Just going to screech at you a bit.
WHAT was wrong with Narmer's father?! I get trying to shape Narmer into a perfect soldier, desensitize him to death, yadayada whatever, but unless he was fucked up to the point of non functionality himself (and it doesn't sound like he was) surely he realized that making your minor son participate in filling mass graves would result in (at least) unpredictable effects on him in adulthood. What was the plan there.
Ahmose has a WHAT?! Okay, you know what, yes, he's 18 and the heir, I shouldn't be surprised, but I WAS. I was s-u-r-p-r-i-s-e-d. Startled. Shocked. Affronted. Also, in the case of a Noble MC around his age, slightly offended to not have already been picked herself.
Petmes. WHAt. Petmes. The option "I know who you are" was greyed out no matter what I tried, so I don't know if you can actually know-for-sure at this point in the game but his entire deal is driving me crazy. I'm actually really impressed by how you're pacing revealing information in this game. It never feels like you're hiding information inorganically; it always feels reasonable that the player or the MC just hasn't had any reason to learn this or that thing until the game brings it up. So far you're doing a really good job of making it not frustrating to have a bunch of stuff going on that the players just don't have any context for. I'm confused, but I think only about stuff I'm supposed to be confused about at this point, if that makes sense.
... I still really want to know exactly who/what Petmes is/was but more than that I want to know when it will be possible to know.
Thank you for such a detailed feedback! 🕺
To answer your questions in order:
There was nothing wrong with Narmer's father. Parenting lessons and psychologists didn't really exist back then, his father had done the same, and look, he turned out just fine! (jk) There was no plan. He just did it because Narmer was there, he was big for his age, nimble and available, and a strong little boy, and then his father could tell the troops: "Look, my seven-year-old can do this no problem at all, so you lot have no excuse to slack off!"
Of course, for us, it's horribly obvious that it would cause extreme trauma. But for them, that was not obvious at all. Even if you asked Narmer, he probably couldn't pinpoint that THAT was one of the earliest reasons why he has extreme PTSD today. He's not even aware that he has PTSD. He just thinks it's part of his personality.
Yup! Keep in mind that when Ahmose was small, the war was still on. Narmer needed to cement a strong alliance somehow. A same-ish age noble MC is all well and good, but that wouldn't bring in soldiers and foreign support.
Petmes is a bit of a contradiction. The greyed-out-choice is a real option! It can be made available, but only if you play with a certain MC who did a certain thing in the first chapter. In that choice in the desert, that specific MC can realize something about Petmes. But it's a strange thing because MC's and Petmes's belief systems don't align, and yet... both can be true at the same time. So MC can have one truth about Petmes's identity, and that would be true for MC. But Petmes will have a different truth, which you will not learn in this game :)