Ashwood Conspiracy: Demo
Ashwood Conspiracy: Demo
It's the late 1990s. You follow Marcus as he returns to his hometown, Ashwood, for what he hopes will be the last time. He is there because of a mysterious letter he received just a few days earlier following his uncle's unexpected death. As Marcus learns more about what his uncle was doing before his death, the more he starts questioning the truth about the most significant tragedy in Ashwood's history.
Ashwood is a story-rich point-and-click adventure game. There is a strong focus on the story, while puzzles are used to advance the narrative.
Trailer
How to play
- Click on objects to examine or interact with them.
- Click near the edges of the screen to move between scenes or rooms.
- Items that can be picked up will appear in your inventory.
- Drag and drop items inside your inventory to combine them.
- Drag and drop items from your inventory onto objects in the scene to use them.
- Items in your inventory that you can inspect have a magnifying glass icon next to them.
Controls
| Mouse left click | Interact/Pick up/Move |
| Mouse right click | Cancel/Close/Go back |
| Esc | Cancel/Open main menu |
| Arrow keys/WASD | Move |
| Spacebar | Highlight interactive items |
Steam wishlist
This demo features the first chapter of our upcoming game. If you enjoyed playing the demo, consider wishlisting our game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3076200/Ashwood_Conspiracy/
Feedback
Thank you for playing our game!
If you find any bugs, issues, or have suggestions, please let us know in the comments.
Download
Install instructions
- Unzip the downloaded ZIP file.
- Open the extracted folder.
- Double-click AshwoodConspiracyDemo.exe to start the game.
- Have fun!
Development log
- Our first milestone3 days ago
Comments
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Wishlisted it immediately. I love a mystery!
Thank you!
This was really great-the puzzles were satisfying and the atmosphere was mysterious and spooky. I fumbled around for a few minutes on the safe, but ultimately found the last clue I needed before I became too frustrated or went looking for hints. I was a little upset when the demo ended because I was excited to keep snooping around, haha.
If I had one bit of feedback it would be that I sometimes had a hard time getting the dialogue windows to go away; I'd accidentally click on the thing again and get stuck in a loop. I played in browser so maybe that was part of it? I also would accidentally click through some dialogue sometimes and had to click the object again. It wasn't so bad that it kept me from enjoying it, though.
Overall, I had a great time and I'm excited to play the full version. I'm wishlisting it on Steam right now.
Thank you for playing & wishlisting and I appreciate you taking the time to write your feedback!
I'm trying to better understand about the issue you experienced to hopefully improve it.
When viewing items, the dialogues are indeed shown in a loop so people can view it multiple times if they need to. We show an indicator so the player knows which dialogue in the sequence they are viewing.
Normal dialogues go away after some time, but some dialogues are persistent (eg. the dialogues at the start of the game, the dialogue when you first visit the storage unit). Persistent dialogues you have to click to dismiss/advance them. Clicking on normal dialogues does not close them.
Persistent dialogues cannot be repeated and require the player to dismiss them so we are sure they don't miss the important information.
Maybe the subtle distinction between the two types was what caused the issue?
Would you like to click on normal dialogues as well to dismiss them?
Or maybe there was an actual bug an normal bugs did not go away after some time?
Sorry if I'm misunderstanding and thank you again for your time!
Ahh, okay. You're right that missing that distinction caused a lot of my confusion. I don't think there's a bug with dialogue, I think it's just my playstyle mashing up against the UI.
I went back and played a bit again and I think what happened with normal dialogues was that I would see "1/2" or "1/3" and think, "okay, so there's two/three dialogue sections in this response" and not "I can click on this item two/three times and get different responses each time." So I'd read the first section, click (coincidentally on the item), read the second section, click, and so on, thinking that I was advancing through one response and not initiating separate responses each time that I clicked. If I still had my mouse over the item when it got to the final response, I would try to click to dismiss it and wind up back on the first response; if I didn't have my mouse over an item at any point during this process, I wound up wondering why the dialogue wouldn't advance or go away.
