Fantastic visuals and sound, chef's kiss on that dithering! I liked the perspective and footprints, and also the way you portrayed trees with shadows and stuff was actually pretty cool. The main problem is that the game effectively requires exotic map knowledge to actually beat (or at least in a timely manner), as I completed events out of order and wasted approximately 10-15 minutes walking around and backtracking to finally trigger a dialog that didn't fire the first time I was in the area. Also after I found Curt's car was gone I left through the east gate and walked through a large empty field (which I had already walked through twice) and could not seem to win or anything. Shrinking the map would be a good play, but also playtesting outside of the time confines of a game jam would allow you to hone in the map and objectives to be "just right" for new players.
Viewing post in The Bitter Trail jam comments
Thanks for playing and we completely agree with both of your suggestions.
The whiteboxed level was initially larger, when we weren't quite sure where we were going with the story and we did have to massively cut it down by the end of the jam as we were narrowing down on the plot & also having to descope other gameplay/story elements.
As you wrote, with such a large level, we did shoot ourselves in the foot a bit in terms of playtesting ; the less confined your game is, the longer it is going to take to thorougly playtest and we did eventually run out of time.