Wow, what a labor of love this turned out to be. So great to finally see this unveiled after following tantalizing screenshots in the discord.
First let me start with the best parts. The pixel art style and the production value put into this project are outstanding, I think the artists on your team need a raise.. metaphorically i guess :P The spinning lighthouse beam title screen is just outstanding.
The audio is also very well done, and although the voice acting is admittedly amateur recording quality, lacking the extreme polish levels of the graphics, for a jam game it was excellent work and i really liked the characters by the end based solely on their voice acting.
The storyline was interesting to me, but I should mention that the tone of the game was not what i expected. I was geared up for a horror game of some kind based on the tagline “Worse than the dark… is what the light reveals” I kept waiting for something spooky to happen until i realised what the gameplay loop was going to be. Even so I appreciated the ambition of telling a true story and framing it as about balancing choices (family, duty, sacrifice etc)
Next some criticisms…. Starting with the game play
First off the gear puzzle sucks :| Sorry to be blunt, but it’s the only one i didn’t enjoy at all, and it’s not as well implemented as the others. I didn’t find it interesting to solve, I just trial and error solved it based on what gears could or couldn’t reach each other.
Second of all, the adventure game style framing with the lighthouse view would be much more suited to a full adventure game, perhaps finding a gear under Elisses bed… adventure game style puzzles etc.. would flesh this game out and address my third complaint…
Which is that the gameplay is a bit samey. The exact same routine each day is not very interesting. Although admittedly this experience doesn’t overstay it’s welcome - some variation in the daily routine wouldn’t go astray. By far the most memorable parts to me were the diversions in the daily routine. When Elisse was waiting in the kitchen for me I was suddenly very curious and immersed.
I think this game would have been fine with just 3-4 screens, 1 per mini game, and didn’t really need the walking up and down the lighthouse. Of course, the fantastic artstyle wouldn’t have been so clearly on display in that case, but purely in terms of gameplay the traversing up and down the tower didn’t do anything for me.
Finally, the loading screens are ass and very unimmersive imo. In retrospect, I would have preferred to play on desktop I think as the loading screens really break the immersion, especially taking you to a simple puzzle game and back warranting a loading screen seems excessive. What can be done though for a browser game :shrug so I get it.
Finally Finally, let me close this criticism sandwich with a disclaimer and a compliment…
So this is by far one of the most polished and ambitious entries I’ve played, and I’ve played almost 250 now :) I’m only taking extra time to go into close detail on my criticism because the high level of effort put into this submission warrants it.
And I wanted to make special mention that the first time I played the cooking minigame, I got a quality score of 0, slightly furious and ready to write a scathing comment about the cooking minigame being terrible. However by the end of the playthrough - and once I’d figured it out - the cooking minigame was my favourite part of each day, and would probably warrant an entire jam submission by itself.
All round very high quality entry with a clearly tremendous amount of effort put into it. Great work, continue to grow and challenge yourselves!
Edit: Oh! Almost forgot to mention, the suspicious german accented guy claiming to be an american is by far the most dynamic character in the entire game :’D Loved it