Greetings, adventurers! Clarissa here!

It's been a pretty great Next Fest so far! I've gotten to meet quite a few cool streamers who've really taken to Enigma Heart, we've received some really valuable feedback on the game and how we can improve things going forward, and it's just been immensely gratifying seeing how much the game is resonating with people. You, the players, are why we do this. And it's been awesome.

In our Next Fest wrap-up post a few days from now, I'll give shoutouts to some of the especially nice interactions we've had -- and new friends we've made -- this week.

A Funny Thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Grain Mill

So, over the past month, I've gotten several requests for this feature, and while I wouldn't say I've brushed it off (I take every bit of feedback seriously, whether I ultimately act on it or not) I must admit that I've resisted it a bit.

Enigma Heart has a quest log now!

When you're working on a project as long as I have been this one, you can get a bit of tunnel vision. Enigma Heart does a lot of things diegetically and through the narrative to lead the player along: Zalia's letter to Esme saying she's coming home, the road that gets built between Brygate and Lydaea, NPC dialogue, etc. So to me, since I play the game every day and I know it back-to-front, that was enough. A quest log felt like it was breaking immersion just to tell the player things that the game was already telling them.

Except...

That's not how people play games.

• Some players are more focused on the action gameplay than the RPG elements (and that's totally awesome and fine!)

• A player might take two weeks off from the game and forget where they were last time they played

• And sometimes, we just lose the plot and forget where we're supposed to be going. (Goodness knows it's happened to me plenty of times in other games!)

So yeah, I'm actually pretty embarrassed that I resisted this one for so long. It should have been a feature from the beginning.

To bring up your quest log, go to Inventory from the main menu, move the cursor toward the Journal item (new!), and press OK (A on Xbox, B on Nintendo, X on PlayStation). Press Cancel (B/A/Circle) to back out and return to your inventory.

I have tried to write the To-Do items from Zalia's perspective (a lot of first-person perspective, that sort of thing) to keep it in-flavor. And in the full game, I'd eventually like to pair this with a more long-form journal so you can get inside the mind of a Zalia a little bit more and get her perspective on her journey. But as it stands, I'm pretty satisfied with this new feature.

In future updates, I may tweak the visual presentation a bit, or change the font from the handwriting-style font to the standard UI font, depending on player feedback. But the functionality will remain the same.

As far as save files go, the version number of the game has officially changed, from 0.68 to 0.68.9. Save files are still compatible: even though the save format has changed, some code has been added to detect the version number. If it's an old save, then the journal is automatically populated up to the current point in the story. It's been tested on Windows, Linux, and the Steam Deck, so we're confident it works smoothly, but if there are any edge cases, or the journal doesn't work as expected, please let us now!

What's In Store

I'm pretty satisfied calling a feature freeze on the demo as we assess where we are in these final days of Next Fest and as we figure out what our strategy is going to be regarding the full game. I do have one more small, oft-requested feature planned, but that will be a much smaller and less frantic update than this one: hint markers over signposts. They're going to be similar to the markers over NPCs, but as small unobtrusive pointers (probably an inverted triangle) rather than a giant speech bubble. Look for that in a few days.

Beyond that, we're pretty satisfied that, barring any edge-case bugfixes, the demo is as solid as we can get it! It's been an incredible ride these last five days, and we're really looking forward to the next two and beyond.

Thanks, adventurers! You rock.

~Clarissa