For those who might have come here in some way without encountering the game page, this is an otome visual novel set in the 1930s with some point and click gameplay a la Ace Attorney. There are four handsome - if suspicious - men to love or hate, with the demo including the full common route as well as the beginnings of two of the romance routes. There are also two dead bodies.

There are considerably more dead bodies in the full game. Sadly, no additional handsome men.

The demo is around 30k words. I designed the game to have a short common route because I dislike repetition, so the full common route is in there. After that, each love interest's route will be around 50k. Again, I dislike repetition so no route has the same murder, the same murderer, or indeed lets you question two characters under the same circumstances twice. If you do question a character twice, they will not tell you the same thing. This is a clue. 

After all routes have been completed, there will be a shortish 30k truth route that gives you the chance to solve who or what is behind this house becoming murder central. This will wrap up fairly early, giving you a chance to then have an alternate world beginning with the love interest of your choice.

In addition to this, here are some quick answers to some questions you might have.

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1. When will the full game be available?
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It should be around at some point in Q4 2023. I did the whole demo as a sort of test during Otome Jam to get an idea of how long things will take me, so I'm pretty confident on that timeline.

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2. Will there be a charge for the full game?
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Nope! As this is my first time doing this, I really am just doing it in the hopes that someone will like playing it as much as I liked making it. Or at least come to hate some of these people as much as I did, darn their fiddly little outfits.

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3. Can I donate?
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Sure, if you feel so moved. Or I suppose if you're so happy that your least favorite character died that you feel the need to reward me with actual money. But it's not required.

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4. Can I stream/review/talk about this game?
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Of course! That sounds lovely, in fact. If you feel like letting me know that you're doing so, it'd be great if you could drop it in a comment so I could go over there and then squeal into a pillow for a bit, but again it's not a requirement.

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5. Will there be more love interests in the final version?
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All right, so my answer to this has changed over the course of creating the demo. The answer was originally no, because, well, this is a house full of murderous lunatics. But then my wonderful team member Shar became increasingly attached to some of the characters, and now I have Ideas.

So short answer is that none are currently planned, long answer is that I am weak.

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6. Will I be able to use demo saves with the full game?
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I'm going to try to make that work, if I can! It becomes a little trickier because there are things I wanted to implement that I didn't have time for - collecting evidence from every conversation you have, for example - but that might go a little wonky with demo saves.

Still, I'll try to make it happen.

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7. I've found an issue in the game. Now what?
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Let me know in the comments and I'll see if I can fix it!

The game has been tested (and tested and tested), but it's likely there may still be wild bugs hanging out somewhere waiting to be found given the timeframe and my general derangement during the process.

If any happen to you, I'm very sorry and I'll try to fix them quickly so you can get back to the murders.

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All right, I think that's it! Please enjoy the demo, and stay tuned if you like for my longer devblog posts where I'll go over the game jam, what I did, and what I learned from the process.

The title will be, "I Have Regrets".