itch.io

I liked the visual style and the premise seemed really cool, but the even though the game gave me information (very nicely done with the texts that popped up), I felt like I was missing a very key element: a reference point.

I had no clue what direction was continue forward and what direction was was go back. Neither was the delineation of what was the “room” and what was not very clear to me. I’m guessing that the S shaped corridor where there was a blood marking was the not-room but everything else was the room?

I think it would have been great if this part was visually very distinct from the room. Because there were hallway parts that still remained inside the room if that was the case.

It might also have been good to have stairs down versus stairs up as a way to indicate going forward or going back. Or if that connector hall had other visual elements that clearly gave it a forward direction and reverse direction.

I didn’t find anything out of place either, but I think that’s because I was a bit distracted when the game started and missed some prompts.

So since the movement isn’t super fast, after having played and thinking I kind of understand now how it should have been played, I think there might be a benefit och making the “room” a much smaller and concentrated area and giving the player the first anomaly more or less for free. Right next to the exit both lamps are dancing about so you should notice it and go the back-way.

For people like me. It would also be good if the game more or less didn’t allow me to leave the first room before they’d looked about. I know because I watched back how I played it, that there’s a prompt, but I really didn’t connect the dots and then I never really understood when I was reset either.

I think the game could really stress it when you end up back at the start.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/cM6FiMBHrZw

Ah I didn’t notice that I managed to register some level up clicks at all I just clicked a bunch and it didn’t seem like anything happened :) Perhaps there could be a stronger visual effect too on those that you have leveled up in this session.

It might be that it was easier dancing about in fights with smooth transitions, but it was really hard with instant transitions (that I accidentally turned on and promptly forgot about, or was it enabled from start?)

My gamer brain is also very much “Why you show me text. This looks cool. I want to play and explore.” So I probably didn’t read it that well. If you are going to continue work on the game, I would urge some kind of effect on the portrait that nudges and reminds the player that they have unspent level up points.

Thanks for the feedback and the recorded playthrough! Very interesting to see how hard the attempt was for you and how you put everything on attack even when the characters were running low on health. I guess it never really was explained that increasing the lower two stats would give a boost to health or sanity. But it was kind of scary to see you running around with the small healthbars and just getting by for quite a while.

An obvious point is that there should be one of the tardigrades that gives you the ability to visit the healing place in one of the closest rooms from where the player spawns as you didn’t even encounter any of them from what I could see.

Thanks for playing and thanks for posting a video

You forced me to spell discombowluahte gaaah! Cool entry, interesting concept and all in all a nice game.

I loved the intro and the general tone of the game with rhymes and all. It was a fun concept of playing with spelling spells. But there were several things that were off with the fight.

The enemy-phase of the game was much much to slow. I found myself looking out of the window or just staring into the void while waiting for my turn again. I think a huge part of fun could have been making that cycle several times faster.

The options I got didn’t really give me much risk/reward either since most enemies would die from two fire balls or two blizzards I just used the one that felt easiest to type. That did change a little bit in the last level or so. But in general, I think there’s a need to force the player to adapt. Either by enemies being sensitive and resistant to certain spells or if there were combo effects.

Next thing with fighting that was really annoying with healing. Especially the “HEAL” spell. Having use my turn and get 4 point only to have 2 or 3 taken away made it a chore. There wasn’t much risk involved in the fighting either with the spell being that easy to type so I would have it heal something like 50% or more and recovery heal up to 100%.

Or… rework the whole fighting logic so that if I only use up say 40% of the time allotted to typing HEAL then I still have 60% action time left on my turn so I could hammer out a quick FIREBALL. In general such a mechanic, I think would elevate the game immensely. It feeds into the speed-typing core mechanic and gives a risk reward system for being fast.

Then as a somewhat minor thing that got a bit irritating was all the [ENTER] pressing. I think it was great that I didn’t have to select spell I wanted to cast but that it got selected based on the first letter typed. In similar fashion I think it ought to have cast right when I typed the last letter. I also think it should cast as soon as any combination of letters that filled up the slots were entered. I’d urge you to try removing enter from the game pretty much.

As for the movement, since my hand needed to be on the letters, I would have loved WASD bindings when moving around so that I didn’t have to press enter and then move my hand down to the keys. Please also consider adding strafing and backwards movement.

I think that was pretty much all for the complaints. :) The game was great though and I had fun playing it to the end. Movement was nice in my opinion, the levels were good, though I got lost a bit at some points. And I really liked the graphics too.

Btw there was a glitch on the final stairs it felt with something that looked like a missing background.

Great entry!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/M1r0hukA3lQ

I don’t mind Jill! Or well, I did mind a bit when she talked over NPC:s and useful information. So a little tweak for her to fill the time between fights and useful talk when the player is just exploring or even better when lost, would have been great. If she could have commented on what the player was doing, like “Oh so you figured out how to open doors, congratulations to you” when the player did such etc. That would have been even better.

The idea of getting xp for walking about and 1xp for revisiting places I’d been was an interesting concept, but perhaps the 1xp and 10xp walking effects could have been toned down a bit.

I’m not sure I could level up, it sort of looked like I should have been able, but I couldn’t interact with the portraits. I also for a while didn’t understand that I needed to open them up (since I hadn’t needed to look at them before) to do that.

The movement was nice and camera and art and everything.

As for the combat, I’m not sure if I was meant to dance around the enemies but at least with instant movement I didn’t feel like I had much of a chance without being hit first.

I also feel like while moving about in the dungeon that at times I got teleported to other locations though I didn’t notice any teleporter. Perhaps this was as intended, but it was desorientering and about 7 minutes in I ended up where it felt like I had been before. In a small area with no apparent exits. I’m probably missing something, but it also felt like something was broken with the game there. So I gave up, and with no saves I felt like that would have to be it.

