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NeuroNexus's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme? | #30 | 3.621 | 3.621 |
| Overall | #38 | 3.572 | 3.572 |
| Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing? | #40 | 3.966 | 3.966 |
| Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game? | #46 | 3.759 | 3.759 |
| Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music? | #59 | 3.483 | 3.483 |
| Gameplay - How fun is it to play? | #103 | 3.034 | 3.034 |
Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Your combat mechanic is actually very cool, abusing enemy patterns is a satisfying puzzle, fairly simple but with room to be expanded upon. More tutorializing would have helped – maybe just some one-time pop-up to tell you that tiles highlighted in red will mean danger there on the next turn – but it’s a good thing you can get right back to the first fight in a couple seconds, or I would have bounced off before figuring it out.
I saw you note the lack of checkpointing on the game page, and yeah, I definitely took two steps on the floor my first time in cyberspace and died before I knew what hit me… but after that I was able to trial-and-error the rest without taking risks, and beat the game.
Very theme-appropriate, and I like the visual style. More landmarks to break up the levels would have helped a lot with navigation, as I just had to fall back on “follow the left hand wall” maze tactics when I got lost looking for the door to use a keycard on.
It would be nice if the monsters also took damage stepping on those floor symbols at the end, jerks. :)
Your game is gorgeous! I love the duality between human and AI and the real world versus the virtual world. My first attempt was a bit messy, I understood quite rapidly that you're not supposed to face the enemies head on, and I love that 🙂 After that, the virtual world gave me some trouble but once I got it, it was smooth sailing to the end of the game. And what a creepy ending!
Given the complexity of Unreal Engine, this is impressive work for a first game with that engine. Great work, I'm glad I found the time to test your game before the jam ended!
Loved the atmosphere! Movement feels good, even if a little bit dizzying because of reflections in matrix world and movement blur in overworld. Got a little bit confused at start with fighting and where i needed to go at some parts. Really good combat system that kept me strategizing my next moves. Overall cool game with great fighting and really nice art! :)
Thank you for playing!
Yes, we need to do something about confusion with combat for sure! As well as an option to tune down graphics a bit so people won't feel dizzy! Will try to work on it postjam.
This reminded me System Shock in matter of ambience. I liked the aesthetic, the mood and the exploration.
I just wished the rules would have been explained earlier though to understand how the game is working in matter of fight system and the numeric world. Because once we understand how to play, the game become enjoyable and just expect us to keep focus on our step and the management of space. But before that, we'll just die quickly, not really understanding how to pass the first enemies.
If an extension is planned, I would suggest to add a little tutorial with some almost safe zone so the player understands they have to dodge the enemy's attack then attack them during a turn of rest they all spend after their last blow, and how the numeric tiles work (maybe making the numeric worlf kicking us back to reality upon failure rather than death?)
Anyway, the theme is perfectly respected, the theme is neat and I admit having enjoyed the game a lot!
Good work on this entry ;)
Thank you for playing! Glad you enjoyed it!
System Shock definitely was one of the major inspirations for us, though we tried our best for it not to be too obvious. And for sure we will work on making tutorial and checkpoints post-jam... we did explain mechanics by text on our game page after we saw how many people struggled at the start, but I mean... its not ingame, so it only can help a little in that regard (tbh, who reads it anyway? :D). There are bunch of things we can and should improve on for sure! Including some that we had no time to implement and it kind of not helping with understanding the game mechanics bit...
As for how tutorial about dodging would look like.. we will need to think about it a bit more so it won't stand out from theme too much. We have couple of ideas, but they need a bit of work and testing to make sure it would fit right in. We will try our best to make it good, of course!
Well, I use to read description, but seeing the remaining time for ratings.. I stopped doing so in order to play as much entries as possible before the deadline ^^" Sorry for not seeing this info!
But well, at the end I managed to find out by myself ;)
For tutorial about dodging, I do think you would just need to add a room large enough and one single enemy in the middle.
This way, the player could have enough room to dodge it and understand the strategy to adopt without risking to be beaten to death. Because what makes it hard to understand in the current version is the fact you meet your first enemy right behind a door in a room in which it's not alone.
So this leads to the situation in which, your first fight happens either in a narrow corridor or surrounded by multiple enemies, which don't give the player the time to experiment and understand
Oh no, it wasn't a complaint about people not reading haha, it should be ingame, not on a page anyhow... I also not always read stuff on the pages -_-
And yes, first fight will change of course. That is a given... different encounter and a completely new room most likely.
