It was quite an endearing story, I really enjoyed it. However, it looks more like an interactive novel then a game of any sorts. There is no exploration I can see, but rather going from point A to point B in a linear fashion.

Before I go any further, there's a few things I'd like you to tell me:

1) what are your exploration aspects, is their any variety in what you can find or do besides the two pictures?

2) how will the game itself be, 2D? 3D? point and click? more information on the aspects of the game would be helpful.

3) Is this the entire story? Are you implementing more into it? if so, what are you going to do with the story?

I can provide more feedback after you explain it a bit more.

Side Note: This is just my opinion, but I believe making a story in a game is different from what people believe. They are not seperate from each other. If you focus too much on the story, you forget about your game and you lose the core aspects you had decided for the game. You have to work on both at the same time, so that your story synergises with your game and vice versa.

I also was wondering what was exploratory about this non-interactive story. Other than that, maybe I'm too old to be in the target audience but, for an adult, the initial reason that the girl needs to forgive her dad isn't very strong. I was like "Ok, we forgive him already" after reading 2 of the things in the mother's birthday present; the rest was just overkill for me.

I also would not call this a game. I think something like this is called an interactive experience.

Problem with the story:

In terms of presenting the journey of forgiveness. I think this story failed.

While reading the story, I did not get any strong sense that the main character held a grudge on anyone. The father was not there for her birthday but she somewhat expected it. When she described her feeling this way...

"Why am I even surprised?... So I probably shouldn't be getting my hopes up about a weekend!"

... the main character had already internally forgiven the father. Otherwise there would be no surprise or volition to have hope. The feeling that the story describes does not come from someone with a deep emotion that needs to be really healed by forgiveness. I do not sense an emotional journey toward any more forgiveness that the main character didn't already have at the beginning of the story.

When person A does not forgive person B, the emotional antagonism continue to manifests when person B had apologized for the initial incident and had done everything to prevent future occurrence, and is not showing any sign of offending it again.

If a child does not forgive a father (for some reason), a type of situation you can use to display that emotion is to write the story from the eye of the father struggling to be at the child's birthday and succeed at being on time, just to have the child still reject him. Then the viewer would sense that the child does not forgive the dad. After that, you can switch the perspective to the child and start her journey of reaching forgiveness.

Problem with the presentation style:

[spoiler]I followed the path to the "Park" first. The moment I see an image, I became scared of your creation because the way you tell the story is one of the ways to deliver horror in an interactive experience. I didn't know what your master thesis was, I didn't know whether you were a game development major or a psychology major. I didn't know what to expect.

Some of the presentation elements you used that I found associated with staging a 'horror' experience include:

1. Black background and white text. When you do this and the main character is a child, I feel a sense of deception. I feel that the narrator, while presented as a child, has something abnormal or dark about it. As if you are giving me a foreshadow that I will discover something gory.

2. A photograph (The see-saw picture). An actual, every day picture carries a lot more "noise" than a typical CGI image. When I see an actual picture in this setting, I start looking for hidden messages in the picture. You told us it was a game, and I did not know what the objective of the game was. If I see a picture I would assume that it is part of the game and I am supposed to notice something about it. While that picture is somewhat in mosaic, it raised my alert level that the genre of the game could be a detective game, a murder mystery, or horror.

3. A black and white photo, and there were text on the back introducing many characters. When I approach this as a gamer and you add this much information without telling me the objective, I do not expect that the new characters are suspects but victims. To me the story now includes the possibility that the main character was a serial killer.

4. A child's drawing shown in an austere environment. For that that is associated with the asylum. That further supported that genre might be psychological horror. Perhaps something happened and turned the child into a killer. There was the possibility that you show that picture for the sake of contrast.

5. "Lake house" mentioned in a black background, and mentioning that the main character had not been there for a long time. Lakes are common sites for horror stories. Perhaps the main character did something there and now had a split personality. (Note that, since I was approaching your story expecting that it is a game, I would assume that every piece of information you disclose has a purpose, and I am supposed to piece them together and figure out what it is all about. You also mentioned that the game was about exploration, so I was expecting that I would need to go to the lake house to figure out the mystery. By the dark theme and the fact that the main character was alone, and every message was trying to remind the main character to be happy, I was expecting the main character to have a suppressed depression with a mature reason (such as back when she was a child at the lake house, a killer came and to attack but she didn't do anything to stop it, or that she was the killer.)

As I continued with your presentation, I felt that it was dragging on without getting to the part where the main character start to explore. Then the story just ended with the revelation that the mother had passed away for some time.[/spoiler]