I thought this game was pretty fun once I got the hang of it! The Ape Escape-esque soundtrack really helps, too.

I think the game has a bit of a problem with conveyance, though. There’s a bit too much sitting around scrolling through text that I think players might get bored, skip the text and miss out on both important tutorials and lore. Spacing things out by having more optional NPCs that talk about the world and opting for more visual and environmental storytelling would be really helpful.

I imagine there’s a lot of detailed inspiration behind the world of the game that I didn’t pick up on, seeing as how there’s three writers behind the game who I’m sure have had a lot they wanted conveyed through the game script. I hope we’ll see this game and its world elaborated upon!

The music slaps but I gotta play it with a controller the next time!

I'm a pro spirit hunter now (except those yellow ones ow)

This one took me a little bit of practise to get used to, but I managed to play through it without dying. But nicely enough, it brought me back to the starting screen, so I just tried to play again and let one of the yellow spirits attack me over and over. No death animation, and the game over screen doesn’t let me replay without reloading the page or frame…. Oh, apparently it just took a while. A pretty long while though, and after that the controls didn’t work properly until I had paused and unpaused the game.

Graphics: The characters and environments look nice, although I feel like the vector art (if that’s what it is) on the loading screen looks a bit too modern at the high resolution it shows at. I’m guessing the UI being shown at a higher resolution is intentional to make it easier to see read. But maybe you could make the pause menu text also use the high resolution if that’s not too hard.

The trinkets look nice too, especially after you rescue them. But their spinning animation looks a bit flat. I think I would have preferred if they were 2D animated sprites made from prerendered 3D spinning objects.

I liked that the camera wasn’t constantly spinning around when colliding with things, but I think the trees got in between the camera and the character rather often. Maybe that was on purpose to make the game scarier by making it hard to see what was lurking behind the trees. But I think I would have preferred a slightly more top-downish view. I do think it’s nice to have a third person 3D camera that isn’t constantly spinning every time it gets close to a wall or other object.

The font used for the title, menu options and character names feels stylish yet easy to read. And the font used for dialogue looks a bit more generic but still stylish and easy to read. The italics font looks a bit like it’s just a slanted version of the normal dialogue font. And I think if you put italicized lines in brackets you might want the brackets to be italic too.

Pressing “Play” shows some text written in a generic sans-serif font, going all the way to the edges of the screen. I think having margins would be nice… Oh, now I played it again and it does have margins. I hope it was some “happens once” issue and not that you fixed it during the rating period, unless of course you asked Ro and got permission.

Oh, and I love the art on the project page. Those spirits look cute and fun.

Audio: The music sounds fun and fits the game. And it also has some nice ninetiesness to it. And the sound effect give the game some spirit too.

There’s quite a few sound effects, and a few voice lines. I like both, and I think those little voice lines make the character more interesting. And it feels somewhat nineties too. I would probably have turned down the volume of the music whenever voice audio was playing and turned it up again when it stopped.

Fun: Running around and catching spirits was pretty fun, and reading the dialogue, especially that with the trinkets, was fun too. And I guess going forth and back between doing one thing and another helps avoid getting bored of just doing just one thing. I think if I found a trinket I could read its text but if I went back to the forest and then back home again I couldn’t re-read it. Maybe you can change that after the jam.

And maybe I should mention that you added a credits screen but left it blank.

Nineties: I feel like the forest itself looks nineties but the home looks more 2002ish. And the solid black walls look like empty space. I’d probably have had a horizontal line across all of them, or some sort of texture, especially on the back wall.

The shadow below the MC is probably done with something modern, but considering Crash Bandicoot pulled of animated shadows I know it at least was possible to have such a detailed shadow below a character.

And about the particle effects, those would probably have been sprite animations. That way you can have plenty of particles on screen since each emitter would only be a single animated sprite. In the case of trinket sprites you might even take advantage of the background being black, and have particles fade to black as they go up, faking semi-transparency.

Oh, and actual semi-transparency was possible on the PS1 but would have been one bit of transparency, so 50% transparent. There were other blending modes though (additive and subtractive, and you could multiply textures by vertex colours but not by each other). The Sega Saturn also had some limitations to do with semi-transparency, although I don’t know them exactly.

The audio too fits the nineties theme. I suppose it could have been better if all the dialogue was voiced, but I know that’s a lot of work (casting, recording, editing and then testing it in game).

What I liked most: the sound effects (including the voice acting), art and writing. Something I think could have made the game even better: I guess that depends on what you want the game to feel like. But being able to easily continue or at least restart after a game over would be nice.

[Edit: fix typo and add a sentence in the end which I had intended to put there but forgotten to write.]

Controls were authentically awkward. I think a lot of the 3D models were a little too detailed. Certainly scratched that collectathon itch.

I beat the chapter \o/ great story rich game, was it just me or does the kid seem to have the voice of a grown man haha ^^ great game :)

This was really fun. Really liked the music and sound effects too, you captured the 90s really well.