I get single digit FPS on the machine I use for testing. Absolutely unplayable at 1080p. I had to manually lower the resolution down to 720p to even get near 20 FPS. I mean sure its just an iGPU but it looks like your are using a LOT of fillrate just for the post processing. Since the combat mechanics are build around a fast reaction time (and you don't have that with a frame time of around 50-60ms) it makes combat very difficult/frustrating.
Yes, its our first time using the engine, so we didn't knew about issues we would encounter. Sorry about that - we will try to check and solve issues postjam.
Combat is not build on reaction time, though - everything is turn-based. Your turn comes before enemy. You can look around (turning doesn't end your turn, moving, attacking and skiping the turn does) to check sittuation freely. Telegraph on the floor shows danger zones that will cause damage next turn, so you can move to the safe position without taking any damage.
Ah okay, so moving also ends the turn? Sometimes I was still moving even though I did not pressed a key. Could be related to the low framerate then. Are you queuing input?
We'll look into how UE behaves on low framerates input-wise, but what we do is that on each keypress event (which I'm not sure if it can happen between visual frames, or not) we do a move and then animate it each frame. So essentially we do not queue input at all, we instantly apply it, but smoothly animate camera/character after.
What your iGPU is? We'll definitely try to make it run on a wider range of hardware post-jam, but as mentioned by my colleague, we had no prior experience with this engine, so we failed to include graphics quality options. I guess on lower end machines we can use reflection planes and forward shading, instead of SSR and deferred shading.
There's definitely something wrong with engine settings as we've seen poor performance (<30 fps) on 2070Super if it runs a 4k monitor. It shouldn't be that bad, as SSR shouldn't be that expensive per pixel, possibly there's some engine settings which scale badly with resolution. We'll figure it out post jam :)
I tried it with an Ryzen 4300GE (35W). Certainly not a gaming rig but it handles most of the jam games without a hitch and it does a good job of finding entries that are not optimized :)
The CPU utilization is very low however the iGPU is at 100% all the time. I suspect the dithering to be the culprit as it requires a ton of bandwidth and that is something iGPUs are really bad at. Try dialing it down (or disable it temporarily to see if its makes a difference). I would not be surprised if disabling dithering will double the framerate. Of course SSR and motion blur have their own costs on top of that but they are fairly well optimized.
Thanks for the info, we'll try to see if that's indeed the case. I just need to find lowspec GPU or iGPU to figure out if that would be enough, or if we'll need to go forward shading route for this kind of specs.
Nice reflections and motion blur (Unreal?) - the reflections include the health bars for the enemies which is strange. Dithering is interesting but not sure why your needed it.
Turn based movement/combat makes it much more tactical than the usual dungeon crawler. Only having 2 HP means you can only do one hit before you have to run away to regain your HP. 3HP might have been a better starting number (or more).
Smooth controls and great camera angle make it all work as expected. Free look would have been nice.
The foliage sometimes gets in the way of the camera. We expect this is by design but it makes it hard to see if there is anything to pick up.
Cyberspace , especially with the motion blur is a bit hard to view without getting "disoriented" as your message suggest. We died after walking on a symbol on the floor which made it a bit of a chore to have to replay all the combat in non-cyberspace again. Load/Save is a tough ask for a game jam but might have been worth a shot.
Unfortunately we didn't get Cyberspace for quite a while and just died every time for no obvious reason. We could have done with some instructions on how to navigate this. Eventually we got that some symbols were OK to walk on and some not and managed to open the first door.
Ah. We just spotted that the different cards and doors have different symbols on them. That was almost like a test for colour blindness and we nearly failed! The more we play the more this is a nice mechanic. Good job.
We so nearly finished and then just died where we think was the last door. Game Load/Save is definitely needed.
Really good game. Just brutal if you make a single mistake. Well done.
Thank you for playing. Yes, we decided to pick engine that we were completely unfamiliar with for the jam and it was indeed Unreal. Health bars was funny bug that we didn't have time to fix - it indeed is a strange thing!
I am not our programer, maybe he will answer much better for technical portion later, but dithering was applied mainly so sprites and everything else wouldn't stand out from eachother. Basically without grain on everything it looked so much different that it was a bit unpleasant for an eye. With couple of tricks we managed to make it feel more in line with eachother.
Was my mistake with combat being that way. Went to turn-based tactical route, completely forgetting how usual dungeon crawlers are played... and that lead to huge spike in dificulty to understand how it supposed to be played at the end... we had to make some sort of tutorial for combat for sure. Telegraphs on ground should've been also explained. With Cyberspace its kind of the same. Its a mix of us not making 'teleport back' feature in time and puzzle mechanic being not clear (when you start second door you appear at the same place you ended on so you have to walk back... safe runes are removed from the ground so path is visible, but, looks like, people think new rune is a safe one and die horribly there). We wanted also to make checkpoints, but run out of time...
