PARANOIA
Paranoia is a short interactive puzzler. It was created in less than one week for ParserComp 2024, the Locus Jam, and the I'm On Observation Duty Jam.
Paranoia is a short interactive puzzler. It was created in less than one week for ParserComp 2024, the Locus Jam, and the I'm On Observation Duty Jam.
Comments
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This was so hard (in a good way!) Took me way longer than I'd like to admit to get to the end. What I really loved about this was how you sustained the creepy-yet-absurd tone throughout, and I think forcing the player to individually check each item while questioning their memory is just such a fantastic way of heightening the stakes. Excited to check out your other games!
Observation Duty as interactive fiction! What a neat idea! I've played a lot of OD and this captured that same feeling of "look at everything! pay attention!" Also those great OD moments when the anomaly is obvious--open eyes, see chair on ceiling, slam green button. Incorporating taste into the exploration was an hilarious addition.
I would love to see this as a longer game and I'd say there's room to grow both the horror and comedy elements framing like this can produce. To me, the repetition and anti-climactic ending are hallmarks of this genre and felt fine. I'm going to play again and see if I can find more weirdness!
I admire the idea, it’s cool, but as a non parser player I just couldn’t get through it. Press a button, then follow the same sequence of touch, smell, taste, examine, repeat until you get it wrong. I think it is a horror, despite what you said on NeoInteractives, because it sent me mad in the attempt.
It would be nice if, when you get it wrong and miss a change, it gave you a hint what change you’d missed.
Good idea—I'll add it to the list of things to include in the next release.
Iiinteresting. A few small notes:
I really like the subtle sense of creeping horror. Nothing changed, minor changed, nothing changed, what the hell is that, nothing changed...
To that end, though, the ending was a little anticlimactic. I guess I was expecting something to happen? I don't know.
Thank you for this! I'm working on fixing those bugs now.
There may be more content added to the ending in the future—my focus was on the gameplay and I was working towards a deadline, but I have a few ideas for later updates.
My respect for finishing it. I couldn’t get close
I admit to using a small parser trick: first, you can issue more than one command at a time (to be executed consecutively) by separating them with periods. This is often really useful for traversing well-traveled rooms: "n. n. n. e. n. w. d. open door. up." rather than typing them all in consecutively. And second, up-arrow scrolls back through your previous history.
Which means that I could up-arrow to something like "look. examine vase. examine flowers. smell flowers. etc. etc. etc." and have it do all the relevant room-examining things at once. Made things much easier.