Tachygram
Investigator <<INVESTIGATOR_LASTNAME>>,
A new assignment has been sent to your inbox. It is currently marked as <<ASSIGNMENT_PRIORITY>> . Please look into it at your earliest convenience. You will be reporting to <<INVESTIGATOR_MANAGER>>. To begin your investigation, go to https://tachygram.belbeeno.com.
Summary:
Several students of a high school have been in communication with a peculiar person. In their wake they leave a trail of anomalies which manifest as corruption on the pages. Use the tools at your disposal to parse the contents of the corruption. Our systems indicate that some of the corruption lay behind private communication methods; you will need to find a way to bring these anomalies to bare as well.
Comments
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So Cohost's shutting down, and this game with it. And I've yet to complete it, because I can't figure out the way it works...
Ahh sorry that its an obtuse little game... the good news though is that Cohost should be going read-only and not just be torn down, so you _should_ still be able to bang your head against it... I hope!
(! spoilers below !)
i'm a total sucker boy for arg's and i think the way you set up a bunch of cohost pages for this was fucking awesome, i loved it. a lot of the posts felt like they were lifted straight from real people!
from a gameplay perspective, though, i think the way qLinearizer was set up was kind of cumbersome, what with the having to trawl through posts and chats and organize them in date order. i actually ended up cheating by looking at the lists in client side js lmao. there was only like one or two chats that i hadn't found legitimately beforehand though, i was mainly just unsure on how to input them. (like whether i should have direct linked to the comment or just the post type shit)
i liked the story, i thought it was a really cool idea with a nice ending. only real gripe is that it felt like the real meat of the story was concentrated in the last few chats with alex and lucy, which felt kinda weird pacing wise. however the sense of mystery with the vague comments and chats as you're uncovering and decoding them in real time was extremely cool and it felt great.
final note: i didn't expect acidjazzed evening and it hit me like a brick. impeccable taste
tl;dr very cool game!!
edit: maybe this should have been a formal review but idk i don't ever use itch. i came here from cohost :P
Hi, thanks for playing! I really appreciate it and appreciate your thorough write-up! 😁
I definitely agree with qLinearize; there's a lot of room to make it less strict, more user friendly and generally more responsive in notifying what was wrong with an input while still controlling the pace of the game; I tried to hint at the format through the placeholder text that the text boxes prefill with, but yeah mostly a time constraint. If I were to do it again, I'd spend more time on the tools side which came in late. I'm glad that you were still able to get through it!
I agree with the pacing on the story... I had the main plot points that I was working towards, but I didn't really know how to build the earlier beats to get there, how to spread it out more evenly or how to include the other characters in the story... it was also an interesting challenge to have a story still be ambiguous with half the conversation, so that when qLinearize got through it, it would still be a decent reveal. I hope that came across!
Again, thanks for the thoughtful feedback and kind words... it means a lot! AND I'm glad acidjazzed evening was pointed out on the first review. 😌