| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Style | #632 | 4.070 | 4.070 |
| Creativity | #694 | 3.907 | 3.907 |
| Overall | #721 | 3.767 | 3.767 |
| Enjoyment | #1542 | 3.326 | 3.326 |
Ranked from 86 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You extrude brush geometry, effectively scalable Sokoban boxes inspired by oldschool level mapping
Development Time
I love quake. Excellent game with a couple stuttering issues (Which didn't impact the broader experience), I'm a big fan of the puzzle design, by far some of the better puzzles I've played in a jam game.
I do think rescaling the blocks felt a bit clunky, but that's probably just a consequence of needing to physically move myself to scale them.
This one's probably my favourite of the jam.
What a great game!! I loved the puzzle design, each level brought something new to the table. I really like the mechanic, it feels so unique and interesting! The only minor frustration was having to reset the whole level (especially the really long one) just because i moved something a little too far. An undo would be nice, but i understand implementing all features takes time, which is very valuable in a jam. Great job overall, and cant wait to see what you all make in the future.
this game looks so beautiful and the puzzles seem so interesting! unfortunately its unplayable (<10fps) on a gt 1030. i know it is a low-end gpu but i really wish i could try this for myself. hopefully therell be graphics settings available in the future!
Hi personion - I'm really sorry to hear that you weren't able to run the game :(
Thanks for mentioning your hardware specs and for taking some time to leave a response anyway - we're all overwhelmed with excitement at the responses and to refine things more.
It was a big, big mistake to not include some more options for graphics in the jam release!! I regret this one a lot - we're already working on improving performance, making some post-processing optional and other general optimizations now that the submission deadline has passed.
I think in the future it should be more than possible to run this game on a similar system as yours - and I hope you'll consider playing our game again once we've released some updates to address this issue.
super cool concept and insanely good stylization :D i love artstyles like this. made me motionsick so i couldnt finish it, but that's not your fault, that's just how i am!
I love games with this kind of aesthetic, but had some difficulty playing this one. I don't know if I was just missing something obvious about the puzzles, but a lot of the levels seemed like they necessitated nailing really difficult/precise jumps that I just couldn't do. While I doubt it's needed for this game (?), I can't bunny hop to save my life, and quite honestly don't even now how you're supposed to do it, and my skill at the rest of Quake movement follows similarly. I was only able to complete "Look Up", and that required landing a jump so precise I quite nearly gave up. This was very polished, so good work on it, but I found it difficult to enjoy personally. I still feel I was missing something obvious about the puzzles, though... I had to be... so I won't dock points for it.
Edit: Somehow, this comment got posted twice. I deleted the other copy, but you may have gotten two notifications. Sorry about that!
Hi! Can infact confirm that while it's possible to use movement tech to skip puzzles, it's not exactly necessary - we didn't want a situation where a puzzle requires a really tight jump to be completed - this is good feedback though, as it lets us know that the visual cues we gave to the player in a few maps might not be enough to drive the point home, so we'll iterate on more beginner-friendly design that eases the player into the mechanics more gracefully in a postjam version ^^
Phew, this took me an entire hour to beat!^^' Which means that I must have been really hooked. BUT! I have some notes. :p
The first level I played was I think a tutorial one? You start just in front of it, there's only a series of jump to perform. But then I picked up Basement Dweller. Boy what a mistake! This took me so much time, and it was tedious all the way. This level is too long, too complex, the solution requires some convoluted moves, you don't know where you're going until very late, and it is so easy to soft-lock yourself... This level is a nightmare! I stuck with it mostly because after so much struggle I wanted to see its end. Finishing it was more a relief than a real sense of acomplishment.
After so much time spent on one single level, I intended to close it immediately. But I was a bit curious: are all the levels that long and difficult? So I just took a look at one other level... And this was a good decision! I beat not only this one, but every others! Turns out all the levels except Basement Dweller are compact, clever, and really fun to solve! The mechanics is really well used, and the level-design greatly show its richness, achieving both to surprise and lead in the right direction. This is a really great puzzle game after all!
There are still room for improvement. The controls don't feel very intuitive, and you often have to fight against them. Some moves don't feel nice, like vertical pushing or pulling, or pushing against a block when it is close to a wall, which requires you to make a bizarre diagonal to make it work. Also the hub world is an interesting concept, but it doesn't really work as a tutorial. My first moments were spent wandering around not really understanding how the mechanics work and what were those "portals" the UI was talking about. As for Basement Dweller... My advice would be to position it clearly at the end of the game, and even to divide it into several smaller levels!^^'
Anyway, congratulation for making this game! I have mixed feelings after my experience, but despite getting stuck for almost an hour right at the start, I must admit that the game's got me engaged in its puzzles, and I ended up really appreciating its mechanics.
