"The Ghost and the Golem"—Can your amulet save your Jewish village?

Announcements
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All of this feedback is super helpful, and I am working on an update including an option to uninflate stats, and a wider range of trans endings (from happy to somewhat happy to at least feeling like you know why things went the way they did).

Question for everyone… how do you feel about, if you will, the game’s “difficulty level” in general? Just from talking to some players and looking at the distribution of Steam achievements, I get the sense that the main “save the shtetl” conflict is really straightforward and few people are experiencing the endings in which things went catastrophically bad… which sort of makes me sad because I think those are really interesting endings! What’s your experience?

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So well-written, funny, and engrossing. I loved it. The humor was just so good. Also, the side characters were well-developed I thought, Rivka and Dovid especially. I felt like I could understand the dynamic of the friendship between the three of them perfectly, just with the light sketching that was done. My only regret was that it seemed so short. It wasn’t really, but I was enjoying myself so much it felt short.

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I love the game but I gotta be honest, the romance or especially Basha which my MC married in my playthrough is just feel force mainly on her, like the first interaction with her was sweet, including the part when she did the classic coin vanishing trick and that sealed my attraction for her but come again when she and her father came to discuss the matchup for a betrothal, and the family leave just the MC and Basha to talk and when I choose to talk about what the MC did for that day, the story just didn’t go in deeply of how the MC sang for a whole tavern or when the MC was in a debate with Menakhem or even when the MC was searching the cave, it just talked about when the MC denoucing Ekaterina in front of the crowd, which is just one topic that does not define what the MC was doing, if you want to exclude the cave ok but it feels like she would have been interested in the debate and the singing, and after the discussion, the game says the father saw happiness on Basha face when deciding if the betrothal will go through but how come the stats are saying she is still uncomfortable with my MC but the dad is some what impress with MC and the stat got the right assumption, like after that dinner, my MC did not interact with her, did not give even go on a date with her and it went on through out the story all the way to the end, the only other time my MC saw her was during the final chapter before the epilogue

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I can’t praise this game enough (even at the risk of attracting the Evil Eye). I haven’t been this engrossed by a CoG in a very long time. And the prose! Superb stuff.

My only complaint (aside from the fact that I wish it were twice the length, because I couldn’t get enough) is that the stats are a bit wonky, as people have already pointed out.

Fantastic job, OP. I don’t mean for this to sound pretentious, but this CoG is real literature. That’s vanishingly rare - or maybe I just haven’t played the right IF? There’s probably great stuff on itch.io and beyond.

I got one of the worst endings. Loved every second. Will go back and try for a cheerier conclusion.

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August patch is now live!

  • Four new Achievements
  • A variety of continuity errors fixed
  • More detail in a few scenes, particularly the “scribbler” ending
  • Some trans-specific material, both bugfixes and some new content
  • New option to de-inflate stats for code-divers
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Have you guys figured out the android issue yet?

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The last I heard, the Android issue on the standalone app wasn’t fixed, but the workaround of playing the game via the omnibus “Choice of Games” app was workable. Is that working for you all?

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It does work for me but i pefer standalone hense why i was asking

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Actually the android issue isn’t that big of problem, the only thing that it does that I found annoying was when I reached the first encounter with radzim, after that you gotta play through the end of the game because if you exit out of the game and you past that radzim interaction, you better hope that the game does not reset but otherwise is ok, it doesn’t mess with achievement but it does reset at the end when you see options like play again

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Elul Update

Bugfixes:
- Fixed dramatis personae, which was mostly blank (!!)
- Fixed some other bugs
- Got rid of stat inflation entirely, since the “turn off stat inflation” seems to have been a little wonky & unreliable.

UI:
- Implemented glossary paging on mobile (at least, I think I did: I can’t test it.)

Identity & Romance:
- You can reveal trans/intersex identity to suitor during shiddukh, eliciting various reactions. (You can also fill Rivka in that you did this, in chapter 6.)
- more depth in general, in the conversation with suitor during the shidddukh
- There are more ways to come out as trans, to various degrees, in the epilogue, and more summary of what that looks like in various romantic and professional configurations

Relationships:
- Improved relationship text (particularly for Moysheh/Basha pining for you after being rejected, and Mamma’s reactions in general)

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I just want to thank everyone here for your invaluable feedback, which really informed the work I’ve been doing over the last couple of months! In particular:

Bugfixes:

@lazlisz “You can choose to be trans, yes, but in my game I chose that my MC told both his friends and then the game immediately went on to have them misgender him within the next few pages.” → Fixed

@LaReveuse “I turned Moysheh down but he still left with a good impression of me, so I’m expecting something like, “I still like her but she doesn’t, and I respect that a lot”, but the stat page says that he’s “head over heels in love”” → Fixed, I think, though there are a lot of edge cases!

@LaReveuse “the character glossary page is empty for a majority of the story,for some reason.” → Fixed. Pesky greater than vs less than signs!

– Features added

NEW NAME
@Glitch_Critter “would there be any way to have a trans MC who has already chosen a name for themselves at the beginning of the story?” → done!