Which really is a pity, because the game looks great. Has a lot of cool stuff in it, it seems and it would have been fun to explore it some more.

Playthrough (didn’t get very far): https://youtu.be/6bD9ogJAQUc

I like the skeleton enemy art style a lot. And I must say I loved the optional very quick ending in the beginning.

I have to admit though that I was struggling while playing the game. Which was a pity, it seems interesting and the level designs thought through.

The controls both that they didn’t have any WASD mappings as far as I could see and the hold shift to strafe. It made it very hard navigating and with a lot of holes… well awkward at times.

The attack/defense reaction bar also was superfast. I wish there had been a setting to make it easier and/or given the player something when selecting the fail option.

I was also really confused about the multiple keys for one lock. I think the idea is fine, or even good, but I think I would have liked as many locks on the door as keys needed and some feedback of how many I had opened thus far. I was about to give up on the first door even though it said I needed multiple keys. I expected it to react in some way and not refuse my first key all together because it was too few.

The spacing out of instructions was very nice, but also a bit problematic that you had one shot of reading them and then they were gone. Now I wouldn’t have to go through them each time I entered the tile, so it would require some smart system.

The save system was one of these where it was so odd that it said Load when opening it that on my first run I didn’t dare use it. So being able to re-read that instruction would have been critical. Or preferably one key for saves and one for loads.

My first attempt crashed. I were at the fire traps and I didn’t feel like I should have been caught by them, but the game indicated that I were and then there popped up an error window and I had to restart.

On the second try I managed to save but when I got about as far as I had previously gotten I ended up in a fight were I didn’t feel like I got to select attack/defense option but ended up inside who to apply the non-action to. And whichever I selected nothing happened. And the game seemed to have locked me there with no recourse to continue. Something had seemed a bit off with not being able to equip keys before in the inventory so I’m guessing whatever was corrupting the game-state was sort of spreading.

Playthrough (as far as I got): https://youtu.be/rwrahdtRASY

thanks for the great feedback! I agree completely that the combat is in dire need of overhaul and balancing. I’ll consider both the amount of information given about the enemies and the choice that the player needs for the semi-auto battle to feel more interesting.

With regards to leveling up defensive stats, I think in part that was due to a balance breaking bug that made you more or less invincible which meant you didn’t need healing as much which in turn means that mental health didn’t go down too much. So with those things there was little need for investing in defensive stats. But it may also be that health should not scale so much with higher levels to keep the player needing to invest in it. That or the enemies needs to accelerate the damage they deal further in.

thanks for the great feedback!

The minimum requirement should, probably did, lower attacks with the weapon by something like 50%. And probably made it harder to hit (except if you activate the crit-tick) so it is very possible that as a whole it still was beneficial to equip a higher tier weapon without meeting the requirements.

And I agree that I really should have provided subtitles especially given amount of effects I had put on some of the sounds.

Thanks for the comments and for playing!

For party-size and difficulty. That got partially ruined by lack of balancing and that bug letting very tough characters heal during battle. It’s true that larger party spreads out gear, but non-participants also get partial XP from each battle. The second way it would have helped is to have more characters to cycle through battling in between visiting the healer-slugs.

You’re idea about swapping party members during fight is on my list of how to increase player agency during battle. I’ll also consider fleeing. Probably giving monsters an attack of opportunity each and then putting them in forced rest-mode for a second or two so that the player really has to run away from the room.

I’ll look into monster movement, my plan is to ease them between tiles too rather than teleporting and that in its own right probably will slow them down some.

Thank you so so much for your thorough comment.

As for the unreachable end on level two, I’m just guessing here but it might be that the procedural generation failed to connect all rooms on your seed and then placed the exit in a place you couldn’t get to. That would be very unfortunate. I’ll have to review all 3600 seeds and see what I can come up with and add some handling of that scenario. Very unfortunate.

More portals than collected tardigrades is for sure a bug. I’m guessing you at least could not place before you collected your first tardigrade? But that you had collected several, and when you placed them the little tardigrade icon never disappeared? Or that after you collected one, you could place even after that icon was gone… Up onto my bug-list!

There should be no way other than leveling up to increase one’s sanity. And that during combat health sometimes restores is another bug.

Opening map while having party open… I hadn’t thought of that. Pure luck nothing fell apart doing so :)

I’m planning to redo the fighting quite a bit, giving a bit more agency to the player while keeping the core auto-battle. It’d be interesting what an auto-battle skeptic would feel about it after those changes.

Again, thank you so much for the extremely useful feedback. Several new issues opened!

Absolutely stunning entry. The graphics was marvelous, the short concise levels were really neat and that slow slow awfully slow reload speed kept me at the edge of my chair.

Before getting to the critique, let’s preface it with saying this is one of the absolute best games in the jam and quite frankly absurd that it’s this good.

Now, speaking of the reload. While there was camera action when performing it, I did not at all understand the UI nor what it meant. The game was so pedagogical about the [Spacebar] so when I pressed [R] and nothing seemed to happen, just me going into what seemed like a crouch. I got the feeling there was some error in key-bindings. And so I died on my first attempt.

I think there were a couple of problems here. Most important, if there had been a reload sound which would have told me to wait. Second, if there had been some animation on the gun/hand sprite. Or just rotating it a bit or such, it would also helped. I also thought that the three dashes might be my ammo before reload. Another trick could be to not have a linear progress on the filling of the reload bars, but let each segment start filling very fast in the beginning and then slow down as it approaches full. That way I’ll see something happening right away and might also work wonders with sunk cost when stressed and feeling like I’ve invested more in filling up a bar than I had.

Once I read up on the game page and tried again it was easy to understand though!

