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Your end screen is the best scoring idea I've seen in this entire jam, and I want to lead with it. The Anomaly collapses, the screen blanks to white with one red word, PITIFUL, then opens onto a huge white sphere with debris lines firing outward, and the panel reports 0.04 x 10^50 atoms destroyed, approximately 0.03969841199999 earth(s).

Your score is measured in PLANETS DESTROYED, to fourteen decimal places. In a jam about chasing ever bigger numbers, turning the scoreboard into the bill for the destruction you caused is a perfect piece of irony, and "0.039 of an Earth" is a thousand times more expressive than "score: 4200". That single screen does more thematic work than most entries manage in their whole runtime.

The fiction holds everywhere else too. There's no PLAY button, there's RUN NEW EXPERIMENT and EXPERIMENT INSTRUCTIONS. The difficulty menu isn't called difficulty, it's EXPERIMENTAL CRITERIA. Keeping the voice even in the button labels is what makes a small game feel large. And the instructions are written in character by an over-eager assistant, with a LIVE ANIMATED PANEL beside each concept, one showing the actual Anomaly reacting and another showing the four fundamental particles floating. You see the thing before you play it, which is much better than describing it.

The criteria screen is well designed as well: a Fundamental Particles slider with an honest explanation that 50-80 is a good starting point, plus an Infinite Mode checkbox described as no story, no bosses, just infinite energy accumulation. The player negotiates their own challenge and knows what each option does. And the narrated intro, single lines appearing in the starfield with one word in red, "Do not listen to them", creates a good unease.

My one real problem: THE RUN ENDS FAST AND I DIDN'T UNDERSTAND WHY. I moved the Anomaly for a few seconds and PITIFUL was already on screen. I couldn't tell what killed me. Touching the wrong particle? Standing still? Moving too fast? The STABILITY bar exists but it's tiny in the bottom corner and I never saw it drop. And the instructions screen, good as it is, doesn't explain the LOSE CONDITION, which is exactly the one thing I needed. Adding that one line would probably be the single biggest improvement available to you.

Two smaller ones. The play field is very dark and the coloured particles are small, and since the background is a starfield of white dots it's hard at first to separate "background star" from "particle that interacts". And there are two typos: "Anamoly" instead of Anomaly on the fundamental particles panel, and "infite" instead of infinite in the infinite mode description.

Excellent atmosphere, good writing and the best end screen in the jam. Explain what destabilises the Anomaly and this is easily one of the best things here.

Thank you for the thorough review. I’m really glad the theme was well received; it’s certainly the thing I focused on the most. A couple of specific points:

  • The instructions are scrollable, and there are a few more panels that explain all the mechanics + inputs, including how volatility and stability are scored as well as the lose condition. Read them over and play again; there are three different endings actually! This one is probably on me though; I could’ve made a more prominent scroll bar or different layout all together. 
  • Visuals can definitely be improved. Ironically, I added the starry background to the game scene at the end of the project even though I had decided earlier in the project to omit it. But I found the pure black background to be unappealing. 
  • I didn’t know how to spell anomaly until halfway through the project. The actual source files are still named anamoly (with A before O). 🙃