Very good game, the art, music and gameplay felt great, i only got a little confused in the second and third minigames, i felt they lacked instructions, but they were simple enough so that i could get the hang of them pretty quickly anyways

I played this through to completion. When I rated it earlier I had given up when I got to the smoking-the-pig part as I was unsure of what was going on.

I love the way you put the player in the islanders shoes and made Captain Cook as the unintelligible alien presence who they mistake for a god. You got me hoping Cook would slip and they'd figure out the truth. Meanwhile I worried that Cook was going to get out his sword and start slaughtering. 

Its obvious you thought about composition when layout out the scenes and excellent job with the 2 frame animations (there's a few glitches e.g. Cook during the ahem cooking).

The sub games though are too long and too easy. The coconuts catching reminded me a bit of Tetris so I wonder if could you turn it into some puzzly type sub game like that. Also, the collision detection is bit ropey.

The touch-the-posts ritual one is better but I felt it was too long and the posts were a tad too far a way from each other. You have the germ of a game here too though, I'm sure there's ways to make it more challenging. Check out the old old hand held game Simon from the 1980s.

Second time round, I was still confused about the smoking game. I kept feeding the fire and eventually noticed Cook needed a drink and sorted that. I decided to wait out the 2 minutes (which is about 100 years in gamey time:) ) and I noticed the pig. Again, you have a great idea here which could be expanded on to make one of those cooking type games where the king has to dash back and forth to get the ingredients and maybe Cook walks off back to his ship if you don't deliver.

Obviously doing all this in a week is a bit impossible.

For me, your biggest achievement is you created a character that I wanted to root for. This is no small feat. If he had some more interesting challenges, you would be well on the way toward an excellent game.

"Lono is now amog us".

This is the third text that appears, not sure if that was deliberate or not :).

Great game, the artstyle matches the setting very well and the perspective it gives to events is a good twist this is definitely a jam game(in a good way) .

Also don't know if it was a bug but on the 3rd game the timer stopped and I couldn't/didn't know how to progress

It's neat to see another grounded interpretation of the mythology theme, and especially one that retells a historical event I was completely unaware of prior to this game. It's fascinating seeing the disconnect of how the villagers view Captain Cook and his crew versus how the player does. And that ending is very ominous with the knowledge of how history turned out for native people of many parts of the world.

I also read the postmortem before trying the game, so it sucks that several of the ideas got scrapped, but what remains is still quite good. There were only a few issues I had with the game. The first being that the text being black in the scenes with the boats sometimes made it blend into the black lines of the boats (though admittedly that may just be an issues with my screen size or the fact that I played in browser), perhaps if the text was white with the dark outline like in other sections it wouldn't be as weird? It wasn't a huge issue but just an FYI.

The second issue I found was with movement and collision in general, if my character ran into an while moving diagonally all momentum would be stopped. For example, if I was moving diagonally  from the top right statue to the bottom right statue in the ceremony mini-game and ran into the left side of a skull, the downward movement would not continue. I don't know how much of the movement code of the game is unique and how much came from free programs though, so it seems understandable that a level of polish had to go in order to finish the game. But I think that would be a good improvement to the game, or at the very least the programmers figure out why that was happening so it doesn't happen in future projects.

The third issue was in the feast mini game, if you pick up water before Cook is sweating there's no way to get rid of the water. I somehow accidentally must've pressed space twice while dropping a leaf into the fire and picked up the water, and I tried to drop it off to Cook just so I could get rid of it but he wouldn't accept it. I then tried just going back to pick up a leaf to see if it would override it, but since I imagine the game logic prevents you from picking up an item while you're carrying one already, that doesn't work either. I'd say unless this was intended as part of the difficulty then I think there should be someway to dispose of an item being carried, since its possible that not being able to pick up a leaf could lost the mini-game.

But overall there's quite a bit to like about the game, between the clear amount of thought and research that went into the game, the music, the multiple mini games and the nice detail of Cook not being able to speak the same language as the villagers.

Excellent work for the short development period!

