More games need to let the player control a book. This one was challenging!

harder than sans 💀

beaten all 4 levels. final boss took lots of tries

Another skeleton game, another to try playing on principle, though admittedly this one isn't getting my attention as immediately as the other one did.

Well, I should start with the positive at least: The game definitely nails crust pretty well for the most part, I didn't really run into any technical issues (which can be pretty impressive in a GameJam, y'know?), and overall, the game doesn't have any glaring "this is terribly designed!" moment, which is good, it can be hard to pull that off.

Also, the third boss was actually pretty decently interesting, and on that note, the ability to jump right into the bosses if you want, and to jump in with whatever stage you want, is actually a really good option that I kind of wish more games of this genre would allow you to do, for a variety of reasons.

Also, the visuals on the bosses are usually pretty goofy, which I like.

And while the music is, for some reason, effectively turned off by default, I feel like it gets the job done well enough even if it's a bit odd.

Unfortunately, I feel like this game is a good demonstration of how shoot 'em ups are easy to make at all, but harder than that to make well. Bullet hells often work best when there's some kind of spectacle going on, whether that's the creativity of the bullet patterns or some other kind of way of wowing the player with something interesting, such as a unique spin on the mechanics or such.

Sadly, this game kind of lacks either of those. Mind you, the design of it on its own is certainly passable, I wouldn't call this bad, but I do think it's maybe a little bit... bland, I think is the right word? The patterns are technically fairly designed, the hitboxes are reasonable, it's just...

I dunno. The pacing in the stage sections is a bit off, there isn't any music being synchronized to so there's no real reason you can't make the game spawn in the next wave when the previous one is destroyed to try to remove the dead air that the game currently has.

The bosses are technically fine, but outside maybe the third one, they're a bit repetitive, y'know? (And yes, I did use focus fire to make the fights faster, it didn't really change that.)

Also, I didn't technically ever beat the final boss because that last phase has a surprisingly large amount of health, but I survived long enough against it to know I could do it if I wasn't honestly starting to get a bit frustrated by a few small design choices with it that I'm not quite sure how to explain but which add up to a fight that's mostly just longer than the other bosses rather than more interesting. (For one, you can cheese the first phase by not using focus and just kind of running half circles left and right around it while holding fire.)

So, not a bad game! But admittedly a bit bland.

Man I suck at the game