And the drama of a single enemy in those corridors. That was scary. I think it would have been cool if on a levels in there started to appear enemies that needed two hits. And I think those work best in narrow spaces. (I’ll get to the boss-fight later). There was some occurrences of two enemies at the same time, and while it elevated the stress, I feel they were mostly a bit too easily placed. Now I never died after that first attempt, but seeing as each level seems to have started with full health, I’m guessing that death just restarted current level? If so, there might have been a case for at some point driving up the difficulty a bit more.

However, the level where killing enemies opened up passages behind you, it didn’t feel entirely fair or on par with the other levels in design. Primarily because of lack of feedback. If there had been a clear sound of walls shifting or such. And perhaps increase the sounds from enemies moving so I could have heard the one approaching from behind me. In general if there’s one place the game is weaker than the others, it’s sound. The ones that are there are great, some could be made a bit louder, and there could have been so many more sounds! And eerie music.

Now the boss. I think it was a lost chance to do something cool. Because it was in an open area with cover-pillars. And because the room was regular in shape. It was really easy just running around the periphery. It made it one of the easiest fights, and the most boring.

If the area wasn’t as open so you could loose track of the boss, forget where you should go, those type of things. That would have made it better. But perhaps even better since it was a hive mind. Each time you hit it (or every second), perhaps it should have spawned a regular enemy. That… well that would have been scary and a proper climax to what otherwise was a fantastic game!

Well done! Very well done!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/n4cPWx14Wrw

I liked the compact level design, with loops and new segments opening up. Traversing it a bit back and forth felt very natural and not at all annoying to go hunt for “where did what change this time”. So that’s very well done with that.

Not being able to do much about the shrooms in the beginning and they moving quite erratically and not even knowing if they were hostile or what combat rules were did add a bit of suspense but also a bit of annoying shuffling back and forth just for them to get out of the way.

Finding the book was a nice dramatic moment, and then blasting away. It would have been nice though in general with some clear feedback on when I hit an enemy (how much range did I have, was there a hit chance, that type of thing). I don’t particularly need an healthbar on them but some indication that I’m doing the right thing.

Though it was quite balanced. As you an see in the playthrough, I lost track of my sanity and health was getting a bit low at one point. And while it’s cool that I regen both while walking around it meant I stayed put in a room just shuffling around. And that wasn’t very fun. So perhaps the regen can increase with each game tick where I wasn’t taking damage. Like start regen after 5 rounds out of combat, and add +1 to regen power on each tick after that.

Movement was fast and nice, but I did end up double moving a couple of time.

Short, but well made entry!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/BngvyS7NDUI

Wow you out-wrote me here :)

Movement (and camera) is HARD. I half-failed there too even if I played around a month before the jam started and tried to get things pretty good.

I guess one relatively easy way to increase likelihood of players interacting with the apparitions would be a textprompt when facing them. Redesigning them to be less abstract and more humanoid ghost-like could be another. Finally if you want to give the player character a voice you could have a reaction event trigger if the player enters the area of one and hasn’t yet interacted with any. That when they leave the area the player character could say something like “What was that thing?”

I agree that showing enemies can be effective, and in particular if you feel like and they are in fact hunting you. But you also have a risk of players starting to play the map rather than the 3D world. And it also comes back what makes sense in the game world and with its logic. No easy answers for sure.

I agree with the struggles of the current AI, it’s probably best as you did to keep it simple and space out the encounters.

Alright, wow, that’s not how a game jam game should look, play and feel. This is pretty amazing really.

I liked the density of secrets. There was a lot of design around that. And the areas had somewhat different feel in their layout too to reflect their setting. That said the combat system with full health restore made the intensity level quite even / casual and there wasn’t that much of elevated risk from having multiple enemy groups in the same area for example. That said, I’m not really complaining, I feel like the target was a casual strategy dungeon crawler and it nailed that perfectly.

It would be easy to make it much more scary if new party members didn’t automatically come to you after each fight, but again, I don’t think that was the aim.

Equally, not really saying it would be good but that there always was a constant symmetry for all dice options… it could have been interesting if there were 5 members and die value 1 and 6 only mapped to the first and last weapon while all other had 2 so that these could be a little extra special.

It probably made perfect sense, but it was a little obscure upon death, why some came back with elevated level and why some skills remained leveled up while others reset though they had icons that at least looked like what I had leveled up.

The mysterious prompts on getting sanity restored or increasing it out in the world. I liked those, even if I didn’t figure out what they were hinting at. I don’t feel like I wanted or needed to understand them though. They added to the uncertainty and hostility of the world.

There were a lot of nice text prompts too. I read them all, or most of them, and they added nicely to the world even if I often have a hard time to stop and read when gaming brain says explore, fight, come on! But the centered text combined with rolling out made them a bit annoying. I wanted to read at once but stuff kept jumping around until it all was visible. So I’d prefer instant show, some animation of perhaps transparency along the text, or left orienting the text and then let it roll out. Not jumping around text please.

I do have one strong objection though! PET THE CAT, I want to pet the cat. Should almost remove one star because of that :)

But seriously fantastic entry!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/7ixT153CDvs

I really love the color choice. Sticking to very few colors gives the game a very distinctive look and feel.

I wasn’t entirely sure what the bar on top nor the one below signified. At the end I’m still not sure what the bottom is, but I’m guessing the top one was “health”. So there might have been some indication of when the next wave was coming, but I didn’t understand it. At any rate, it would have been nice with some indication. It doesn’t have to be an exact countdown but something that indicated it would happen soon.

There were some numbers in the corner, but these weren’t explained.

I noticed I could clip through walls by repeatedly pressing forward against them, which allowed me to get outside the map at one point. I got the feel that it was easier to succeed at this by not facing the wall and strafing through it.

I think I also placed a spike trap without a wall but placing the spikes on the core. I was kind of expecting enemies to come from all directions, but they seems to mostly come from one direction.

The controls worked well and camera perspective looked good to me. Perhaps I would have liked the movement to be a bit faster though.

