#hellsite
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
#hellsite is an immersive phone sim about investigating internet drama. @Loop is a janky social media full of obnoxious influencers, morally questionable companies, and fandoms that take themselves too seriously. Answer questions from your less plugged-in friends who are trying to get caught up on today's drama.
Gameplay: Answer DMs from your friends by collecting hashtags and profiles.
Programming: NotExplosive
Game Design: NotExplosive, Tesseralis
Art: SonderingEmily, KaeOnline, Tesseralis
Writing: SonderingEmily, Tesseralis
Music & Sound Design: Quarkimo
Assets used:
- Snippets of Medieval Manuscripts (public domain)
If you're stuck, here's a walkthrough that can be decoded line-by-line or word-by-word: https://pastebin.com/RccdSwfG
Download
Install instructions
Windows: Extract and run, same as anything else :)
Mac: MacOS will tell you the app is "damaged" this is a lie. You need to do the following:
- Right click the .app
- Select `Open Terminal here` (should be near the bottom)
- In the terminal window, type: `xattr -cr .` and press enter
- You may now close the terminal window
- The game should now run normally.
Comments
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Really interesting, contained little game. Perfect introduction for the info-game genre.
A great idea and execution! I found this game through a recommendation, and it was an amazing experience to play. Hit very close to home as well, as someone practically raised by Tumblr (and twitter to a lesser extent).
A bit spoilery below:
Really enjoyed the reference to maia crimew (at least that's the way I read it). Generally every account felt so recognizable it was amazing. Definitely off to recommend this to my friends - especially those that are less chronically online than me. I want to see them suffer.
Awesome game! I'm always looking out for more investigative games like Her Story and Roottrees so this really hit the spot.
The writing was great - the feeling of dipping into different internet communities and different ways people approach social media was really fun. I think the site outage is a great way to limit content in a believable way!
Using hashtags and usernames to explore is such a natural way to search through content, and I really enjoyed searching and seeing what would turn up. At the very start, I felt a little overwhelmed by how many things I wanted to look at next, but the available content was the right size that I quickly started to feel like I was mastering who was who and what was going on with the various dramas, which was great.
One of my favorite parts was how answers are entered using the collected usernames and hashtags as part of a natural conversation - nice and in-universe, and I found it very satisfying to inform my tragically unsavvy friends what was going on. 😄 The questions not arriving all at once was nice too.
Spoilery comments below!!
One of my favorite moments was the teacher and former student reuniting in the comments of a random post. Stumbling on unexpected stuff like that is such a great part of a search-based game like this!
Will you work more on the game? I would love to see a post-jam version! 🙂 One comment I had is I was looking for more of an ending to close out the game. (Like is that person's daughter okay? I didn't get absolutely everything so maybe I missed something.) I wouldn't have minded some final segment after I finished answering the questions about the individual dramas.
UI-wise, I wished I could drag and drop hashtags into the answer spots and into the search bar. And having my progress saved would be great so I can revisit and explore more. It would definitely be great to see a web build of it so I can recommend this game to everyone and they'll have an easy time playing!
Sorry for the long comment, I'm just always interested in cool games like these. 😄
Thanks so much for playing and for the kind words!
We don’t currently have plans to expand this game, maybe a post-jam polish build but that’s it. Everyone on the team has other commitments so it’s unlikely that we’ll find the time to work on this game.
If you enjoyed the writing I’d suggest following tesseralis, she did a ton of the writing for this game and is excited to do something like this in the future (no exact plans yet).
As an aside: Hello fellow Ludum Dare-er! I didn’t realize it until I looked at your itch page, but I’ve actually been following your work for a while! It looks like we’ve both done: Ludum Dare 45 (Start with Nothing), 56 (Keep it Alive), 49 (Unstable), 50 (Delay the Inevitable), 51 (Every 10 Seconds), 56 (Tiny Creatures), and the most recent, 57 (Depths).
While writing this reply I found out that I left comments on the Ludum Dare page for Nothing to Say five years ago(!!), and Creative Types a few months ago.
It’s super rare to find someone as enthusiastic about jamming as I am so I’m super glad to have come across your work! I hope to see you in LD58 :)
Ooh, yes! I love Ludum Dare! My sister Rose is the LD OG in my mind, since she's been participating (on and off) since LD 22 in 2011. But I finally jumped on board and we've been having a great time collaborating ever since! I'm definitely looking forward to LD58, see you there. :)
Really fun game concept for nosy bitches who love to snoop! It took me just under an hour to find all the accounts and hashtags. The fictional drama was very entertaining and believable. And a lot of content for a game jam game! I would love to keep exploring for hours if it were ever expanded.
I also liked that the solutions to the puzzles were all words you obtained in actual context. Not to complain about games that likely inspired this one... but one thing I didn't like about Golden Idol and its similars is how often you obtain a word needed for the solution to a puzzle by clicking on something totally unrelated that just happened to be the same word. In this game the hashtags and account names being used are all clearly in the context of the drama being discussed and thus felt relevant to find.
A small note for accessibility purposes, right now the symbol for a new puzzle in the DMs and the solved puzzle is an identical circle of different colors, it would be more accessible to colorblind people if they were represented by different shapes.
And, also... I couldn't figure out how to quit the game when I was done 😅Esc didn't work, I had to use the Windows key to close the game manually.
Overall, great job, I can't believe it's a jam entry! I had a lot of fun with it.
potato
pottao
There is a lot of obvious good things in here but I wanted to say that I love the careful use of homonyms in the posts - searching "cancelled" gives results for the cancelled show but also the cancelled person, "flood" for Lativia floods and TRONIX FLOOD, etc. very smart stuff great work (also not unlike real-world drama searching...)
potato