When you say about free look you mean looking around to check combat situation? We did it so turning is not an action and you can turn in combat without fear of getting hit... but again - never explained that in game! Time being rough on us with lack of experience with jams and such... we also went hardcore aka never prepared anything beforehand haha!
Foliage was supposed to be halftransparent when you enter it, but... yeh >_< never finished it. By design you were supposed to be safe there from monsters, but we couldn't implement it and monster visions fully so it now mostly a decoration.
And terribly sorry about card art being hard to see... we hoped that both cards and doors have good-enough visibility, but never actually checked with color palete table for different colorblindness :( Thanks for mentioning it - it is something to think about for a future fix for sure.
Thank you again for playing! And such detailed feedback - it will help us a lot to make everything better postjam and also improve future jam's checklists!
Thanks for playing.
We've used dithering to make sprites of enemies look more in line with the rooms itself. Without dithering or other 'old-school' post-process it looks more disconnected from the environment.
We'll polish our visuals post jam, though, to fix issues people having with the game.
Nauseating but the game is really good. I really enjoyed it.
Thank you for playing! Were it effects that was causing neusea or something else? Would love to try and make it less so if it possible on our side.
It’s the matrix world thing. Maybe because of the reflections. Stayed there for some time and I needed to take a break.
Oh yes, most likely it is those reflections.. we will keep that one in mind - maybe we could add an option to tune it down a bit so it would be easier for the eyes. Thank you!
I feel feedback from every action I take. Juicy kicks! Nice puzzle with doors. But still, 2 health is not enough :) I really liked this work.
Thank you for playing!
Well, we do have regen mechanic (5 turns tick, we didn't make it visualy showing that its working - hope to add that after jam so it will be visible and easier to play around) and everything hits for 1 with telegraphed attacks - so I though giving more would be a bit too easy! Though checkpoints missing is the biggest offender here, of course :< will add that one for SURE after the jam!
The combat was a bit tricky at first, but once I figured it out it was very doable, although maybe a bit too high stakes without checkpoints. The visuals were great, and I liked the contrast between the two settings. Great job, especially for your first jam. It's chock full of content, and with a full story to boot.
Thank you!
Yes, sorry about lack of checkpoints... we were rushing things so much at the end that couldn't make it in time. Learned great deal about how and what to prioritize better though!
This is some very great dystopian end-of-days setting. The atmosphere is very frightening and thats great. The art is very fitting, the monsters look very creepy. Switching between real world and cyberspace was cool and the minigame shook things up a bit. It took me a while to understand how to (properly) fight and how to navigate the cyberspace runes, though. I would have loved to get more information about the world and what happened, but sometimes mystery is great too. No real "happy" ending I guess, but you can't always save the world (or yourself at least, haha). :)
Yeah, there's no "happy" ending there. We wanted to make it way longer with more enemies and gameplay in cyberspace, but unfortunately we needed to cut quite a lot of content and features due to time limitations and our lack of experience in this genre and with this engine at the moment of the jam.
We hope to have an updated version of a game after a voting period ends without expanded story, but with less repetitive content and we'll see if we'll develop it to the original idea and scope after that.
I cannot rate it because I couldn't play it. It constantly just flashed the textures, mostly to black. I'll try again later on a different computer but so far it didn't work on my machine.
We'll take a look at those technical issues after voting will end and will release an updated version of a game. It's our first time working with this engine, so we don't know all the possible technical issues we can run into :(
I adore this game, very beautiful with a lot of good ideas ! Great job!
Thank you! Glad you liked it!
"The shuttle leaves with the AI controlling the human's body."
The game is super solid, both in presentation and gameplay. I love that you went with different gameplay between the two realms, the use of the theme goes below visuals and narrative. The game looks very good and movement is fast and smooth.
The settings and story are pretty cool and pretty well realised, by the way.
Both combat and puzzles are very fun at least at first, they eventually both get a little bit repetitive and it feels like the only way you could die is really just an attention or button pressing mistake in both cases, it becomes more tense than really brain intensive. That's a minor complaint, with a game this length you won't have the time to get bored either.
Super cool game, I had a lot of fun playing it.
Thank you for playing and finishing it!
Yes, we planned too much to handle for our first jam and cut like 80% of our ideas at the end there. Still thinking on trying to make the game as we intended post jam, though.. with all different monsters and puzzles!
