Almost 10 Years Old

Anamnesis will soon be 10 years old, and I've increasingly come to realize that the world, the internet, and even gaming as a whole have changed quite a bit during that time. I've got nothing better to report, so I'll just go ahead and ramble on about some of those thoughts now.

I don't remember exactly when Anamnesis started to exist. I had been working on it for more than a year before I decided to create this blog, and several proto-anamneses came before it sometime after I stopped making embarrassing RPG Maker and Adventure Game Studio games. Even these were in turn based on a shallower, teenier version of the game's world. A few of their characters even made it as renascents into Anamnesis. Fortunately, I was old enough by then to get rid of that one really awkward self-insert character for good, so at least you were spared that particular torture.

Perplexingly, in all these years, nobody seems to have to my knowledge tried to make a game quite like what I've been trying to achieve with Anamnesis, even though more games are released every year now than ever. I can barely keep my to-play backlogs and especially wishlists from growing out of control, yet still I can't find a whole lot of games in the same ballpark, which can actually get scary at times. Has nobody else really tried to do this or, more likely, is it just a really bad and doomed idea?

These doubts are compounded by how increasingly little feedback I've been getting from each new release. I'm not personally that close to anybody that could actually read English, nor have even a passing interest in text-based games for that matter, so I've been relying on internet feedback whenever I wanted to prioritize an area to improve in the game. I've always been a little surprised at how little discussion the game usually generates though, neither positive nor negative. To this day I still can't completely rule out the possibility that I've uploaded some old relative's beach trip photos or something instead of the latest release and I'm just witnessing one of those awkward silences nobody dares to break.

This is most likely my fault, as I've done virtually no attempt to promote the game in several years now and human interaction is hard. There is probably some truth to that whole thing about your game not existing if you don't publish it on a storefront and have a social media presence and whatnot, but I still believe that a game truly unique and worth playing would attract attention on its own without having to resort to cheap self-promotion, no matter how many other games get released in the meantime.