Whispers of Alice

Really outstanding job. Thank you for sharing this ambitious project. I thought the storytelling and pacing were handled really so well throughout the majority of the game, even if the ending felt a bit abrupt. It felt open-ended but tragic and left quite an impact.  I appreciated the way the story escalated with each interaction with the journal pages. I also liked the way you implemented some mechanical elements with the slingshot. They felt in-line with the tone of the game.

This would be a good project to polish up (working out the technical issues, perhaps the pacing at towards the end, and adding some sound.) Please let me know if you revisit it!

This game hit close to home for me as a queer person with very religious family, and it reminded me precisely of why I chose to stay closeted to them to avoid certain outcomes, of which those emotions were well portrayed towards the end of Al's diary entries. I felt chills reading the entry about throwing out church clothes as it's something that happened almost exactly to me in the past, and the ending with the reveal of Elliot's character struck me even though I saw the foreshadowing beforehand. Other than some rough gameplay/bugs, I felt like the interaction brought by making this a walking sim where you have to find the pages of Al's diary helps give more connection to the characters, but its bugginess hindered the storytelling at some points. I thought it was nice to not get a concrete answer on what happened to both characters at the end, even though based on the content warnings there is an implication, as so many stories like this end in the same way and it was refreshing to have a different conclusion that allows more focus on the experiences the characters went through rather than the tragedy of the ending result.