The idea of gathering resources to tower defend the core was really neat, but I think I would have liked some area awareness around the core to assist me, i.e. a little minimap that is always centered on the core and shows enemies approaching and preferably traps. I think that even if that would make the game easier in a sense, it would elevate the immersion as right now there was no strong feedback when anything was approaching or attacking the core. It ought to be screaming and making all sorts of visual effects on the screen so that I come and protect it.

At one point it felt like I pressed a button and teleported to the core, or some other core because it felt like the world looked differently. Perhaps I was just confused, and then there was a countdown and I got teleported back to the original core. Or so it seemed. Not at all sure what happened there.

All things considered, a solid entry.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/OIS6nATzNF0

Oh, while playing I didn’t really notice that the previous message turned grey. I think either some more contrast there and/or extra space between entries/prompts should assist a lot.

I didn’t get that it was possible to do a pacifist run, but given that inspiration, it might be “nice” if there’s a genocide run too… maybe there is, had I only dealt with the two cryo that I didn’t wake up…

I like the atmosphere that in the game a lot. The movement was sort of slow, but I wasn’t too bothered by that, but I would really have wanted to queue up one move/turn instruction. It left me kind of confused in the beginning about which key was strafe and which was turn because when I pressed forward and turn and I just moved forward, my mind went “I guess this is one of those games with strafe on Q/E” and then I pressed A/D to turn and I strafed and that took me a while to sort out.

The choice to show enemies on the minimap felt a bit odd. At least showing those that I hadn’t seen yet. Because the game did have a lot of suspense in the sounds and environment. But then being able to see the exact location took a quite a bit of that away.

I should also say that I though the, I’m not sure what exactly they were - things - one could click to get a bit of narration. I though they were just air or current or something like that coming up from the ground. It was only when I got close to the end that I accidentally clicked one and realized what they were.

Fighting was both nice and a bit off. It felt strange that the enemies could occupy the same tile as me. It also made the camera film out from inside their meshes. The enemies also could clip through obstacles in the world. Which felt wrong. But the here I think the slowness of one’s own movement and the long ready time after each attack worked very well with the dance around the enemy combat. And with scarcity of powerful ammo, having resort to the knife. It made for a good compliment to the suspense in the game in general.

The pacing there was also good, with a bit of a breather between the fights.

I think it could have been cool with letting loose more than one enemy after the player in the larger areas. In particular, since the end story was kind of building up towards something. The size of the final outside area was really a bit unnecessary as it is now. Why did I have to walk the last bit that didn’t have any story or enemies? There were a sequence of large rooms, and coming from a very large and scary area that felt like it could have had a shark. At least one of the last rooms could very well have had a couple of enemies that you can try and fight simultaneously or just run for it in panic. I think something like that would have been a more fitting climax.

I tried recording the playthrough but for some reason it just turned into a black screen with the sounds.

Good game! I wish I liked it more though, because it has a lot of atmosphere, cute monsters and I was ready to get a bit scared. But I didn’t really get what the monsters were doing to me, what my “health” was. If there was a way to “heal” and when I died it felt like “why did I die now” or “what could I have done in this situation to survive”, in other words that it didn’t feel fair. Which took away all the scariness. So some clearer feedback with how the systems worked and when something was hurting you from what direction would have been needed, I think. It looks really great though, so it’s a pity it didn’t really work for me.

It was neat running around exploring the map with the flashlight. I didn’t sneak / crouch anything since it required keeping that key pressed, which would have been much too taxing. If that was important and needed for prolonged periods it should probably be a toggle mode. Or at least have that as an option.

The controller was fine to me in the underworld. There were some odd cases of the camera ending up inside furniture and decorations, which could probably have been solved with adjusting the near clip plane. But not being able to strafe made the initial bit feel extremely awkward as it was layout a bit organically and moving towards the goal zigzaging with turns didn’t feel human. It probably would have been nice with strafe in the underworld too.

There were a lot of trees when I got the axe and I hadn’t seen the fallen one, so it was really weird for a while why I should cut down a random tree. And stranger when nothing happened.

Because how a lot of stuff didn’t align with the grid and there was no strafe it was also quite often unclear what could be investigated or interacted with. For example the tree you actually were meant to cut down could be reached from quite a few places and in several angles but it didn’t give any feedback that I was doing the right thing until it was gone. And so was I cutting all along or not. I wasn’t sure. Also after having cut down the tree, I sort of expected the game was teaching me I needed to cut things that stood out in the dungeon. But I didn’t find anything that seemed to react to my ax.

I might have been inclined to continue exploring if not the map was partially (randomly ?) reset after each death. The in-world logic for resurrecting where you were killed with all equipment you had but no map (memory?) of where you’ve been but a little from the previous life was hard to grasp.

I also felt like the flashlight before I died the first time illuminated the surroundings better than it did after the first death. So it became very dark and only walls shone up a bit.

Don’t take my complaints too much as such. I’m mostly a bit sad. The game had really good graphics, sounds and atmosphere in general.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/5RSOfIjnTCg

Very nice game! I liked the narration most of all. It was also interesting with some options never being possible to select. Even if it probably related to content cut due to running out of time, it kind of became a form of narrative too. Like you can’t ask mother “why” in the beginning because you don’t have that ability yet. Probably never will get. Or perhaps that one was on purpose. I liked it a lot though.

I was about to give up in the first room, because I couldn’t open the door. This was because I had pressed so much Return in the dialog I forgot that F was the interaction key when outside of the dialog. Might be worth reminding players or make a bit of remapping so Return also works as F the same way F works for Return in the dialog/text options.

It was a bit hard at times to see when there was a lot of text where the current message started. Perhaps there could have been an empty line or some margin or something to mark it out a bit.

The game was a bit confusing pacing-wise. Leaving that first safe room, I got hit down to a sliver of health before reaching the healing station. That made me think, alright this game is going to toy with my emotions and keep me feeling like I’ll be dying all the time. And then the save feature said it might have saved. Which reinforced that feeling. But after that first close call, the game soon leveled me up enough I could hardly be hurt by the spacers.

