Alright, I gave it a playthrough. Took me about 15-30 minuets to complete it, including wailing in frustration and randomly hacking numbers in the computer to see if they worked as passwords (2007 was the last logical thing I could think of, then I tried 1984, 1337, 666... no dice...
). Now, for the review.
*** CONTAINS SPOILERS ***
As it's been said before, the game is very unconventional. I didn't really have trouble to grasp the general story, but I'd have liked to learn some more about the background story of the location ("Nobody left." - So where are they, if the village didn't start out with a population of maybe five people?).
The puzzles were logical, in general. There were two "I-can't-believe-that-actually-worked"-moments for me, however - the password (actually, I was just desperately looking for five-digit numbers) and the thing you had to do in order to defeat the floating killer robot things (I mean...
).
I simply loved the style of the game, graphics and everything. The switch between pixel art and pre-rendered was a little disturbing, but since it only occured in maybe one screen you didn't need to head to anyway, it wasn't much of an issue.
The interface was a good idea, and althought some hotspots were rather small, it didn't turn out to be a pixel-hunting issue for some reason. Whatever you did to achieve this, you did it well...
Kudos to you for the clean coding - I didn't encounter any notable bugs or glitches, and since you
did develop this from scratch accoding to the credits screen (I
was starving for five-digit numbers, mind you...) that's quite an achievement. Congratulations.
To sum it up, I liked the game, don't have any major grudges with the puzzles (the whole thing is rather story-driven anyway) and loved the background and story - reminds me of Kafka, for some reason.
Isit (intentionally) kafkaesque or is that just the pretentious takling? Anyway, I'd like to see it explored further.
To sum up the summary, nice game. Plans for another one?