Love the game ! reallycool mood and art ! but kinda hard, or i'm jsut bad x)
It's surprisingly punishing with the lack of checkpoints/saves. When you get a grip on attack patterns and start to weight all your actions it becomes quite trivial, but any mistake can still cost you a full rerun as you need to start from the scratch. You can check out our playthrough on a game page under the spoiler tag, though I myself made a couple of mistakes there :)
After voting will end, we'll update the game with fixes.
I absolutely loved the design of this game! The art is gorgeous and the setting feels incredibly unique to the genre.
I wasn’t quite able to make it through the whole game, though I did give it three tries. I hope to have time to come back to see it through to the end.
Thanks for submitting! Great work!
Thanks for playing it!
We first thought of different settings at the start of the jam, but decided to go with biopunk/cyber setting to make the game more unique and to explore this storyline (which should be described in more detail by the game).
Cool setting great monster design although it seems a bit repetitive; seeing the different types of monsters have different types of attacks wouldve been great! additionally it wouldve been a bit more fair if there were checkpoints or a revive mechanic given the length of the game.
Thank you!
Yes, both monster types and, sadly, checkpoints - didn't make it due to time limit... But I am completely agree - it would make game more interesting, fair and less repetative if we would manage it.
Maybe we will update the game after jam to fix some of those things! We will see :)
Hmm. I want to love this game, but I opened the door with the bound leg and then immediately died to the crawling dude. Restarting the game from the menu didn't seem to work.
Is the crawling guy supposed to be too tough to fight, or am I doing something wrong?
I absolutely love the environment and the aesthetics. Love me some dystopian biopunk/cyberpunk.
Yeh, those guys are harder due to different attack patern. Basically you weave damage in between their attacks - moving out and in again for it. We posted video of walkthrough now to help people just in case mechanics provided too much difficulty to understand. We forgot that encounters are only easy from get-go for us, since we know how they work...
Menus were rushed, so no saves/restarts, unless you die, unfortunately :<
Thank you for trying out our game by the way! Means a lot!
Overall, I think this came out great. The enemy design and visuals where spot on, as was the overall vibe.
Combat felt a bit clunky and overly methodical, but I did eventually figure it out. I almost would have preferred it leaned MORE into kiting and dodging and less into weaving in damage, and avoiding vs aggression was a meaningful choice with the horror aesthetic.
I'm still not 100% sure how the cyber space instances worked. At first I thought the safe tiles where based on the pattern on the key, but that didn't seem to be the case. I wound up basically going through using trial and error and regen until I beat it.
I also didn't understand the human/machine duality at all until the ending, and didn't even really realize the other thing talking to me was the computer and not some other person over an intercom or something, but that might be on me.
The movement felt great though, and the atmosphere was top notch.
Thank you for playing through the whole thing!
Ye, combat meant to be more kiting and and dodging, but we had to cut so much of what we were planning to do with it, that it had to stay simple weaving instead. Learned a lot from how to balance tight time limit in a jam though!
About cyber space - you was completely right! The rune on the card (and on the floor leading to the correct room enterance) is the safe rune. What confuses people is that machine wasn't teleported to the start location after finishing sequence as we were planning. You stand at the end of previous puzzle and "safe" runes removed from the ground for the solved puzzle to allow passage for the next. We could be a tiny bit more clear about 'walls' opening after terminal access. Maybe some animation and clearly teleport out from long puzzle routes - they a bit long.
We now got a playthrough video up of on main page of the game, so people can watch how it was played by us (without speedrunning!), maybe that would help for now, since we can't fix explanation inside the game..
Thank you again!
Great and unsettling visuals.
I also struggled with the combat at first; it took me a while to understand the proper strategy. I'm probably too used to other dungeon crawlers where you're expected to just take the hits.
The movement is fantastic. The smoothness of transition movement and the speed of instant movement? The best of both worlds.
I had a good time, even if I think I made a few poor choices at the end there, hehe.
Glad you liked it! Choices at the end were rushed a bit, but I hope it made sence about what happened ;)
It runs at 5-10fps for me and I never figured out how to dodge consistently, also you can still attack when dead. Aside from blown highlights in some areas it's a pretty cool aesthetic though.
Sad about fps issue. About dodging - key to that is to watch telegraph on the ground. Red square means there is an attack incoming next turn to that spot, so to not get hit you need to move from it or kill the enemy that turn (if only one is attacking). Enemies have set pattern of attack. Also both human and AI have regen mechanic that hits pretty fast - sometimes kiting is the way :)
Thanks for playing!