• Added three new lines into the NEW writing style, which Noyno says near the end of the cutscene after the final boss. The older lines still remain in the OLD writing style.

No, that's it. That's literally the whole update. One may ask why did I even go through the effort for a measly three adjusted lines, like I just remembered that I left the oven on after 8 months. I suppose this was a bit of a compulsive thing, and requires some explanation...

There will be spoilers about Ribbit coming up, so bear that in mind.

The drawback of writing a loosely open-ended story is that there may be multiple interpretations of it, and there'll be more inaccurate ones if you do a poor job at conveying your message. One of the more unusual examples I've seen is that THE GIFT is a metaphor for depression.

Which... I can definitely see how you'd come to that conclusion, the way it talks to YOU and Susie, it almost feels blatant in certain parts... in spite of that, I swear that was not my intent. The characters themselves ARE different forms of depression, and different forms of change. THE GIFT itself, is not depression. It was written as a literal evil, a manipulating virus, a reverse Mary Sue, an embodiment of "the impossible situation" that floats around in my head. And if we assigned a metaphor to it, "uncertainty" would be what I think it represents far more.

When you write your story to be about the feeling of "every solution to my problems seem impossible," you very quickly start worrying that you'll accidentally end up romanticizing the theme, and end up preaching it like a factual truth, rather than the intrusive thought that it is. But with Ribbit, the intent was to emphathize with the characters for the way this theme treats them.

You may start off despising Susie, and you may do the same with YOU. But as more gets revealed, you might pity them, perhaps want to help them. You don't want them to end up like this, and that's perfectly understandable. You wouldn't want yourself to end up like that either. It's not something the mod wants you to "accept." It is a tragedy, the worst possible scenario, exaggerated by anxiety and fear. But, as the Future demonstrates, reality is often a lot more mundane.

Now, how does this link to those three lines of dialogue I adjusted? Well, you know how an occasional poorly made horror game will pop up with a very shoddy message attached to it? Something like "People with mental health problems are responsible for all the evil in the world?" I'll look at that, and then I start wondering "Oh jeez, Ribbit's story isn't coming off like this, is it?" And then I read through the script again, and realize "Okay, good, I'm fine." But what if someone does make that takeaway? And how much of this is just me overthinking things?

Thus, I finally get to the point: Through these new adjustments, Noyno puts less of the blame on YOU and Susie for their behaviour. To be fair, Noyno realizes later that they're being controlled by THE GIFT, but nonetheless, I didn't like the way he pushed the fault on them earlier, so now he's more ambiguous about it.

Is anybody gonna read all of this shit?

Oh yeah, we passed the 2nd year anniversary of Ribbit, by the way!! Thanks for still playing it! I don't have anything else to give you, I'm sorry. This post might as well have been its own retrospective, though?? Anyway, if we're still talking about how Ribbit's ending kinda falls flat on its ass, rest assured that I'm still thinking about that criticism. Alongside other potential ways to rectify it.