VERSION 1.2 - Archives Mode, A Fighting Chance, UI Updates and more!

Howdy, Whitaker Metaphysical family. A massive new update has been released. It includes the following new features:

ARCHIVES MODE NOW AVAILABLE

Due to this being a story game, I began to realize that having to sit through the same story elements when trying multiple attempts is probably boring. In addition to some UI updates to make getting through repetition faster (most cutscenes are escapable or can be breezed through), we have added the ability to view Lore without having to go all the way back to it. You know, like, every other horror game ever. I promise I’m a professional.

• This mode can be accessed from the main menu and the pause screen.
• Most lore you find, watch or listen can now be recalled across multiple playthroughs. This means if you hit a permadeath, you can still see lore you have achieved to that point even on a new run.
• Lore is unlocked when it is read. You do not have to read/hear/see all pages/parts of a lore piece to unlock it.
• Backstory Lore has been added to give better background on the game characters.

This will also help with puzzles as you can now view combinations from Archives when in game.

A FIGHTING CHANCE - DIFFICULTY BALANCING

While playing this game with my family and watching them get mercilessly slaughtered one by one, I realized my game might be a little too challenging. While I wanted to make a creepy story game that made you earn it, I did not want to make anything impossible. Therefore, we have made major strides to give players a better chance this update without making major changes to how the main gameplay/chase loop pans out. This largely effects the Normal difficulty setting. We figure those who want Hard mode will take it.

• MORE HIDING PLACES: New hiding spots have been added to the North Hall and the Staff Tower
• MORE DEFENSIVE ITEMS: Two new throwable defense items are now in the Culture Tower and the Staff Tower.
• MORE POWERUPS: More boost items have been added across the game that can affect player and enemy speed. This should encourage more exploration and give players more rewards for wandering.
• ENCOUNTER RATE REBALANCING: The amount of times you run into the enemy on Normal difficulty has been dropped substantially.
• WALL ENEMY ESCAPE EASIER: The wall enemies are now easier to escape and you can escape with any button press, not just Interact now. This should make “plinking” to escape much easier.

UI UPDATES PART 2

• Teleport events now preview their destination in text at the top right (where it previously said “press enter to lose time” it will now show the warp destination when the player passes through - provided they discovered how to warp already. For instance, players were not noticing the “skip tutorial” option at the start. Thanks to Ginxel, a streamer who covered our game, for this idea.
• You can now advance text events automatically using the Interact button.
• Long audio events with subtitles (cassette player, reel-to-reel) can now be stopped before they finish.
• New prompts have been added to some events for better guidance / instructions for players. For instance: the cat now tells you what it does as does the hill of dirt in the maze. Be sure to check out the rug in the first hall, too.

OTHER BUG FIXES:

• The letter in the Maze no longer causes the two items to disappear if you read it before grabbing one of them.
• Autosave was not behaving correctly after the last update. Its original functionality has now been restored.

DEMOS REMOVED:

• This is not fun news. We are removing the in-browser demo and the downloadable demos for the time being. These were built off of previous builds of the game and also, the browser version has major performance issues that don’t reflect how the game actually performs on PC and Linux. We hope to put a better version of the demo online in the future. However, to be transparent, we have had more purchases of Linux versions of the full game than we have demos downloaded TOTAL on Itch.io. This makes placing the demo here not much of a priority for me due to the lack of interest in it.

Thank you all for being here. Whitaker Metaphysical appreciates your efforts to discover true psionic power.

XOXOXO,

negDev