The fighting was of course quite simplistic and with the random encounters, it was about to become a bit annoying but then I found the weapons module and could one-shot the spacers and then it was fine.

I only killed one of the people in the cryo-tanks, because it felt the right thing to do. The others weren’t going anywhere. And equally it was the most parsimonious option to reduce awake crew after having spoken to and learnt the truth from the one standing before the end thingy.

Lovely little game, very well written.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/bttt5o0f_iY (there’s a pause where I restarted and got myself back to the door before I realized what key to press)

There was a lot of content in this one. I played for about 40 minutes before giving up. Quite a bit of that due to the world being quite vast, with not map, and no clear direction of where I wanted to go.

First I didn’t at all understand the combat. I though those icons at the bottom was what I was supposed to click and it got really annoying when they auto hid. Then when I finally got it, the ability to dance around the enemies (even though it is confusing to me with turn on AD rather than QE) made taking damage almost optional.

The leveling up stats was nice, but also I feel like I got a lot of points to level up all the time to the point that even if I didn’t dance around, my characters were quite overpowered. And I was leveling up stats I was guessing I didn’t need just to spend the points.

The warning about the sword and not overwriting made me not pick up the one I passed by for fear of it causing some bug, but later when I started picking up armor I kind of understood what you meant. I think I only lost a few potions (that I didn’t need).

The level layout with different height levels was nice, but I think the area got a bit too large and confusing without any assistance in finding the way. And since the enemies at that point was no challenge it got a bit boring.

The skill leveling up was also neat. There were a whole lot of systems in the game! But also a bit confusing. Sometimes I leveled up a thing and everything turned blue. I don’t know why that was.

I also would have liked some clearer indication of when someone was ready to attack or not.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/ZykhnsQezVA

Oh yeah I forgot a thing. On your itch-page it says “ASDQZE to move and turn around” and I’m guessing it is S rather than Z you wanted to have there and perhaps write as “WASD to move and QE to turn” because when I read that instruction I was like what is this how am I going to be able to navigate and what button does what.

Really cool art style and interesting game mechanics. Great entry!

I got quite far I think, based on the number of characters left in my party before I was killed.

I opted to keep the mapping the longest because the instant movement with the effects and the grid cells being so identical it was hard to even see that you were moving when walking in corridors and such. If that had been a bit easier I would probably let that one go before some of the others.

It took me a little while to realize I could swap weapons. I kind of expected I needed to get them first, that might have helped me survive longer since I did have quite a few bullets left when I died.

I very much liked loosing party members, well no, it was a horrible choice each time. But great mechanic. A natural way of making the game harder and harder. And I love giving awkward choices to the player. (Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to implement the “best” idea in my game)

I didn’t dare step into any traps as it felt health was my major challenge so I’m not sure how they worked but the level design was great in allowing me different ways to progress depending on the skills left to the player.

The final level that I got to felt a bit bugged. There were several prompts for going up a level where it seemed to be just a hallway and there was one invisible wall too. I also wasn’t sure what killed me in the end. I’m guessing some enemy I hadn’t noticed. Which is a bit of a pity. Both that it was so abrupt and that I didn’t notice what it was. Felt a bit unfair.

Speaking of stairs. They really need to be visible or if there was some indication, they need to be much clearer. I got lost on one level backtracking and wandering about because the stairs were invisible.

The battle mechanics was nice. But since it took a while to discover weapon changes (perhaps they should start with a variation of weapons equipped) I mainly opted for attack first enemy until it died. It would have been neat if there was a bit more info on them (similar to on the attacks) so I could be a bit more strategic about it all. When I discovered guns, I went for spray when multiple and one of the two single target attacks otherwise.

I really enjoyed the game. Very good and interesting!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/qOCqDuZSZj4

The game looks nice, and it has some interesting features. I do like the graphics! Unfortunately I had a very hard time playing it. Especially the combat.

My first issue was having the characters organized horizontally while the key mapping was done vertically made it unnecessary hard to remember which key was for who. The progression of showing when the would be ready also didn’t really work on the character portrait(s) with dark background. I think the “I’m ready to do an action” state must be much clearer and the buttons when ready shine and sparkle some. The one button that seems to say you can always and should always press as much as possible is rest. But I guess it also is disabled when the character is disabled? It’d be good if that was illustrated on the button. And the button might also be a bit duller in general until the player actually needs to heal and then shine up to let them know they are about to die. On that note, the word “Rest” sounds like something one does between fights and not during fights, so I kind of disregarded it until the very end of my last attempt.

In part fighting might have been made more working for me if it was a bit slower. And as it was now I was just looking at the lower part of the screen watching the bars and spamming buttons. So I didn’t even notice when one of the enemies died.

At one point I got to level up, and there appeared buttons but then the fighting scene ended before I could do anything.

I also felt like the healing potion refused to heal me when I had characters hurt from previous fight. But the portraits were full health, so perhaps I was mistaken. It did resurrect one of my characters though when I finally got it working. Not sure it was supposed to do that.

The font was neat, but a bit hard to read, so I didn’t get all that it said in the intro. It should probably not auto-progress.

Playing through, I’m guessing the crystals did something. Might be connected to the looping time? But I’m not sure. I’m uncertain what made the time get longer. And since it’s a central mechanic it would probably be good if the player couldn’t miss that. Or if it’s supposed to be a mystery, it could be made clearer that it should be that too.

The looping was… well I didn’t really get the point of it. It caused a lot of repeated traversal akin to backtracking. And that might have been cool if there was some foreshadowing. Like if you through a window could see a crystal in a neighboring room and you could set that as a quest for yourself to reach it but your steps run out so you have to find a way to open short-cuts and prolong your loop time. And there needs to be exciting things happening on the way that you have to repeat.

