BLOOD MOON THEATRE v0.1

Been trying at the first riddle for a good few minutes - I've made zero progress, and the puzzle hints feel like they're actively misleading me.

At this point, I'm okay with someone just giving me the answer - I feel the first puzzle's pretty much unsolvable.

Just finished the game! To start with, the idea's really cool, and the story's setup is terrific. Each failure feels increasingly tense, like the blade is getting closer to your flesh and only through figuring out the puzzle can you prevent it... Well, hopefully you can prevent it, no spoilers, beat the game to see what fate awaits you!

However, there's two problems currently...

So first, I don't know why and maybe it's a "me problem", but when I saw the row of symbols I immediately assumed that each symbol was a letter, like I was trying to figure out what eldritch chant the symbols spelled out one word at a time. I think it's just conditioning after so many horror and adventure games. It wasn't until after the first Game Over that I took a moment to read more carefully and realized the prompt clearly asks what the words are that they're speaking. Again, probably just a me thing, though a line somewhere saying something similar to "each symbol is a word, what words are they speaking?" wouldn't hurt.

After that, maybe the biggest issue is that some of the words you need to guess are... Difficult. Fortunately, you only need three of the four words each phrase, but that second phrase... After beating the game, I took a sneaky peek behind the curtain; I won't spoil what the words are, but with how pictorial the other symbols are, ⸸ and 🕷are... almost impossible, I have no idea how I'd figure those out. I think with 🕷 a context clue could be added, like "Running the ceremonial blade across their tongue, a figure with a sewn-on spider. . ." or something. 👁 is a bit hard, but can be brute forced with some time.

Besides that, some minor stuff; on my browser the game needs to be opened in fullscreen, but when you fail a prompt the alert forces you out of fullscreen. Also, not sure if it's a bug, but "symbol-options" doesn't change between phrases, and it would be a nice UX feature if it swapped the Question Marks for the words you guessed correct.

But yeah, all that said, it's actually a pretty cool game, and honestly I was surprised it was only three rounds! I felt like, with the last round, you could have started using the symbols as a growing vocabulary and had a few more phrases mixing in new and old vocab. Excited to see more!

i have no idea what to do. theres no hints or anything. great idea but when you cant even get past the first one it kinda makes me dislike the game

Sorry couldn't get past the first riddle. maybe giving a letter would help narrow down the options or a better description of "what they want". You could even make it so that the icons mean something like the skull is s or it's a poison symbol so p.