Adding an option for the normal dialogue to work like persistent dialogue instead seems like a really good idea to me. I read a bit fast and I do just kind of instinctively want to get rid of text as soon as I'm done with it. The option to intentionally dismiss or advance text might also be nice for people who read more slowly, so dialogue doesn't disappear as they're reading; here it would save them having to make their way back through all the other responses if the last response happened to time out as they were reading.
Regarding persistent dialogue, I think what happened to me (and I was able to recreate this in the intro dialogue in the car) is that I would click while the text was filling in and accidentally advance it. I think a lot of games where clicking as the text fills in letter-by-letter will cause the entire dialogue to appear in that window and will only advance if all the text is already on the screen; I'm just primed at this point to expect that to happen, even if the button says "continue." I've played a couple of text-heavy games that have an option for that as something you can toggle on or off in the settings menu, so that might be worth considering if you want to make sure players don't miss that information.
So no bugs! Just me misunderstanding and a couple of usability notes for you to consider.
You are a legend, thank you!
This is some invaluable user feedback and I truly appreciate you taking the time to write it in such detail.
I added it to my list of things to update in the upcoming patch versions.
I really had trouble with the safe — I spent at least an hour trying different combinations, but in the end, it was simpler than I thought. Other than that, I really enjoyed playing the game, and I love the atmosphere it creates! It intrigued me enough that I genuinely want to see... how deep this hole goes. Good job!
Thank you playing! Awesome that you did not give up and found the solution :)
Would it have been helpful if after 3 failed PIN inputs you would have gotten a hint that would point you to take a closer look at the articles board?
On second thought, I actually think you should leave it as it is! While it might discourage more casual players, it made the game feel much more like a real challenge — at least for me.
Also, it's the only part I’d consider less intuitive; everything else flows really well.
Thank you again for your feedback!
I'll keep it in mind as others play and make a change if they find it too challenging.
It seems like its not letting me play the WebGl game. This game looks cool, would love to know when this is fixed so I can play it.
Sorry to hear that. Which browser and version are you using?
Note that our game requires support for SharedArrayBuffer which should be available on all the latest browser versions.
We tested the game primarily on Chrome, but I just confirmed it works in the latest Edge and Firefox as well.
Augh what is going on with this safe? I have the clues but I feel like I'm guessing...In rot13: gurer ner ahzoref va rnpu negvpyr, gubhtu gur ynfg vf n gjb-qvtvg ahzore, fb gung qbrfa'g ernyyl uryc. gurer ner n ahzore bs jbeqf uvtuyvtugrq va rnpu negvpyr (rvtug, sbhe, mreb, gjb), ohg gung'f nyfb abg gur pbzovangvba.Beyond that, it starts to feel like I'm trying to force something to work. What am I missing?EDIT: oh, never mind, same trick again, don't know how I missed it the first time. :-)
Overall this is pretty interesting! The atmosphere is good, the things you can try as passwords on the computer are a nice touch (I tried all five, and then found a name, and went back, and sure enough it let me try that! that's cool!), the steps are as logical as you can expect from the genre. (There's always some suspension of disbelief along the lines of "why would someone write down the safe key like that?", but everything at least made sense, there wasn't any "sure but why would they want you to count the number of birds in the photo" or anything that just defies sense.)
You may well have me hooked!
Thank you very much for playing and writing the feedback. Glad to hear you liked it!
You are the first person to play it fully on their own as other playtests were done (in person) with me present. So I'm really glad to hear you finished it without me giving a hint :)
I was glad to finish it without a hint! :-) A lot of escape-room-type things I see on itch really do end up hitting some utter leap of logic that sends me to a walkthrough. Nothing here was so obvious to be boring, but also nothing was so hard as to be frustrating. Well, OK, I did spend some time walking around in circles when I got stuck (I took the safe key all the way back to the shed, just in case, and tried using it and the spanner on the manhole), but really, everything made sense, which is great.