Echoes in Morals of Old Boston
A downloadable game for Windows
About the game
"Echoes in Morals of Old Boston is a pixel art choice game that focus primary on your morals rather than the evidence given to you. Are you going to kill this person to save the other? Your morals are your sword and gavel."
You have committed a crime in the fictional providence of Old Boston in England. You have been sentence not to death but you have been offered a second chance and that is to be the person in charge as the person who charges people for the crime. You will encounter difficult challenges and days. You have no choice to work with the government of Old Boston or choose to flee. Your ultimate choice is yours.
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Development log
- Demo Release!Jan 01, 2024
Comments
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Hey. I like the concept, but in it's current state, I find the game to be nigh unplayable and very lackluster. Let's start with the logical errors: Why is a person convicted of treason forcibly drafted to enact death sentences on criminals? I think the fate of such people, especially in 1776 Boston, would be to hang from the very same rope that we make others swing from ingame. What's more, why would you place the responsibility of deciding over life or death into the hands of a person with potentially high criminal energy? What's more, how does the Mayor, who should purely legally and administratively speaking not even be responsible for and capable of critizising our decisions, know wether or not the person was innocent but only after we hung them? Why doesn't HE execute said criminals, if he's so all-wise instead of making a traitor like us do it? What's more, the evidence in all of these cases was lacking, absolutely insufficient to persecute or even suspect anyone for, let alone EXECUTE (!), not even in the late 1700s was the American Justice System that bad. The historic context of it being set in Colonial America, which, on principle, could've made the game interesting, was awkwardly inserted, and the aestethics (the papers, drawings, the language, etc.) do not abide by it, which makes it seem incredibly inauthenthic and jarring.
From the way the cases are presented, and with the lack of evidence to collect in every single one of them, it is impossible to convict anyone with any degree of certainty, which, in this type of game, is an absolute dealbreaker. The only way for us to do the moral thing is to KNOW who we need to execute, rather than simply doing guesswork and having an all-knowing diety of a mayor tell us wether we were right. This all-knowing mayor also happens to be incredibly tolerant, because our criminal record as a traitor not withstanding, we are permitted to keep our job despite executing two innocents in a row, and being let go with a slap on the wrist. What sense does this make to you, dear developer?
I apologize if this may have come off as a rant, or rude; I merely want to draw your attention to the glaring flaws so that you may work on them and make an actually good and interesting game out of this.
Thanks for the feedback. I wanted the game to be around the 1700s. The timeline from our world to this word is different the game takes place in the fictional town of Old Boston which is part of England. Although the game has real places like England and the America's the game differs from events in our real world. So the criminal system isn't like you expect in today's world or back then in 1770. You may see misconceptions in the game but that is part of the game. Most things like not enough evidence to for sure know if this person committed the crime is part of the game. In the 1770s the criminal system was evolving so having lacking evidence from day 1-3 is part of the game. As the days go forward more documents would be presented as the department of convicted criminals would evolve its evidence. But most of the feedback is 100% agreeable is there a way you would like to see changes?
Very nice little deduction game! A couple of the puzzles felt a bit obtuse, but overall very nice concept that could definitely make it if done well.
4.5/5.
Best of luck, Marcus! Cheers.
Thanks for the feedback do you have anything that can change?
fundamentally, the game feels like it'd have some sort of moral question: "Is it okay to kill others for yourself?", "Do murderers deserve death?", "Is eye for eye moral?".
This could've been done if I had these sort of characters established in some way.
A game like Papers Please does this by having them just talk to you and tell you all their life issues and how life is so 'boo hoo sad', but this isn't the one way to go, there could be additional, non-case relevant papers that are obituaries of relatives of one of the suspects, or tax and loan logs that indicate deep debt, something so simple can just go the extra mile.
Other than that, gameplay wise, everything feels a bit dry and empty, the papers move and slide but not like how papers do, the game says in one of the newspapers that I'm gonna need proof but then I don't, my desk doesn't change or get decorated or deteriorated, and generally just more and more nitpicky """criticisms""" that will obviously be done later on in development.
Thank you I needed to see where to fix up the game and you pointed out good details that need a rework. Thanks again.
The game was missing some files. It's fixed now and it should work. Extract the file and search for the exe. There is a lot of files might fix it up when release.