| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay Polish | #4 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Enjoyment | #7 | 3.850 | 3.850 |
| Genre Interpretation | #7 | 4.150 | 4.150 |
| Overall | #10 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Sensory | #12 | 3.550 | 3.550 |
| Relevance to the chosen theme(s) | #27 | 3.350 | 3.350 |
| Creativity | #32 | 3.100 | 3.100 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit either (or both) genres?
The game is a metroidvania featuring a magical girl navigating a fortress she was imprisoned in to escape, finding items to help her along the way.
Chosen theme(s) and relevant explanations
I chose Python, snakes are a recurring enemy and theme throughout the game.
Team/Developer
PAPERMOON_SO
Premade content
Font used is a custom one I use in almost all my projects. Player sprite was based on a sprite from a previous game. Palette was made by polyphrog.
This is a really enjoyable game! the pixel art is simple, but very charming, and everything felt snappy and responsive. The level design was great as well! The way the game sends you back to previous areas felt very intuitive, even for me (who has no sense of direction).
I would have liked some music, and if I'm really nitpicking I think that the frequency of health drops and pickups kind of make the dark magic ability an obvious choice in most instances.
Really solid entry all around!
A really solid and fun bite-sized Metroidvania! I loved the tiny art style and the design of the player and enemies. The player felt nice to control, and while the abilities were fairly basic, shooting enemies never got old. The red robe looked really cool, too!
I really appreciated the maps as well, they did a good job motivating me to explore and pick up everything while making sure I never got stuck. The final boss was simple and effective, although all the health drops from its projectiles made it kinda easy, and it was a bit hard to tell if I was even damaging it until it died. A bit more enemy variety could've been nice, too! Still, for a gamejam game, I think you did an outstanding job!
Cool metroid-inspired (I think) game! It was really solid all around, and having a map really helped with exploration. My only nitpick is that I felt that the wall jump was sort of finicky
Great work!
That was very sweet!
Gameplay was simple, but sometimes simple is better. And it fits the artstyle, as petite as it can be, wich makes Cleo and her snake frienemies very headpatabble <3
I really like the concept of the dark wand, it scratches my love for risky gimmicks, but in execution it felt a little way too tame... Not only the hp cost is extremelly low, but the health pick ups from enemies are way too generous to make it actually feel like it was costing me anything, aside from the final boss where I didn't actually have health pick ups and it actually needed a lot of shots to deal with, there it felt like it was accomplishing it's purpose (Yeah, you let me know on Discord that it's bullets could drop pickups when destroyed, but since that wasn't really a factor on my experience since I didn't end up seeing that happening, I won't take it into account for this review).
However, I think the wand being designed this way did allow for a very fun challenge where I decided to traverse the hot areas without the heatproof upgrade (Wich I didn't know actually existed, but I figured it was safe to assume), and for that I will also praise the level design! It is definitelly a very good metroidvania on that front, with lots of optional stuff and even whole optional upgrades like gliding, wich are never required, and that's what makes it even more metroidvania spirited!
That said, I do not like the existance of upgrades that exist merely as what I call "Key to a door", like the volcanic robes, wich does not add anything to Cleo's arsenal at alll, it's sole purpose is to allow traversing the heat area for another required upgrade.... wich is also essentially another key to a door, since it also only exists to make white barricades breakable by the wands I already have.
Another thing I wish was made differently are the region maps. They are a completely fine, and actually great addition on their own, but I do wish they did not reveal all of the secret areas. Like, I think it's perfectly fine if they reveal the hidden path to something like the Volcanic Robes for example, since they are a "required upgrade" (in theory), but they did not need to show off every other hidden basic stat upgrade, since that defeats their purpose of making you want to actually explore every nook and cranny and be susicious of every slightly different wall.
I did also miss some music honestly... the sounds are cute and fluffy, but being in complete silence on their absence is a little bummer, and I think this also makes the final boss a tad bit anticlimatic since it was also happening over the same silence as the whole rest of the game.
This is a very solid entry overall tho! It felt very simple, but it's also very fun!
The wallkick was extremely nitpicky, i constantly fell because i pressed jump before movement or because i pressed movement before the jump, having a timing of “EXACTLY AT THE SAME TIME” made it harder than it needed to be, i think it would have been better if pressing jump while touching the wall made you walljump in the other direction.
I have nothing to say about the music… Since there is none.
