The Ritual

Although inspired by the Pompous Trash game jam I'm not entirely sure this project is going to wind up fitting in there.

The title screen contains the following block of text, which I think it is worth reproducing here as a description of the game itself and a sort of warning about the sort of project it is:

This game was motivated by the Pompous Trash game jam which very much set the tone in my mind as I was developing it. It is also lightly inspired by the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode titled "Darmok", although it more or less discards the conclusion of that episode and instead stops at the idea of impossible communication and mutually meaningless language.

It is unapologetically opaque and does not concern itself with being a reasonable gaming experience. The contents of the titular ritual do not coalesce into a story. The game makes no particular effort to motivate you to complete it. It is not an incremental game; its mechanics do not expand or unfold.

The goal of the game is to perform the ritual completely and correctly. The ritual itself more or less takes the form of a call and response exercise; if you select the correct response for each prompt in the ritual you will succeed.

The practice mode will allow you to experiment with individual parts of the ritual and displays some additional information which you may find valuable.

If you decide to invest time in The Ritual, you may find it useful to work together with others. You should also be aware that the game does not save your progress in "Perform the Ritual" mode, so you must complete the entire ritual in a single session.

There are some other things I would like to do with this idea, but it is so niche that I'm not sure it is going to be worthwhile to pile more time into it. (Maybe if it gets some traction?) If you happen across any bugs, please do let me know about them and I'll try to get them fixed up -- but beyond that I'm not sure if there will be further development or not.