First time I tried to <TAB> out your game to start recording my playthrough the game just exited. Second time, the game survived but when I tried to get back to it, I got no mouse pointer so I couldn’t start it… so there won’t be any recording unfortunately.

Hope this doesn’t come across as overly critic. I’m not. I think it could be a really neat game that I would enjoy playing very much, I’m just struggling right now.

Nice relaxing entry!

I think the movement was rather slow, which might make sense if you are some slow-moving rig with lots of gear and such, but then it would have been really nice to re-enforce that with sounds and camera effects while moving. Quite a few times, I overshot where I wanted to go even though the movement was slow, so there was something in the queuing up of movement that worked unexpectedly for me. Not sure exactly what. I also several times got confused about which block had the ore since they so often were in the periphery of the block.

The mining mini-game was also quite slow compared to normal speeds of such events. I even thought for a while, what if that first level up of the mining would speed up the minigame. That was the reason I got it. it also felt a bit unfair / unexpected that I didn’t get to try the remaining keypress challenges if I missed one. I think that’s usually how those work. But it could also just quit you out of it directly when failing too. If I could have increased the speed of the game somehow, perhaps as a risk/reward thing, perhaps through upgrade, it would have been nice.

There was a small bug that the mining prompt showed after you had mined a location.

With the mining, I think it could just as well have triggered when moving towards a block with ore instead of a separate mining button. I also wasted quite a lot of ore, I think because my inventory wasn’t completely full, but I guess too full to take any more ore. It would have been nice with a clear feedback there.

The main reason I didn’t want to continue though was the movement in combination with backtracking. Since you go ever deeper, it becomes a lot of presses to get back. If movement was snappier and if I could hold down to move forward or if there was a separate backtrack function (could even be an upgrade), that lets you watch as the character moves back. That’d be nice.

At one point I was a sliver of stamina away from death and I think that came from a combination of lack of feedback in the UI that I was running low. And that I would imagine that mining would be a big drain on stamina, but just moving back not so much.

Maybe I didn’t dig deep enough. But it would have been nice with some variation on rock. Taking more time / costing more stamina to cut through. Thus increasing the need for upgrading pickaxes that way. Also if there were different ores of different worth so that you could get a little thrill rush of discovering some gold.

Nice relaxing entry to start today’s voting with while sipping on a cup of tea.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/sOg6BgZKh5M

Glad you liked my recording of deforming an empty can of beer for the monster movement sound. I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

As for finding the exit, I noticed the same when Captain Coder streamed the game, that an unlucky placement where the exit is on same wall as the entry to the room that the player took makes it very invisible. Since the levels are so so austere at the moment too, there’s no reason for the player to look about. Rooms are just places to be attacked. I have plans to add area effects and style the exit room in general as distinct from the others. And just actually dress up the levels.

Subtitles are high up on my TODO list.

Everyone agrees, me included. The UI… suck. And the walls and floor. It should really give reflect what the intro described. However I’ll manage to do that.

Really interesting reflection about the potential frame stop. It could be a consequence of how I implemented the movement controller… Was it in particular while changing direction or also when keeping forward pressed down? If you remember…

The presentation on the autobattle came from a more involved idea about the Crit-Tick interaction. That pressing it would freeze time and you being able to reroll any of the rolls visible and thus voiding what came after it. But while I think that’s a cool mechanic, I don’t know anymore if it suits the game. So focusing on the participants with damage numbers flying about is much better. Making issue for it right away.

Thanks for the great feedback! Yeah I really don’t like how the walls turned out and the UI. I’ll revisit the textures and models for the world and make them more like they are described in the intro. And the UI… I’m a bit ashamed of it honestly. It’ll be reworked 100%

First to the most obvious. Stunning graphics, great visual effects that ties into the story and feel of the game. I like the world building and the story. It’s spookiness.

There were so much great sound that I actually noticed and was a little disappointed that the log recorders didn’t make a little sound when you picked them up to read. Not a real complaint, but something to consider if you’re doing post jam fixes.

I like the concept of BPM health. I don’t think it worked 100% here though since the threat was stationary it didn’t do much more than force me to stay and wait for BPM to go down at times without nothing to do. That bit could be improved by having the return to normal go faster if you don’t see any of the growth. But the other part that could have solved it would be if the growth was hunting me in some capacity. Another method would be if you never hit the same low BPM once you’ve been over some threshold, but that has the risk of soft or hard locking some playthroughs.

The loot and interactions were quite intuitive. First I was a bit confused because the initial door was quite discrete so I hadn’t seen it so perhaps a bit of environmental hints like a flickering light around it or such might be beneficial. Subsequent doors I had no issue noticing.

I did miss the side way in the growth the first time around so got a bit confused about where to go next, but that felt kind of good in game. And my initial thought was that I had been scared and rushed through the growth tunnels, so it was probably in there somewhere. So that all made sense and made sense within the game world.

I must say though, with the exit I found. Though I think it is the responsible one and I’m happy with it… I didn’t really understand I was taking the exit when I did, so it might be good to inject some reflection from the protagonist to the effect of “Do I really want to do this? It will … Y/N”.

Great entry as a whole, really well made.

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/C7P5DdZhMXg

I agree with you!

Yeah I do need to learn how to make better UI in unity and one that scales well. I had to cut some serious corners there and they are basically more or less placeholders as they are now.

There needs to be more variation in the world, there needs to be more explanation of how the game works and if you knew how late in the jam and how fast I had to do some of the graphics… but also I’m not the most talented in that department but I for sure can and will make them better.

I’ll take that into account when making updates to the game and also I really really love your idea of tag out fighters so I’m going to at least try that out and see how it feels.

Looking forward to re-watching your stream and taking notes. I’m gonna have so many notes.

