to be brief about the presentation: stellar pixel art, satisfying sfx, moody atmospheric soundscape, fitting music (with a nice touch of dynamism for the day-night cycle), and a lovely sense of impending doom. this is all very impressive and highly polished for a jam game — and then there are the mechanics…
it takes a while before things start happening, especially when dealt a bad starting hand. during my first run there were long periods of time when nothing happened, until the fire started picking up towards the end. also, it seemed like the challenge wasn’t to place rare building, but to randomly draw them in the first place. I ended my first run with hundreds of each resource, and nothing to spend it on.
I almost stopped playing after just one attempt, but I guess the relaxing pace (and the score screen) gave me time to think. I realized that I had a lot of ideas for new strategies, like letting fires spread to get more faith (which incidentally made the game a lot more hectic too, which was cool). I really enjoyed the sense of discovery, trying to figure out how I could maximize the score on my following attempts. my best score so far was 4987 on my 3rd attempt, but I’m sure I can do better, which motivates me to play more. I’ll definitely come back to this after the jam!
trying to balance getting faith from spreading fires without making too much of the land nonburnable is an interesting dynamic, it adds a lot of tension and urgency to the otherwise relaxed gameplay.
the main progress gate seems to be rock, and it’s important to get a quarry early. restarting to get a good starting hand seems essential for a good run.
a lot of things are dependent on randomness, which I like, but it would be nice to see some more agency (like deck-building or something).
meadows and forests are basically dead cards — the opportunity cost is huge, and there’s no real benefit as a lot of things can be built on charred land. at least forests have the benefit of allowing more camps to be built, but meadows seem completely useless.
during the final moments, I’d love to make a futile effort to put out the fires before the city in inevitably engulfed by fire. it doesn’t even have to give points or anything, I just like clicking the flames :)
bug: clicking “Exit Game” freezes the game on web.
superb submission overall!!