Yep, a lot of people seem confused by the overwhelming positivity, but I've explained it in other posts, a lot of people just fake being super positive and then give you 1-3 stars just so you can "return the favor" hoping you thought they were so positive they gave you 4-5. And also they don't want to be negative or critizice your game in fear of you being offended and retaliate with a low score.

As I said, my advice: join smaller jams, <200 participants,  people are way more awesome, less dishonest and less competitive and (mostly) genuinely vote and tell you how to improve your game. It's less competitive and more cooperative.

Also, some people were 1-staring games just to boost their own. So yeah, somehow, with all the amazing games, the amazing art of some games, the amazing ideas, the amazing mechanics that I've seen in this jam...  the winner is a simple unpolished unoriginal puzzle platformer with crappy pixel art graphics (and getting a 4.0 in visuals!!! WTH??) and no music. Some things just don't add up, but anyways, it is what it is man...

Based take. I didn't leave a comment on your game, but I honestly thought it was really good! Call me a conspiracist but I highly believe the top entries were rigged. I think your game has a lot of potential despite what misleading reviews say.

It happens! The current Itch voting system can definitely be a little messy,  technically, anyone could spam one-star ratings and throw things off, including big teams (which I'd never do, of course). For me, the whole point of a jam is to give honest feedback and help each other grow, not try to game the system.

But hey!! being in the top 200 out of over 1,000 games is something to be proud of! Our team landed around 163rd overall too, and we’re really happy with that. Honestly, that’s pretty great considering how many amazing entries there were.

It’s true that some of the highest-ranked games didn’t have a ton of reviews compared to others, which makes the results feel a little unbalanced  (also some def shouldn't have won imho) but that’s just how it goes sometimes. In the end, jams are objective by nature. What really matters is that people played, had fun, and connected with what we made.

We’re proud of what we built, proud of the feedback we received, and happy to have shared our work with everyone. Despite everything, from I could play (i couldnt write a review of it sadly ;-;) I really enjoyed your game! it def should've gotten higher imho

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and questions.
I didn't try your game in the jam but wanted to try it now. 

For me the browser version was loading for like a minute or 2 and I can imagine some people were like 'screw this, it does not even load' or something like that. Or just 'that's taking too long'.

I wouldn't probably wait that long when I want to try as many games as possible essentially right after the jam. I'd suggest to optimize games more for the webGL - so it loads faster when you are planning web version.

I didn't use the browser version as I saw written somewhere you had that it's best done via download. I think it was on the title screen? Yoo I gave you 5 stars for everything! Excited to hear your seriously considering taking it further!

I got 333rd myself, which was odd despite the positive kind words but what can you do? I agree my game wasn't pretty as I made everything myself during the 5 days in clip studio paint. So basically an ms paint game haha.

Not sure if I added this in my post on your game as I honestly criticized very little as it was in a short time span. But the game would greatly benefit from being able to control the character as they fly around. Not well of course, maybe like air control with resistance or control through small tugs or bursts to the rag doll.

Regardless I meant everything I said in my comments. I wish you the best of luck!!! If I haven't already followed I will now as I hope to see an update in the future.

I'm unsure how genuine people are in general with their reviews, and I could see a lot of people intentionally giving poor reviews to bring others down to essentially get themselves on top. I'm not personally a fan of peer-reviewed contests like this for that reason, but I understand that it's practically impossible to experience every submission with a small number of judges.

I heard there were people who were going around and basically throwing people's submissions with bad ratings without even playing, or even people who were outright banned. It's not clear to me if those people had their ratings revoked. It might not have helped 100%, but also having a 5-10 minute timer before being able to rate after clicking download or play in browser could have mitigated this sort of behavior. 

Additionally it would have been nice if there were comments attached to reviews, somewhat like what you see on Steam. You could get more context on why someone may have given it a lower rating in certain categories.

In general it's a little surprising how heavily certain areas were critiqued considering it's a short jam. Perfect game balance or robust polished AI isn't something that someone can realistically develop that quickly for instance. It's not fairly judged against very simple mechanics like multiple choice slideshows, so doing something other than very simple seems very punishing, which is rather discouraging for participating in a game jam in the future.