GATE 37
What makes you human? Is it the way you look? The ideals you uphold? The love in your heart, or something more scientific? Is it the dictionary definition of human? Is it your very being, your genomes and chemical makeup? Or can human be whatever you fancy it to be; that is, what does it mean to be human?
Premise
You are a 19-year-old girl. In your "past life", you signed up for a volunteer program that would rid you of your criminal record if you stood post at Gate 37 for seven nights outside of the isolated town of Whitewood, allowing or denying entry to passersby, though you have no memory of this. Once your seven nights of service are complete, your memories of Whitewood will be wiped and you will be given back your memories of your past life, allowing you to continue living as if nothing happened.
Background
GATE 37 was a game created in 17 days to be released on Halloween (though was slightly delayed), featuring artwork from 16 different artists and was the very first game I (CRRN) not only coded and wrote, but produced and directed! It began as a personal experiment, though became a volunteer-driven experience once I found it implausible to complete the artwork on my own. If you want to support my other art and projects, please consider checking out my X/Twitter!
I don't think it could be the best it could be even if I worked on it another month, and unfortunately school is very demanding. If I could've made it better, I definitely would've, but I'm very happy with what we managed to accomplish in such a short timeframe.
Credits
GATE 37 was heavily inspired by "spot-the-anomaly"/horror visual novel-type games such as No, I'm Not A Human, Who's At The Door?, and Security Booth.
To not spoil the characters in-game, here are all the volunteers who helped me bring this project to life without specific credits!
SPRITE ARTISTS:
- Sori Takeru (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Start (Link to their X/Twitter)
- euyuid (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Kaijjuuu (Link to their Carrd)
- Pechu_u (Link to their X/Twitter)
- niko.LAI (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Pilomiii (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Akuicia (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Thalossophobic (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Shinya (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Tianoi (Link to their BlueSky)
- frostfiresoul (Link to their X/Twitter)
- CRRN
BACKGROUND/CG ARTISTS:
- Heather (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Soukoku4Life (Link to their X/Twitter)
- EIRIRIKR (Link to their X/Twitter)
- CRRN
PLAYTESTERS & PROOFREADERS:
- emil (Anonymous)
- sardine (Link to their X/Twitter)
- korosan (Link to their X/Twitter)
- typhects (Link to their X/Twitter)
- Mellow (Link to their X/Twitter)
- ELC4RYM (Anonymous)
- mystqin (Link to their X/Twitter)
- XinXi (Anonymous)
Character/background/writing-specific credits can be found in the game.
Other
GATE 37 takes place within my (CRRN's) original character project/world, Paradise Lost. Some terminology, character origins, or the reason behind their appearance may be unexplained in-game, but are part of this larger world!
- All images and dialogue were hand-drawn/hand-written. No AI was used in this project.
- GATE 37 was intended to be a semi-horror game for Halloween. It includes elements such as jumpscares, extremely loud noises, sudden changes in light/flashing-glitching effects, unsettling/distorted faces, blood, and death.
- If there are major issues/bugs in the game, please message me, but otherwise there are a handful of minor bugs that are known and may or may not be fixed.
Download
Install instructions
Upon downloading the zip, find it in the file explorer, right click on it, and click on "extract all".
Open the folder that was extracted.
Run GATE.exe
Comments
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Visuals are very slick! Very cool for being made in 17 days. I do wish that more choices mattered, and it was clear that lots of dialogue just assumed you picked one option, but I can respect not wanting to sweat over the details for a game made in a couple weeks. I had fun!
I don't know why I never replied omg, I swear I did??? Yeah haha, there wasn't much room for lots of endings sob... but thank you so much for enjoying it!!!
EXCELLENT GAME CRRN!!!!!!!!!!
IM SO LATE. THANK YOU FUDGE !!!!!!!!!!!!
Typos:
Fairy at the start of the game says achiving
On the choices talking to demon there is a "better then"
Saying Wild Men to Angel, it answers with Carpe Dium, which I'm very inclined to believe was meant to be Carpe Diem, but disregard it if intentional.
Question:
Choosing to shoot joy has no gunshot and the text goes saying it steps away, but the dialogue it says implies (to me) that it is accepting that you'll kill it and just openly taking the shot. Did I interpret the tone wrong?
Review:
I think Dennis and Ending 5 Variation 1 were pretty interesting events, and the player character's past and future is intriguing, so I appreciate the two main characters to say the least.
Me-ism and Deer given the chance to be reocurring could also grow on me, I think. If the game expanded, I think a good approach would be killing, letting in and shooing away, killing ending a story there, while letting in and shooing open different branches (letting in being a domino effect and shooing letting the character revisit later and allow you to continue their plotline).
Spare Llulla route when, Pharaoh?
Not letting suspicious elements in not resulting in a different conclusion is a bit upsetting, many choices resulting in the same dialogues ditto, so as a VN I can't praise it too much, since I'd rather it just be static except for the bad end choices. Demon in particular, when you say "sounds better than here" still reacts as if you're refusing him, and then angel praises your steadfastness, so it feels very incongruent. Fairy talking about his crown seems like setup for how shooting him in the head ought to lead somewhere, but it wasn't the case either.
SFX-wise, I only wish characters had footsteps (it's unintentionally quite comedic when fairy just zooms away on the first night) and thus some characters that arent really walking could stand out as even more uncanny.
Art: lovely. the eyes and skin are such normal inspections while the mouth is so borderline fetishistic really transmits well how invasive it is to inspect someone's mouth as opposed to the rest. As gameplay it didn't feel very flexible, but artistically and narratively, it was used very well.
(I read the page better as I wrote this, and now I presume it isn't a project you'll continue working on going forward, so my criticisms on expanding the game may be worthless presently, but a worth a penny in a future project, deo volente.)
Woww thank you so much for your review and criticisms! I'll definitely keep them in mind for the future. Yeah haha, there were quite a few spelling mistakes and bugs I don't think I got around to fixing, and the inconsistencies in story/dialogue are because the dialogue was written at the same time as the code (thus the story was made up as I went LOL).
I definitely have more experience now and your criticism offered some new insight. Thank you so much again!