I love so much about this game! The artwork is very good and the music is awesome! The gameplay on the cooking and greeting games are a bit clunky, especially the greeting game, but the coconut catching game is very fluid. I would recommend maybe making the games less repetitive by either changing up the objectives or increasing the difficulty, but other than that this was very good and I really liked it!

This is an interesting one! I actually read the "Post Mortem" before playing. It really shows how much effort you put into creating this. While the story, art and music make the game very pleasing to interact with the gameplay of the minigames are lacking. They feel more like chores and don't provide the player with much sense of accomplishment or enjoyment. My suggestion would be, to stick to  only one and try to improve that one as much as you can. 

Hello!

Really good jam entry - there were a lot of attentions to detail that I liked (like Captain Cooke not being understood by the player - I dunno if this was making a wider point about settlers + colonialism but I empathized with the villagers so that's good). I feel like maybe the amount of objects required for 2 of the minigames (so 20 coconuts, or idols worshipped) felt a hair too long. 

The artstyle was obviously nice - the game had a lot of polish, with the cutscenes and transitions and narrative in days - if there were bugs I didn't find any. The music was  immersive - really sold the vibe, and I'm glad it persisted through the scenes. 

My last comment could be super personal/subjective, but I think your thumbnail doesn't sell the game at all -  you've got a great name in Please The Gods, and I think just adding text would round out the image and provide some context, otherwise it may be skipped over - I personally sought this one out as I'd chatted with one of the devs on Discord - otherwise I may have not clicked (which would have been a shame!)

I found the game super fun and interesting. In particular, I really liked the moving animations and sprites, especially the rolling of the coconuts as they fell from the sky! I thought that was a really thoughtful touch. GOOD JOB!!

Nice game and was fun to play! I laughed a lot at Captain Cook's dialogues :D The only issue was during the "3. Keep 'em cooking" mini-game counter stopped at 86s. I wasn't sure if the game still counting or completely stopped and couldn't pass that mini-game. mini-games could be a little shorter or faster but other than that I like it. Nice work!!

Gameplay:

The gameplay is generally not great. The controls feel a little too slippery, the actual scenes are designed in ways that are awkward (constantly getting stuck on things, like the person to the left of the fire in the cooking minigame). 

The minigames themselves also just feel super barebones and repetitive, and I found myself saying "Oh, great, this again" before slumping over my desk and idly pressing keys to go back and forth for some mundane task. There's simply no challenge, which hurts the game - if the coconuts fell a little faster, that minigame would go from tedious to engaging. The cooking minigame doesn't have that kind of easy fix, pressing A, clicking, pressing D, clicking repeatedly for 100 seconds isn't engaging gameplay.

There just wasn't much to do, and what there was to do, felt barebones and just generally not well designed from a gameplay standpoint. It wasn't bad or anything, but it just wasn't fun to me - and maybe telling the story is more important than that, but it's just my personal preference.

2/5

Graphics:

Visually the art style is cute, there were some animation problems though it felt like (where the reverse facing sprite would appear between every direction change?), and there was a lot of inconsistency, from the dialog text to the font of countdowns.

It's still a pretty game though, and the island art reminds me nostalgically of a screensaver I used to use.

4/5

Thematic Relevancy:

Well, the overview of the jam says this for the theme:

This theme has been one which has led to much debate, both between us admins and on the discord server. We’ve eventually come to one conclusion – your game has to be mythologically accurate. You can’t make up myths or have new characters or blend pantheons. Work with what’s there and try to portray things in the way the people who actually believed in the mythology would have viewed them. If you make a game about Greek mythology, make sure you portray it in the same way an Ancient Greek would’ve, for example.

I wouldn't say this game is necessarily mythologically accurate, as rather than portraying a mythological event as they would have perceived it, it portrays those who did believe it and their mistaking of an outsider as a god figure (reminds me of Cargo Cults).

So, it's a game about mythology, but it doesn't really follow the guidelines of what "game about mythology" really means. 

3/5

Historical Accuracy:
Portrayed an interesting historical event that was creatively selected and portrayed the concept of the event super well. Would have been interesting if it went into the later realities of the event, when Cook took wood from a burial ground, had a cutter taken from his ship, and was eventually killed, but that's out of scope and the specific events it portrays, it portrays well

5/5