COMING OUT TO SUITOR
@lazlisz “You seemingly can’t tell anyone else—not even your match, so you can’t even see if this person is okay with that before you decide to MARRY them”

@Vengeance “I think a decent in-between could be an initial somewhat negative and/or confused response, but coming around to it in whatever manner…”
→ there is now a VERY INVOLVED conversation available with a variety of possible suitor reactions, let me know what you think!

@transalaskan
“And having your mother try to steer the conversation away from you being a tumtum and having no way to say you don’t want it to be treated like a shameful secret… oof.” → you can now always come out as intersex to Basha/Moysheh.

TRANSITIONING IN THE EPILOGUE
@lazlisz “more possibilities for at least transitioning by the epilogue”

@transalaskan
"When the game asked how I felt about my beard if the shtetl erroneously knew me as a man, or if I wanted to experiment with presentation as a tumtum, or etc, I was excited for a possibility of actually transitioning. →

There are now many possibilities, many of them suggested here. As a matter of fact there is an epi_trans_outness variable with 9 different states (one of which is not yet implemented, but the others are). One of my main takeaways from this conversation, which freed me up a lot to write this update – freed me from being trapped between a voice that said “don’t be a meanie! let them be who they were meant to be!” and a voice that said “don’t erase historical oppression! you can’t act like it was so easy!” … the thing I realized talking too you all is that it’s a game, and people are okay with the idea that figuring out a way to come out or to transition in 1881 can be a victory condition. So to the extent that you’re still living under Mamma’s rules, or confirming dutifully to the shtetl’s ideas, or still depending on respectability and propriety (eg in marrying up to a merchant family), well, maybe that means you’re only out privately to a select few or maybe not at all. But there are a lot of other ways to live in 1881, too… and you can find them.

I’m also taking seriously a lot of signals you send earlier in the game (like that beard thing early on) to try to assess what kind of future and presentation the MC envisions…

SUITOR RELATIONSHIP DEPTH
@Elemental “the romance or especially Basha which my MC married in my playthrough is just feel force mainly on her…like after that dinner, my MC did not interact with her, did not give even go on a date with her and it went on through out the story all the way to the end, the only other time my MC saw her was during the final chapter before the epilogue” ->I would actually still like to do a little more on this, but I tried to add a little bit to a) set your expectation that arranged marriage is, yeah, kind of stilted and awkward (no unsupervised dates in the shtetl! not if you’re playing by the rules, anyway, and the merchant family is.) and b) add a little more in the epilogue about how the relationship turned out.

This “Elul update” ships as the month of Elul is wrapping up – a month of reflection, atonement, and repentance. Hopefully it helps atone for a few of my sins! :smiley:

Thanks everyone, and l’shana tovah vemetukah tikatevu – may you all be inscribed in the book of life for a good and sweet year (b’ezrat hashem, better than this miskayt of a year we’ve had)!

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Oh, and two other fixes:

STATS ISSUES
@Gadriel @Healbot @HappyPotato @Sujan_Dhakal @LaReveuse @LiliArch @TwiExMachina
I ended up just getting rid of the stat inflation entirely, so now what you see is what you get!

STANDALONE RESETS
@Sade98 @wolf666 @fool
I believe this is fixed now!

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This is lovely to hear about - thank you for doing this and sharing about it. Nothing’s ever perfect to start with, but it’s wonderful to see how thoughtfully you’ve taken people’s feedback into consideration.

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I’ve been replaying the game over the past couple days and I got so confused when the “something seems off with these stats” suddenly disappeared mid-game lol. I can understand why people were a bit put off by the smaller stat growth, but looking at my endgame stats with my best skills in the low forties…it doesn’t seem off at all.

It was neat apparently timing my replay in the middle of the changes being rolled out. The choice of a True Name for a trans character was a pleasant surprise and it always was thrilling to see it being used (and it was also a special kind of fun for me, who did a Wikipedia search for all the presented names to find the Most Fitting for the character, was stuck in a choice between Esther and Ezra before deciding on the former, and then found that I could in fact have both cakes with a true name of Ezra). It was really nice to be able to come out to your suitor and I loved the different ways you could describe the shape of your soul.

But beyond the updates…I still really, really enjoy this game. It’s funny, it’s interesting, it’s a look into a time period I knew nothing about in a culture I know too little about. My next playthrough I might be able to graduate from Yiddish With Some Context to All The Yiddish, which’ll be fun.

I’m the worst kind of IF player where I find my way to play early on and never deviate from it, but I haven’t found that way here yet. There’s too much I want to explore still, ways I want to have the MC express themself…so that’s neat. And yeah, great update to an already great work.

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I was so excited to see this game got an update because it was already easily in my top ten favorites, at least. The new dialogue is lovely!

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This game is threading a fine needle I haven’t seen lots of games thread before – allowing queer joy while also acknowledging that it has, in many times and places, been harder won than cishet joy. I really appreciate the commitment to both, and I’m eager to explore the various possibilities the epilogue offers for a trans MC.

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Oh my gosh, you are amazing! I feel so happy when authors keep revisiting their games and adding special additions to them. x

ETA: I had originally been hesitant about playing as a trans character and romancing anyone other than our friends. But it’s so good that we can talk to our suitors regarding it! And now I’ll have such a hard time waiting until the Diwali holidays before I can immerse myself in the game again, aaargh!!!

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