Reviews for The Cloud

[GregMustache]

Small suggestion: don't center your game about the tragedy of clinical depression if your main character's only dialogue is interchangeable with Linkin Park lyrics, and the gameplay involves deliberately avoiding happiness.

As depictions of depression go, this is... pretty gross, actually. It's presenting a depressed person, acknowledging that they're depressed, but then everything they say and do is based around these overwrought metaphors about clouds and darkness and monsters and other stuff you find in a moody teenager's poetry blog, and actually making an effort to reject positive thoughts and happiness just so they can stay depressed. Given how a lot of people treat mental illness as just being "a matter of staying positive", this presents a horrible image of people with clinical depression as just being sadsacks who are only miserable because they want to be.

Botched message aside, the game itself is not great. Finding the Tuesday door took forever, the BGM loop is shrill and annoying, and I never had to use the Dash function in the minigames because I could pretty much just stand to the far side of the screen and occasionally move, and the eye animation was so much more detailed than the rest of the game that it came off kinda uncanny-valley levels of creepy.

JackAstral responds:

I appreciate what you're saying, but this is just this one character. It's about a teenager who feels depressed and has comfort in feeling that way. He rejects help, and instead slides deeper into the feeling until he decides to end it all. He lets negative emotions control him, while rejecting anything positive. It's not suppose to represent every possible type or form of depression or anything- though I've done more vague projects that do. This is just one individual story and experience, obviously something like this is different for different people

And that linkin park dig was brutal, ha ha. I don't mean to come off as emo and whiny :b

[RodrijahuFyM]

Honestly, I not finish the game, why? I feel the game progress is very slow and repetitive.
And as another reviewer, I also thought that the mini-games you had to grab the "happy faces" to win, but it turns out it was not.
The game is based on pixel art, but personally I do not like these types of games that contain images transformed into "pixel".
The sounds of the game are not bad, but the music menu is repeated several times.

[lex555218]

Literally nothing makes me hate a game except repetitive gameplay that not only is annoying but becomes dragged out and aggressive enough to make the player spend over ten minutes trying to complete one level. I like the idea behind the game, and if the game were designed better, I'd enjoy playing it. However, as it is right now, this isn't interesting or good enough to be worth as much of my time as I put into it.

JackAstral responds:

It took you 10 minutes to beat the cloud parts? They should only be about 2 or 3 minutes each, at the most.

The game itself is only about 12 minutes long

[Xifani]

I can't say I understand how depression or SAD works, since I've never experienced it firsthand or known anyone who has, but it seems to be presented in a strange way here - as if the character is consciously trying to avoid positive thoughts or happiness in life.

The gameplay is repetitive, but it adds to the monotonous, dreary feeling of the game. I can see what you were going for, but the overall execution could've been handled a bit better and more carefully.

JackAstral responds:

Thanks- that's kinda the idea of it. "Comfort in your misery" is I guess what I was going for

[Karmakosm]

I know you worked hard on this game, but it would have been more enjoyable just to make the game easy through out to see the ending. I wont see the ending to this because I feel like the game was way too boring in the beginning and then unnecessarily hard on the last level. This game would fit the art game category that tells a story, and I would have liked to see the ending, but from what the game had been about, I imagine it wouldn't have been very positive. I like the art in the game, and the programming you did with the meshing and that, but it feels a little too copy and pasted. Not my favorite, but worth the play for the music and the mood.