Thanks for the feedback!
Quote: "i played to level 3 and didn't see much blood, violence, disturbing visuals, suicidal/masochistic themes and blasphemy"
Haha, well it was mostly in there because of the whole "cut your wrists to beat the boss" thing. I thought people might be surprised when they had to kill someone by spraying blood on them
I did err deliberately on the side of caution, though: if I hadn't put the warning in, people might have been offended. ("Blasphemy" was more an afterthought - although the player is falling through hell.) I guess a little part of me wanted to attract attention, but I did want to warn people: as darimc said, it is
Quote: "a little messed up"
Quote: "I find it frustrating that you always have to restart from the very beginning"
Hm, maybe I should have put in a checkpoint system - but I sort of wanted it to feel a little like an arcade game, and to be a very concise, "run through it in one go" experience rather than the sort of thing you'd pick up, play for a bit, stop, carry on later etc. Of course, once you get used to all the "typing phrases", you can go through the game relatively easily - I had to, in order to test it properly!
The imagery was partly inspired by Killer7 and partly by the slightly retro, weird, pixelly feeling of this guy's games:
http://www.cactus-soft.co.nr/ The symbols which pop up before each level were from astronomical charts, I think. (I just googled "symbols" or something.) The levels system is taken from Dante's Inferno (the original Italien poem, not the EA game
) and the nine circles of hell. The typing phrases are taken from the bible. (I wanted to create a contrast between the evil bosses and the virtuous nature of what they were saying: "the devil may cite scripture for his purpose", after all. That's also why they have feathery wings, rather than bat wings.) There's also a cross motif: the crosses used for selection at the main menu, the target reticle, the faces of the bosses, the clock hand and the icon for the executable all have crosses, the idea being that this is sort of a dark nightmare of traditional theology. (No, I'm not religious, but the idea interests me.) To be honest, though, there's not much of a coherent design or message in there: more a series of tangents, all sparked off from one vague vision of bizarrerie and freakiness.
Secretary of Unknowable Knowledge for the Rock/Dink administration '08