Absolutely stunning graphics and quite simple to understand. I played first attempt yesterday and second successful attempt today. And I must admit I don’t remember the story, other than rescue the cats. And that’s a good story in my book.

My first strategy was hugging left wall and see where it got me, and that got me dead. On second attempt I tried to explore every area before going through a door. And if possible explore around the start area before wandering off and I think that made the game like 10 times easier.

I think the information detail in the map worked really well, even though I felt like it might have been neat to know which rooms I had been in and perhaps also if I found everything in the rooms. But the latter might not be good / needed. And the way with the verticality, I’m guessing one can enter the same map grid on two different levels that don’t connect. So that might not work great. I’m mostly happy with the map, but in large part because the game world is sufficiently small.

Now that verticality. That was amazing. It did so much for making the world feel real, fleshed out and gave a great air to the rooms. One thing though, since going up and down was a common thing, I didn’t at all register that I was escaping the dungeon when I did. I just though I was going up to somewhere. It might also be that since there was no compass or indicator on the map of direction of the player I didn’t notice that I was leaving the map… Or I think that I was. Anyways, I felt disappointed when I won, and that’s not great. I felt like I could have explored some more, found some more cats. Gotten som more loot. So I think it needs a bit stronger signalling or a dialogue letting the player choose to leave or find more cats.

The loot. I feel sword and defense worked really well. And of course cats. But the coins felt like they didn’t belong, especially when you already had the cats. I mean there could be a use for coins, like a fountain that you can toss them in in hopes of getting health restored or something like that. But just collecting them when there already was something else more important to collect feels unnecessary.

I also noticed that it had a bit of mouse issues. Grabbing it and then needing to tab to the game twice before it reappeared.

One thing you could consider too is to scale the danger by the number of cats you’ve rescued. Don’t really know if that makes sense, but I get the feeling if one in careful about looking around a lot the game gets quite easy.

But in general a really great game!

Playthroughs: https://youtu.be/_SlCK44rfz8 and https://youtu.be/DBRoxfVlSzs

I think for the camera, it’s not a global rule, but walking up right next to a wall, most time you want to show some of the floor at the bottom of the tile you are on. And to not get a really wide perspective, moving the camera back a bit is part of the trick as far as I’ve understood it.

With the red planet maze, it might also be that the exit could be a little bit clearer. Since the cave is dark and you enter from a well lit room, it could make sense to make it bright even. I bet I passed by or was looking at it when trying to find my way out without realizing it.

A compass could be a middle ground, but I totally get if you don’t want to add that.

As for the runes, I’m not 100% sure what I did, but I only had 1 rune in the inventory when I reached it. I placed it in the middle slot, then I might have just walked away. Later when looting other stuff the UI popped up again and again. But it wasn’t there if I opened the inventory. Because I was wondering if I could trick the game to turn in the puzzle while standing next to the exit but the two ui wouldn’t be on screen at the same time.

Adding time as a secondary constraint on the eyes would be a great solution, I think.

This is quite odd. I was planning to record the game play but when capturing with OBS the game hide the mouse cursor even if it’s visible in the recording: https://youtu.be/dxRqEWpZhe8

However, once I closed OBS and restarted the game I can see the mouse. So something really strange is happening with how your game runs.

Now to the game. I really liked the assets. Their extruded 3D but yet flat shape.

The movement was quite slow really, and while moving around of the ship I could walk inside lockers and basically come too close to the walls, it felt like. The camera should probably have been moved back a little bit and movement made much faster.

I played through the red planet. I suffered a bit of sanity because I figured it didn’t matter to insert a single of the signs first and then come back to solve it. But that apparently counted as attempting it with just one put in. The insert signs UI also kept popping up all the time afterwards as I was running around interacting with things.

Speaking of, I honestly got a bit too lost. It would have been nice with some map or having the layout be a bit less complex.

A very small thing, after solving the riddle the thing disappears but it’s still there blocking movement.

I though I could just press the return to ship button there and then, but I wasn’t allowed. Which made me think OK I have to find my way out. And promptly got lost in 10 minutes trying to get out.

When out of the cave I though I could press it to go home then. But no. And by then I think in my mind I gave up on that button walked back to the ship and flew to the next planet. And it’s only now that I realize that the button might have been for when on the ship to be able to walk around in the ship again. If that’s the case, it should probably not be called “Return to ship”.

The next planet I landed on, I should say I had no sanity or health damage. I took some steps and then the screen turned black with some eyes all over it. It seemed I could still move, but I had no idea where and whatever I did I seemed stuck in the black eye things so I gave up there.

It feels like a pity because there seems to be a whole lot of systems in the game, and I liked the art style. So if only the movement had been a bit snappier and the situation I ended up in a bit more understandable, I would have kept at it.

I probably spent 30-40 minutes in total though.

Oh it felt like it was more than 2 levers per level to be honest. I think one solution might have been to have a souls-like prompt then that said “Something happened somewhere else on the level”. Or such. And perhaps the character if reaching the gate first (which is probably best if it’s most probable to see it first), they could say something to the effect of “I need to find something that opens this”.

I liked this one. The world building and characters outside of the cube. The monster design being balloons and their sounds. My favorites where the simple roller, the screaming blob and the wall shield one.

The dialog in the beginning set a nice tone, but it would have been nicer still if a bit more of that had carried over into the cube somehow. The UI while speaking would have been a bit clearer if it showed which option I had just selected and waited until relevant to show me my next option when the conversation went deeper. Now it instantly let me read my next line before I had any chance to hear the answer and since my eyes where in my part because I had just selected an option, it got a little confusing.

The movement was a bit awkward at first, bit after minutes playing I didn’t think too much about it. It would probably help a lot if when pressing and holding forward, the character didn’t do stops in each cycle.

Combat was fun, but felt a bit unfair that I only got to use the crossbow once per level, it never reloaded arrows. And I had a lot of them towards the end.

