The Things He Ate
I can feel the prickle - like static in the air. More and more often I can feel something is shifting. I don’t know if it’s the mountain, the town, or Carne. I will not leave this place, though. So instead, I’ll write a record with the hope that someone out there finds us - in ten years or a hundred or a thousand.
This is scribbled inside a worn out journal that you find one day. You’re a ghost and cryptid hunter with a podcast, and during a little vacation you’ve recently come across what appears to be a ghost town at the base of the mountain. The town itself doesn’t look too strange, but your profession has taught you how to look closer, and this place is… well, a little off.
For starters, it’s not on any map that you can find, nor is it marked on your phone, and at first glance around a gift shop at an abandoned gas station, you can’t find a single photograph with a person on it. There’s not one living soul around and even the birds seem to avoid it. It’s eerie and quiet and so very very exciting!
This is a solo journaling game created by StarlitLibrary (Nathaniel Oldrin and Courtney Mejía-Murphy) for Cosmic Horrors Jam II!
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Development log
- The Things He UpdatedFeb 05, 2024
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Deep in the woods in an abandoned town no longer on any map, you find yourself looking through the destruction and rubble for any clues as to what might have happened. Photos no longer show people, every instance of the town name has been erased, and the only remnants of any one who lived are the diary pages left from an ‘Amber’ and a ‘Carne.’
The game is broken down into day cycles; each day you draw 6 cards, which will give you clues and snippets as to what might have happened to the town, and at the end of the day you write down the day’s experience in a journal.
The game features 2 racing tallies: Frustration and Mystery. Each card will give you points to add towards a total and the first one to reach 75 points will bring you to an ending. The game can also end in Frustration if you draw a full hand of cards labeled ‘Benign’ in which your character will give up on the mystery and leave.
One of the best aspects of the game is ‘THE LODGE.’ Which is a secret area that you can only visit once. A few of the cards will let you visit the area, and when you are inside, the game instructs you open a completely separate file from the game and view the document.
There are several different documents in THE LODGE but the player can only view up to 2 per playthrough, so it lends itself to a lot of variety. Having these documents as separate files is a really ingenious idea that prevents the player from accidentally stumbling upon them when scrolling through the main PDF.
Unfortunately I drew an entire hand of ‘Benign’ cards and had to end the game before the mystery was solved, but I would have liked to continue playing to solve the mystery if I had the chance.
You can read my playthrough HERE
If I could make one suggestion it would be to add a text description file for the photo in THE LODGE to make it more accessible for people who use screen readers.
So sorry for this late response, I wanted to reply once we had updated the game but it took us longer than expected! We read your playthrough together while on call and absolutely loved it. Our apologies on behalf of that elusive document stealing bird...
I'm so glad you enjoyed the game even getting the Frustration ending. Amber, Carmine and the town will be waiting if you do decide to go back and figure out the mystery!
Thank you for your suggestion about the image description for the photographs, we have now included one! We also added a bit to Amber's first diary entry to make it clearer that he is a man and uses he/him pronouns, since we realised his name probably prompted some confusion and that we hadn't been as clear about that as we intended.
Thank you so much for sharing your playthrough and your thoughts about the game. It made our day when we read it back then and it was wonderful to reread it when I came back to reply today!