Overall everything else was pretty good, the boss was a little weird but nothing to complain about.
Nice little retro style metroidvania. With one thing missing is a background music. Unfortunately i found wall jump early and it's just annoying to perform on web version either timing is too tight but I often just detached the wall before it would jump opposite direction. So i gave up right there.
I really liked this! \(≧▽≦)/
The map and secrets were really fun to explore. It felt like there was a secret passage everywhere I went!
The originality is a bit low though... I've seen almost all the stuff before in Super Metroid and Silk Song. (^^ ')
Dark Magic draining HP is something that I haven't seen much of in the genre though.
Also, really nice job on the polish and having everything working smoothly. I didn't run into any bugs.
If you could add some background music and more sound effects, I think that would make it even cooler.
Um, and maybe making the enemies more mechanically snake-y would help fit the Python theme more. Right now it's only visually in the theme.
I think that the enemies were quite good to fight, even with just 2 kinds. Juking the vertical-shooting enemy was cool.
Last issue: I couldn't tell if the final boss was taking damage until the moment it died. It would be nice if there was an effect or reaction to it getting hit.
Overall though, my criticisms are just nitpicks. The game was really fun and well executed!
*edit: formatting
Really solid metroidvania. I did get stuck for a while early on because I didn't realize you could shoot up :p I will say that it felt like the platforming abilities were fairly underutilized? There was very little that actually used the walljump (which was maybe for the best since the controls for it could be kind of awkward - needing to make sure im holding the direction *before* pressing jump while also having to switch from the opposite direction was finicky, and I mostly cheesed it where possible by just holding down both directions at once), and I don't think I found anything that used the glide. The higher level attack draining your health is a cool idea, but it felt like my health was so high compared to the damage dealt and health drops from enemies were so frequent that there was basically zero risk to using it, which felt like it kind of defeated the point.
The boss also felt quite half-baked, its movements felt way too erratic to dodge consistently and health drops from its projectiles were once again overly generous so it felt like it devolved into mostly facetanking the chase phase and then healing up from the projectiles, which required no more thought than randomly jumping around and spamming the basic attack.
What the game does really excel on are the secrets - it's always a good sign when a metroidvania has a little secret room off to the left of the starting screen I think, and there was definitely a really solid quantity of goodies scattered around the map.
I definitely will admit that the combat was really unfinished, as I prioritized overall map design first and foremost. I considered buffing enemy damage and health close to the end of development to help the health and weapon boosts feel more substantial, but I worried it’d create huge difficulty spikes, so I left it as is. But I’m glad at least the map part worked out, since you enjoyed the secrets all around the map.
I’ve gotten a lot of complaints about the wall jump being too difficult or awkward, which I’m surprised by since I tried giving it a very generous window to execute.
It's not about the length of the window after moving away from the wall, it's the fact that I have to be already holding the direction when I press jump for the wall jump to execute. Most wall jumps work by just pressing jump once you are in a wall jump state without any need for a directional input, so my muscle memory has me pressing the jump button before pressing the opposite arrow, which in this control scheme results in nothing happening.
Cool game, I really liked the secrets, made me feel like I was smart, but some less inquisitive players could have a harder time finding them, and since they mostly give extra hp, those might be the players that would need them. It felt a bit slow to walk around, the flying enemies were annoying as in you couldn't ignore them like the shooting snakes (which reminded me of liero), the wall jump was a bit awkward, from what I found I had to press side button and then jump, where instinctively I wanted to do it the other way around since the jump was the thing I wanted the most (I actually had a similar problem in my game and just changed it to only jump, but you could also allow for holding the jump key).
I had actually tried allowing holding jump, but I found with my implementation it trivialized wall jumps because you could hold jump the entire time and you’d jump as soon as you hit the away direction, so I removed it. I think that’s just because of my implementation though, since it was designed around the away press being first.
This was AMAZING. The gameplay is so polished, super fun, and really, really cool to play. I ended up playing way longer than I intended to hahahaha.
I really missed having a soundtrack, though. Some Amiga, NES, or Game Boy style chiptune would be incredible! Congrats on the project. The only reason I didn't give a perfect score for creativity was that the enemies felt a bit repetitive as far as I got... but I loved entering a room and 'feeling the heat' of it... the power-ups are great and the gameplay is top-notch. Congrats!
I even bookmarked it in my browser to play again later hahaha.
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