Brilliant stuff - simple, but high impact, gorgeous visuals and animation, and fantastic sound design. Insta-faved :D

@mikailus: We aren't 'ruled by a monarch', dumbass, we're ruled by a Prime Minister and governing body of representatives. The queen has about as much actual political power as a potato. Let me guess: you're one of the people that thinks Alaska is actually in the pacific ocean, to the southwest of the continental states?

lol, some peeps are taking this way too seriously.

Good animation, definitely should NOT be in the 'E' category. 'T' at the very least, 'M' if you're feeling conservative.

A flawed masterpiece.

The centerpiece here was the brilliant story, but the way it was conveyed to the player is the issue - the logs had numerous spelling and grammar errors, and a large number relied on the player finding them in the correct order, which (as it did in my case) might not necessarily happen. Early on, this resulted in a bit of incredulity as to the quality of the story, and later, once the story has hooked the player, the way some information was simply missing depending on the route I took was a bit off-putting.

The simplistic graphics really aren't a problem for me, particularly given this was made for Ludum Dare, but the other major issue with the game was the lack of any kind of map screen, or even ability to place yourself in the ship. This resulted in a lot of frustrating backtracking and running in circles, occasionally going down the same passage numerous times in a row unintentionally. This could either be fixed with a basic map screen, indicating the player's position as well as the position of important locations, such as the storage door, the cockpit, the escape pod, the greenhouse, etcetera, or with a sort of 'in setting' navigation system, with lines of a partiuclar colour running from the cockpit to each section. For instance, a green line could run from the cockpit to the greenhouse, or a blue line from the cockpit to storage.

If you were to return to this to create a more polished version, this is what I would do:
Add two screens - a map screen accessible via M, and a log screen, accessible via L. When the Captain encounters a log, the log is removed from the world, and an entry is added to the log screen. The combination of these two features would allow the player to more easily navigate the ship, as well as access earlier logs for reference, and hunt down the logs they're missing by exploring parts of the map they haven't accessed yet.

I particularly liked the way the game simply ends when you open the storage door. I'm not going to spoil it for your other players, but I'm pretty sure I know what was on the other side.

All in all, this was fantastic. The issues I mentioned were stumbling points, but I was too engrossed by the story to really care all that much. I'd love to see more story-based stuff from you - once you get a proofreader, of course ;)

While the narrative was beautifully poignant and the grayscale pixel graphics were uniquely atmospheric, the execution was flawed. The excessive repetition of objectives, the lengthy intervals, and the overall linear nature basically prevent this from being a game at all - simply a story where you occasionally have to push a button to hear the next bit.

I believe this would have been better off as pure narrative - removing what semblance of interactivity there is and reducing the end product to an animation, or even just leaving it as a written story.

If you're going to make a game, you need to go all the way - there has to be some kind of interactivity beyond completing a simple objective to make the player feel needed, if you know what I mean. Even maintaining this format, it would've been possible - multiple conditions that the player could choose between, leading to one of a number of endings, that sort of thing.

It pains me to give this a rating as low as I am because it nearly brought tears to my eyes, but in the end, you need to pick between a film and a game - resting in the space between is playing the jack of all trades but master of none.

Plenty of people have discussed your execution with you - some polite, some less so, so I'm going to avoid telling you what you already know, and instead focus on a critique of the story.

While your story drew influence from and retained much of the eerie atmosphere and tension present in movies such as Sunshine, it lacked much of the motivation. There's a line between something that's mysterious and something that is just plain unexplained, and unfortunately, this story fell on the latter side of said line. There were simply too many blanks for me to continue to take it entirely seriously. Instead of being engrossed an creeped out, I found myself continually asking 'wait, what?'

A mystery is a framework of facts creating the outline of one giant unknown. It's mysterious precisely because we know something about it, if not much. In this case, there was no such framework - merely a nebulous mass of disconnected facts and events. That sort of mass can work if, by the end, the reader (or player) has enough information to draw one of any number of conclusions, but in your story, there was simply not enough similar data. Let me show you what I mean.

At the start, John is lonely, but stable, but he suddenly begins to see this mysterious dead astronaut and a number of accompanying visions that are clearly hallucinatory. The first conclusion one might draw is that John was going mad from the isolation, but the sudden onset and severity of the hallucinations seems to disprove that. So, is it a disease? Is it some kind of outside force manipulating his mind? Is the reality around him actually breaking? You can see there are many possible conclusions here, but instead of providing facts that support one or more of them, the story simply stops providing new information and returns to what is already known: John is seeing things. And the moment that happens, the mystery is lost. The illusion of mystery is sustained by the game's masterful audioscape (bravo on that note) but the heart is gone.

This game exhibits a lot of merit and a lot of promise, hence the four out of five stars, but in future projects, I hope you heed the advice given to you by myself and others. You have the beginnings of something truly great here, and with a little work, you may be able to reach its full potential.

Utterly brilliant. Calm, dynamic, emotional, and profoundly moving. It reminds me of Enya, just a bit. I loved the plucked strings near the beginning and the end - I only wish you'd used them more prominently, it's a very powerful sound.
As always, an absolutely fantastic piece. Great work.

Oh please, PLEASE make a full-length version of this! This is farkin' BRILLIANT!

For me, this invoked Castle in the Sky, and in a very, very good way.
The strong violin and whistle carried the piece nearly flawlessly, and though it did get a little murky around the middle, it wasn't murky enough to really hurt the piece much at all.
Beautiful, and very inspiring. I'll be listening to this while I'm doing my writing.

I CAME.
Jokes aside, this is absolutely impeccable. The sense of scale and motion, the detail, the lighting - heck, even the fluffiness of the clouds are all spot on. This is a masterwork, friend. The fact that it's also epic steampunk is just icing on the cake.

I've been going through your art, and I ADORE your style. I hesitate to pidgeonhole it, but if I were to name your aesthetic, I'd have to call it cybersteam, and that is something we simply don't get a whole lot of.
Kudos to you for being a badass.

That's bloody fantastic, that is.
On top of the fact that Moon is one of the best movies ever made, your rendition of Sam is pretty damn close to pixel perfect.
Very impressive, good sir.