Thank you SO much for this incredibly detailed review! Yeah, Basement Dweller is something a lot of people are having problem with, but honestly I think from perspective of feedback, it's kind of a happy accident that it's like that? It helps us see what makes the other levels tick, and what makes BD less inutitive, so we can avoid the same mistakes when creating longer experiences in the future - the general consensus seems to be that BD should have been two levels, or in the very least, should have had a checkpoint in the middle (which is what we're planning to add to allow for longer levels without sacrificing enjoyability!)
We've also been going over solving the input system, currently considering either splitting the input, or using relative orientation between the camera and the selected face to determine if the block should be extrudable through mouse movement or player movement (looking at a block straight on makes movement controls more intuitive, but standing to the side of it does make it easier to use mouse controls
With the hub world we're planning to keep that structure, but greatly streamline it so that it feels less like a disjointed puzzle, and more like a proper "level select" screen akin to Quake's or even Talos Principle's - people just don't seem to like solving puzzles to get to the levels, which is entirely fair!
Woow, amazing visuals!!! We love puzzle games, so this one hits the mark! Awesome job!
Alright here are my notes that I took or something like that:
Pretty cool game, puzzles were decent after I understood the main mechanic. Game looks great, it just needs a bit more level design to make the levels a bit easier to understand.
Hi Kristoff!
Thank you for your time playing our game and writing a comment - it's invaluable to us.
Internally, we all agree the game jam concept definitely needs some further polish - especially for the overall progression and introduction to game mechanics. But, I'd like to quickly address your final point about performance: the problem is far more than vsync!
We used signed distance field global illumination, and a few other expensive post-processing techniques for lighting and visual effects; it was a huge oversight to not include options for the jam entry. In the future, these settings (and window resolution, etc) are absolutely something we'll be allowing people to adjust in order to meet their system's ability. We've already begun using baked lightmaps, which are far less intensive as well.
This game is so UNBELIEVABLY well polished, stylized, and designed for a game made in 96 hours. Amazing :D
This is amazing! Very polished and does a great job on nailing the Quake/boomer shooter feel. My only real complaint is that the difficulty curve starts off really high. I could really see this being a full game.
Great game! At first I had trouble understanding, but that's what puzzle games are all about! After a bit I quickly figured out the puzzles and had fun solving them. Love the retro theme too! Only problem I'd have, (and a nitpick at most), is the scaling the runes feels a bit hard to control. Maybe its because i'm used to other entries using keys, idk. It didn't affect my opinion too much. Nice job, and good luck!
This game really nails everything that it sets out to do. At no point during my playtime did it feel like I was playing something made in 4 days. There is nothing that I can think of that stuck out to me as an issue at any point. Seriously an amazing project that deserves even more recognition than it's currently receiving!
My god. Am I really playing a Jam game? Full menu screen, detailed tutorials, complex puzzles (multiples of them) and even a hub area. Very atmospheric too. There's just so much packed into this game that its hard to believe it's done in 4 days. I don't think I can provide a lot of meaningful feedback, but maybe consider looking into different difficulty curves. Having a hub area is super cool, but it was a bit confusing where to go first (maybe it didn't matter?).
This really blew my mind; it already feels like a paid game lol.
I got really stuck on a couple levels and couldn’t figure out what to do, otherwise I thought some of the puzzle were really good and I didn’t mind resetting on them as I built up the steps I needed to complete in my head.
With a tagline like "What if Quake level mapping was a puzzle game?", there was no way this game could be bad.
Amazing concept, and with an extremely polished execution; everything from the textures, to the UI, to the movement, to the fact that the game's acronym is "BSP"... it all works to really drive the concept forward.
If I had to criticise something, I felt the controls for expanding and contracting blocks (brushes?) were a bit finnicky. I would've preferred those to be tied to a key, rather than physically moving back and forth, since it often didn't register.
Nevertheless, I love this game, and I would buy a full release in an instant. Great job!
Awesome puzzles, love the mechanic! Feels QUBE-y with more attention to interactions in 3D space
This game is something else, I love the atmosphere and the style, 5/5 on that, it has that old style heXen kinda vibe which I love. The puzzles are pretty interesting, I solved a couple, and they really make you think about how to scale a platform so to move it around. I don't know if I was doing something wrong, but the extruding sometimes was difficult to apply for me, but it wasn't really a problem. Love this game, very cool submission.
Really great! although i will admit i have a skill issue considering the first parkour jump took me ten whole minutes. when i jump before running, it doesnt move much, (as in, if i jump and then move in the air, it doesnt get me much momentum which is kinda frustrating when i need to do jumps.)
but on the puzzle side, i think you nailed it!
This is such a good puzzle game once it clicks. Absolutely great mechanics with tons of potential, and decent puzzles. The one critique I have is how the player is not slowely eased into the mechanics, and the lack of order to the puzzles doesn't help. Like, I initially stumbled on the "Basement Dweller" puzzle, which is way harder. I restarted and played the other levels in order to truly get into it.
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