I also think that if I had known (or read the description just above here before playing) how many levels there were I might have wanted to stick with it. Now even though there was some progress in the levels, they were a bit too same for me to want and really attempt to get much deeper. There was some progression in the monsters and that was fun. But It would probably help if every something level was starkly different, like a boss fight or a level that is just health potions enough to get back to full health and then steps up to next floor.

I get the reasoning behind the mapping mechanic to some degree, but it felt a bit odd in world explanation why I wouldn’t at least have been able to map out where I had been before receiving the map. And then let the map fill in the map areas that I had yet to visit. But use different coloring so it’s easy to see where I’ve been and not.

Another thing I thought about was that there was a lot of levers, but most of them, the gate was somewhere else, so it was very hard to know where to go when pulling them. It was very neat though, on some levels where I got next to the exit, but there was a gate I hadn’t open and I didn’t have the map and I could see an open way into the room and then backtrack to find the way in. That was really nice. But otherwise I think the levers ought to be close to the gates. Player doesn’t have to see them but has to at least hear them and preferably have seen them before. But it might also be enough if the gates are more clear that they are open gates after opening so the player can see them and think “Ah it must have been this gate that I opened”.

All in all, I think it was a solid game!

Raw playthrough without commentary: https://youtu.be/IgoK0GaLZ00

I really dig the setting, sound and art-style. And it’s mad impressive building your own editor. I think in one attempt, that I got curious and clicked on the arrow thing and started editing or something.

I also had issues with the walls, but once I learnt the trick of navigating with the on screen buttons, then there was no real risk of wall damage.

I also found that not every click on the navigations seems to have registered. Sometimes I had to press the same button more than once before anything happened.

In the inventory I was also at times a bit confused about what things could go where. There seemed to be 3 different colors or at least and the only thing that seemed consistent was that the red one meant “No”. But for example I could not equip the apple in the hand even though it didn’t show as red.

It might have been by design, but when I dropped one of the stones in front of me, hoping it might do something to the pentagram in the cave area, it felt like the ston disappeared. If dropping means destroying, it’s probably good to warn the player about that.

At one point I think I could clip through the walls at which point my ui disappeared entirely.

So I’m a bit sad I feel like I just scraped the surface of your entry, but these slugs are just too murderous for me to stand a chance.

It looks like a really interesting entry otherwise, and I hope you get some points from my experience.

A clip of the short playthrough without commentary (for reference as I sent you on discord too): https://youtu.be/izyJPqrtWWs

This was a scary one! I had lots of fun playing it. Though at first it felt a little unfair how the enemies were so quick to attack. Once I abandoned melee more or less entirely and used corners and strafing to get around enemies, I managed to survive. I played with two hands. One on the 1-4 and the other navigating. Might work really nice on a controller btw (don’t know if you had that support).

It really added to the suspense too that the game didn’t say if there was any save or checkpoint, but it might have been nice. I died once early on, and if I had died later again I don’t think I would have wanted to start over. There are people that like that sort of loop though… so I who knows which is best.

In general I only got lost once even though the map was quite big and that was at the very end because I didn’t find the door that just opened and there was another that remained shut that sort of begged to be opened.

There were some really evil level design, and I liked it since I survived, but if it would have killed me I think I’d be upset. In particular the spinner in the stressing fireball sequence.

There was also a the repeated pattern of: Here’s a big room. There’s nothing in it. We promise. Just a button, why don’t you press the button. And how first couple of them I could run out and be safer but then came another room…

Really good drama in that level design.

Over all, I think it was a splendid entry!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/Iewie-421Eg

I liked the narration most of all and the way all characters spoke. Their cute art style was really great too. And there was a lot of content in the game. A lot of level designs and puzzles made.

I was a bit confused though with the fighting system. From small things like push swapping places depending on if there was someone around you or not. To not really understanding the different attacks or why I sometimes got rotated and sometimes not when swiping this or that direction. The UI glitched out at times too as you can see in my playthrough, so that might have added to the confusion a bit too. In the end I think I opted for swipe left or right as attack when they were available and pounce if not.

It was also not entirely clear what the level up stats did for the combat so I took some on random. It worked out fine though. I got out.

After leveling up health when I lost health I didn’t loose it from the topmost health square btw.

First thing I immediately thought about the when seeing the game was removing the qwe/asd instructions or reducing them in size and information content to just be arrows. The interesting bit to inform the player about was the other buttons. It was a bit of information overload having it all there.

It was great that the context dependent buttons showed up on screen, but perhaps the fighting system could have been simplified or explained by adding more and more complexity. To have all options from the start was a lot.

From dungeon layout there were some puzzles that I didn’t really understand how to solve and some where there were buttons or things to interact with that didn’t seem to do anything or walking out on invisible platforms without any hint that it made sense.

Overall though, I think it’s an impressive entry and I enjoyed playing it and was surprised almost 40 minutes had passed when I finally completed it.

Link to playthrough: https://youtu.be/77EklV_wkgo

no you can pop the tick to gain a guaranteed critical hit on the next attack (building on the Crit-Tick word pun). I had initially planned for the player to be able to rewrite battle history when popping it by selecting a roll of their own to re-roll and voiding everything that happened after it.

I had also planned to tutorialize it a little more, but now I was basically hoping that the voice lines and the spinner below it would be enough.

I guess you visited them before you understood how central they were? So perhaps my idea of having a UI prompt when facing them that says:

Press [Space] to Interact

the first time and

Press [Space] to Heal

once the party knows what it does… might be helpful in trying them out?

With the combat I agree there’s something missing. When you say skills, do you mean something that you as a player can activate during the actual combat except for the Tick?

I had the idea that every something level up the player would get to choose from two negative perks that the character would get. But I’m guessing this is not exactly what you have in mind.

And the player controller… I really need to work on that one.

Thanks for the great feedback!