioned really impeded my experience/enjoyment, and there's a charm to roughness anyway. Plus, there's so much extremely high quality stuff to balance it out. I love the smooth animation, and little touches like alpha transparency for Charybdis' fins, big touches like individually animated body parts for Scylla, and that whole super cute water drip interaction.

When you inevitably reply (I hope? I'm not being too presumptuous, right?) let me know if you think you might update this, like, in the next few days. I run a small game curation blog and I'd like to post this there, regardless of whether it gets updated (but on the off-chance you were planning to do it already really soon, I'll wait). I wanted to post Somnamulizer there too, but thought 'maybe it'll get a bugfix and I can post it then' which was silly and I regret that thinking.

P.S. I was the one who'd never seen Cats Don't Dance. It was me.

Cute and fun. Really looking forward to next month's.

Just a heads up that you can get this game and others as part of a bundle for $1.89... for the next 5 hours. After that, the price goes up a little.

From what I've played so far, your puzzles need me to figure out what you were thinking more than trying to logically solve the mystery. Here are some of my spoiler-filled thought processes while playing:

Spoiler

• Reaching the front page of The Daily Redpress is overly complicated, requiring either a search for "Redpress" or clicking on one of the non-existent other sections of the site and pressing back. Why not just let me click News or the logo?
  
• Father Matthew is used instead of Father Matthews at least once, at the start of the article on The Daily Redpress.
  
• The dates of his visits seemed inconsistent to me? His site seems to imply his first two Redfield visits were on 20 Jan and 25 March, being in Paris on 10 March. Whereas the article says his third visit to Redfield will be on 10 March.
  
• I'm not 100% sure the dates match the 2014 calendar year? Since some articles don't mention what day of the week it is, but only mention a day of the week in the article, it's hard for me to match dates.
  
• I couldn't find anything more about the impersonation incident, and I felt like there should be further information somewhere.
  
• Linking two events because those are the only two news subjects on a website was too detached from reality for me.
  
• Similarly, a surreal process of elimination mindset seems to show up a lot. There are only three pig farms, and two have been used already, so clearly the third is next? Is there something I'm missing there?
  
• Searching for "maps" isn't very intuitive, especially since locations like "East Redfield", "Redfield Community Centre", "Love Street" and "Quackfit" turn up nothing. An actual tab would probably better convey the feature existed, I'd have had no idea if not for your screenshot.
  
• I was stuck for a long time because I typically spell "tyres" as "tires".
  
• After calling tyre shops, I couldn't work out what to type. I tried numerous keywords, but the questions seem like what I type should be structured like a conversation. So many possibilities... I hit a wall here and couldn't get any further.
  

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Sorry that most of that feedback was critical. Conceptually this is very interesting, but the investigation genre is a tough one to make user-friendly, and you seem to want it to be hard anyway. Have you played Her Story? I feel like it provides a good example of the sort of sacrifices you might have to make to the experience/linearity of your discovery process in order for the experience to be more enjoyable than frustrating. In this case, it operates more like a database than a traditional story, so a few overly clever or lucky players might figure out the solution much quicker than is ideal, but I feel like it's worth it.

The key:

Spoiler

You can hang it from a hook.

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I haven't worked out how to order the ornaments/curios though. I've tried ROYGBIV, complementary colours, symmetry...

EDIT: OK, I figured that out that as well:

Spoiler

Turns out order isn't that important, so don't bother looking for changes as you switch items around. Just keep it balanced!

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This was one of the best adventure games I've played in a while. All the super smooth animation you did really made the game shine, the elevator gag was especially great. The characters are really charming. Well, up until that point where they aren't... I liked the way you handled that, though. Gia was my favourite character, and I presume you feel the same way.

I hope you will polish this up a little more. Even just to fix a few of the minor GUI bugs I noticed, for instance. I could live without the extra dream sequences since you got a decent joke out of excluding them. If you decide it's done enough, that's OK, but if you do have further plans I'd like to know about them!

Humble Bundle are distribuiting the game through steam, so it's not DRM-free. 

The DRM-free icon on the Humble page indicates that the purchase comes with a DRM-free Windows installer/executable as well as a Steam key. The line at the top is hopefully in error.

I liked this game a lot. I feel you achieved the relaxing atmosphere you were aiming for. The trivial nature of the narrative/goal and pleasant scenery made me feel in no hurry to 'beat' the game, which I appreciated. It's also a rare instance in which I had no problem with pixel-hunting (I'm using this term to refer to when you have to methodically move the mouse around the screen to find things you can interact with, rather than them being visually obvious in the first place, but after reading this thread I'm not sure how standard this definition is).

I'd like to post it on a games recommendation feed I run. It has only a modest audience... probably less than 100 people, I don't really know. I thought I'd ask just in case "don't look at me" really does indicate you want as little exposure as possible. If that is the case I'd be happy to abstain.

In the event that I do put it up, would you prefer to be credited as zorra, Julia, don't look at me, or something else (do you have a Twitter handle)? Oh, and would you rather I linked to this thread or the AGS Game Page?