Hey everyone,

So the first review we got said "I have no idea what I played. None of it made any sense." And honestly? That's fair. Every choice teleported you somewhere random and there was no way to tell if you were getting closer to home or not. The game was fun in the moment but you couldn't actually play it. This update fixes that.

The forest has areas now

Instead of bouncing around at random you're in one of 13 neighborhoods and you stay there until you take an exit. They're laid out in rings around home:

• OUT THERE: space, the sky, the dark
• THE WOODS: the forest, the golf course, the water, the animals (this is where you wake up)
• THE EDGE OF TOWN: the carnival, the library, the arcade, the kitchens
• ALMOST HOME: town
• HOME

Most of your choices move you around inside your area. One or two of them are exits to the next area over, either toward home or away from it. I re-routed 600 choices and rewrote the line for every single one so it actually follows from what you did. The weird stuff is all still there, it just happens in order now.

Home is behind town

Every normal way home is one choice away from somewhere in town. The bedroom, the garage, the parking lot, a taxi. The secret item endings still work wherever you use the item. Fastest route from the golf course to your bed is 5 choices. Figuring out which 5 is the game.

Portals

There are 12 things in the forest that still jump you somewhere far away (the question mark golf ball, the EARTH hole, the mirror, the wormhole soup...). The game tells you when you've used one. It won't tell you where it goes.

The map is actually useful now

I replaced the old map because it was a circle of lines nobody could read. The new one is a chart. Columns are how far you are from home, boxes are the areas, and every place in an area shows up (lit once you've been there). Dead ends you've hit are a red X, ways home are a star, routes toward home are solid lines, routes that take you backwards are dashed, and every exit you haven't tried yet is a little stub. Each box tells you how much of it you've seen, like "THE FOREST 7/44, 2/8 dead ends". You can see what you've ruled out and what's left.

Buttons tell you what they do

The WEIRD / FUNNY / NEGATIVE tags on the choices are gone. They told you how a line was written, not what it did. Now every choice shows the verb (MOVE, LOOK, ASK, TALK, SHOUT, ARGUE, WAIT, DO) and where it leaves you: STAY in this area, TRAVEL to another one, or PORTAL. Dead ends show as STAY and home shows as TRAVEL so it doesn't spoil anything, you just know if you're about to go somewhere or argue with a duck.

Smaller stuff

• Places that had the same name now have their own (the 9th hole, the EARTH sign, the neon fountain instead of 8 "golf course"s)
• The HUD shows what area you're in and roughly how close home is
• The forest comments when you leave an area the right way or the wrong way
• Separate volume sliders for music / sound / key clicks (from 0.5.8)

Still 95 endings, still 20 ways home. If something still doesn't make sense tell me and I'll fix it.

Thanks for playing! I appreciate that you guys love the music~