CW : domestic violence
You can read the tags for more detailed CW  (if you're ok to get the story spoiled)
Be safe!


Incarnate Ethan, a 5yo boy, during his therapy sessions. Play with stickers and draw on your paper to tell his story with the help of his therapist. 

Traumatic events are difficult to process and Ethan's memory is unreliable. Choose the right images and help him understand what happened to his family, so that he's not consumed by sorrow...


Game made for the #2 edition of Narrative Driven Game Jam on itch.io
Game available in English and French


How to play?

(it is recommended to play the web version in full screen to avoid known visual bugs... thank you for your understanding)

Move stickers : drag and drop
Rotate stickers : mouse wheel / AE (azerty keyboard) / QE (qwerty keyboard)
Move camera : move the cursor to the side of the screen / ZQSD (azerty keyboard) / WASD (qwerty keyboard)
See conversation history : drag and drop conversation boxes / mouse wheel on conversation boxes



Credits :


Thank you for playing!

Download

Download
Hero_V1.rar 37 MB

Comments

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(4 edits) (+2)

So, first thing first, the art was wonderful. I love that elephant to bits, and the psychologist is the cutest character ever. Awesome work by the artists, that title screen is also great. The stickers had a nice style, and were pretty clear and readable, which I think made it work very well. I liked their expressive, simpler style, with nice colors. Loved that demon.

I enjoyed the writing, even though it was sometimes a bit on the nose. The story had a lot of potential, but I feel like it was undermined by some very strange design decisions.

For instance, I'm a little bewildered by the fact that the text was advancing without any input on my part (except when I was asked to put some stickers on the page). It made it harder to follow sometimes, and kind of dulled the impact of the story. These things can work, but mostly when you have voice acting; if you have no audio channel, and the VA isn't directing the timing for the subtitles, automatic dialog can feel a little janky. Unless you've got, maybe, some typing animation with gibberrish talking to simulate voice acting, and/or as an "opt-in feature". Felt especially weird, since the player's attention is pulled in two directions at once; both the many stickers on the table, and the dialog that requires near-constant attention.

It was also rather off-putting that 
- The stickers had no impact on the story being told.
- They were all strewn about the table, with a lot of them being shown at the same time.
- You had to clumsily move the camera around to see them all.
- You couldn't move the stickers again after placing them.

It was basically a kinetic novel, so the stickers felt pretty under-utilized. That's too bad, because there certainly was a toy-like quality to them! I really like the idea. Even though I noticed it had no impact on the story, I surprised myself by playing with them and enjoying it a lot!

But giving too many options at once makes it feel directionless and messy; making it have no impact on the story creates a ludo-narrative dissonance and makes it feel disconnected from the rest and purposeless. 

It would have been pretty basic, but for instance I'd have enjoyed if the stickers had been used as options to progress through an (even very simple) dialog tree. 

I'd have loved it if the stickers had been telling a different story from the one Ethan was telling, too, for instance. I feel like it really would have justified their inclusion narratively, and probably would have helped sell the theme of "Unreliable Narrator". But for that, you'd have to restrict the choices of stickers with regards to the current dialog option, to create a stronger connexion between them and the story being told.

It also was a little unpolished; it's happened to me a lot, but it's better to aim for something "too" tiny and polish it super well than to be over-ambitious.

Good effort! A strong idea, that I feel didn't reach its full potential, but with wonderful art and pretty good writing. Keep it up!