Oh man, I'm real into this! Kinda reminds me of what I was trying to do with abc2, but it's way more direct. I love this, great job. The concept and the actualization of the concept are both very good. I love the part where it seems as though the game breaks but it's intentional and it just continues. I guess I should mostly be saying good job to the original people who made the work, but what you added to their work was very important.

I played this too, but I forgot to comment on it.

I loved the way the game begins with your character as one out of a group which is slowly moving in the same direction. At first I thought I was looking at a cut scene; I didn't realize I had control. When I figured out that I could move independently of the group it was a really great process of realization. I realized that A) I was this particular person. B) I was somehow different from the other people in this group. and C) I could subvert the rules of this world. It was a really great and sort of mind bending shifting of perspective.

I have some ideas about the cube and the scenery, some ideas about what the game means, but I'd rather not comment about that as I don't think one particular person's interpretation of an ambiguous piece of art is necessarily important. Suffice it to say that I thought the process of moving to the left and falling off the screen with the cube was rife with enough potential associations that I was able to draw a lot from it.

This was very interesting. It took me a bit to realize what was happening, since I wasn't looking at my browser, but I really like how almost everything is sourced by clicking on it. I think it's a clever way to embed the sources, without having a very long list of citations at the end. On that still, I found it curious that there is a link to a 3d horse model in the credits, even though in my three playthroughs I was unable to ever find it in the game! Either it's an intentional mystery or (more likely), it's just a visual event I have been unable to activate.

When I first played it, I thought I was watching some kind of cutscene as a crowd of people shamble through the bizarre (to me) photography. Eventually I realized I could wiggle left and right, and after tentatively retracing my steps back to the first screen, I went further right, ahead of the rest of the crowd. In considering the conversation you had with me about the game ahead of time, I took this moment of the game to be a representation of the protagonist's epiphany that they don't have to follow everybody else.

I quickly ran into the physics candlesticks in the room that seems to be constantly enveloping the player. I decided to wait for the crowd to reach me again (having figured out that the moon cycle in the top left seems to match their walking pace?). Now that I write that, it's kind of a strange idea considering that seconds previously I saw myself as an outsider to the crowd, instead of dependent on them. Hmm.

The physics candles were already strange, but quickly enough I experienced the cube that rotates alongside me. Now it felt like the game was falling apart on itself. Getting tired of waiting, I did further keyboard exploration, and found I could jump/say a phrase(?) with the spacebar. I was able to use the strange 2d physics to navigate over the candlesticks, and found myself falling into a delightfully artistic glitch pit.

I really like the notes on design you include in the glitchy area. It felt like it was written while planning this game, and was an object that either I could have the patience to read and have my experience changed, or I could ignore and just imagine what the impact of reading it would have been. After initially thinking that the cube obscuring it would be too annoying, I did manage to read the whole thing, surprising myself!

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After playing it once I came back to it about an hour later, and this time immediately headed left, since I had realized in the mean time that there must be more that way. Interestingly enough, this time the crowd started heading to the left, as well. I didn't think quite as much about it at the time, but in writing this I see a very strong contrast between the religious symbology the player finds on the right, and the more nature focused (as well as more colourful) photography that makes up the left direction.

I view this game as a story of the difficulty of escaping a belief that one learns is incompatible with their self, so, having previously thought of the crowd as a metaphor for conformity, it's curious to me that the initial reaching of the crowd is determined randomly. I imagine if that they went left on my first playthrough, I'd have a pretty different reading on the game!

The rest of the playthrough didn't have anything special to me that I can think of, however, I do want to talk about the singing / jumping button. I'll admit, I read through the previous comments before writing anything on the game, to help give my own thoughts direction. I noticed in the most recent(?) comment by you, that you wanted to hear people's thoughts on this loosely tied dual mechanic. I'll admit, while it did stand out to me during the game, I hadn't thought more about it until I read that. So.

It's curious to me that jumping seems to have a varying, random strength to it, perhaps modified by what screen the player is on? I found that the candles were difficult to jump over, but going to the left, I continually jumped much higher than I never needed. Along with that, the character is seemingly inconsistent about when they sing. In my first playthrough I thought that they were supposed to be able to sing in a continuous manner that made sense, but I found later that it just seems random.

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For my third playthrough I decided to experiment with what I understood of the world. I ran to the right, got the cube on the screen, and ran back to the left to see what changes that makes. Finding none, I went back as far right as I could, and tried to walk into the candles to see if that caused anything. Funnily enough, I realized that the crowd was close to this screen for once, so I decided to wait for them to show up.

I don't know how intentional what followed was, since it felt 'wrong' in that it negated my previous playthroughs, but the crowd walked right through the candles, dragging most of them along. As far as I could tell they were not subject to the glitch pit that lies on the other side of the candles, positioning them as truly indifferent to my own problems(?). I wasn't able to investigate this more however, as, even though there was only one candle left, I could not jump over it as I had done before! Strange...

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This is definitely the longest comment I've ever left on GT so, I hope you enjoyed it.