Deffo not a concept I've ever thought of. And I can see why a text based platformer game hasnt taken off haha, not that I know of anyway. But genuinly interesting concept and it works well which is great. Got too cocky myself and sped it up too much after getting up pretty slow. Nice one! P.S. Is the story anything imperticular?
Play game
The Lost Cursor's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Theme | #1 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
Impression | #1 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
Sound | #1 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
Overall | #1 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
Engagement | #1 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Art | #2 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How did you incorporate the theme?
It has a story. I think that counts.
Comments
yeah. I wanted to do a platformer and then had the terrible idea to make it a text based platformer. Also made graphics easier cause that's where I'm weak. Story was LLM generated.
The cursor blinked into existence somewhere near the middle of Chapter Seven, a dense forest of serif letters and tangled punctuation. It was a small, flickering thing—nothing more than a vertical line with a stubborn glow—but it had a mission: to reach the pristine, untouched opening of the book, where the words “Once upon a time” waited in elegant, bold typeface. The journey wouldn’t be easy. Ahead loomed towering paragraphs, their sentences stacked like jagged cliffs, while commas and periods littered the ground like slippery pebbles. The cursor darted forward, leaping over a sprawling run-on sentence that stretched across the page, its words twisting into a precarious bridge.
Soon, it encountered the Great Dialogue Divide—a chasm where quotation marks hung in midair, taunting it with their dangling curves. “You’ll never make it!” jeered a snide apostrophe from above, but the cursor ignored the taunt, timing its jump to land on a sturdy em-dash. Page after page flipped beneath it, each turn a gust of wind threatening to blow it off course. In Chapter Four, it slid down a steep italicized slope, narrowly avoiding a collision with a bolded exclamation point that jutted out like a spear. The text grew denser as it pressed on, the prose thickening with metaphors and similes that shifted like quicksand under its blinking base.
By Chapter Two, the cursor was weary but determined. It scaled a wall of footnotes—tiny numbers and asterisks forming a ladder of sorts—only to face a swarm of ellipses, their dots bouncing unpredictably like floating platforms. The beginning was close now; it could feel the crispness of the opening page calling. With one final sprint, it vaulted over a dedication in flowery script and landed triumphantly on the first line. The words “Once upon a time” shimmered around it, and for a moment, the cursor stopped blinking, basking in the stillness of the story’s start.
Hell yeah, dude. I must've been living under a rock, but this is the first time I've seen a platformer in this style.
All the best.
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