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(+6)

the atmosphere is wonderful, and as someone new to coding, I really appreciated the controls-- being able to command the game from a console just felt really nice (although, isn't this the opposite of what the jam was about? haha). the soft, beautiful guitar kind of reminded me of the soundtrack for "miner dig deep," that 2009 xbox 360 indie game that it's hard not to be nostalgic for.

however,  I felt that the gameplay itself was  strange, and perhaps even tedious. as others have pointed out, there's really not any reason not to just switch between planting, feeding, and harvesting the tiles all at once. I think it would be neat if you made it so that planting more than one plant in one tile perhaps means you yield more plants, but makes them much slower to grow, over-feeding plants also makes them grow more slowly, and harvesting immature plants kills them. this would incentivize executing commands on particular tiles, rather than just executing a command on all the tiles at once without worrying about the consequences.

I think it also would have made things flow more easily if pressing "up" on the keyboard gave you the most recent command you executed, and never gave you whatever the console's response was. it also would have been nice if pressing "down" brought you forward in your previous-commands list.

furthermore, I feel like the story could have been executed a lot better. before watching your video or reading the documentation, I decided to just jump right into the game so that I could form a clear judgement for myself before playing it through. so, because the flavor-text that you get in the console talks about how how awful the torrential rain is, the whole time I was playing this I thought it was my goal to appease the rain sprites and make them stop flooding the village, and therefore that I was somehow losing-- maybe I wasn't making sacrifices often enough, or I was using the wait command too frequently. it would have been a lot better if, at the beginning of the game, you were told that "Your goal is to advance the flood that will submerge the world of Man. Do this by planting crops, feeding them, harvesting them, and then sacrificing them to the rain sprites," rather than assuming that the player will have read that on this itch.io page.

in the same vein, even after reading what my goal was on here after my first attempt at playing this, as a player it was really difficult to assess my progress. I kept playing, hoping I would get to some kind of "end-screen," which never came. if something was stated in the console, I totally missed it, because I was focused on the plant-feed-harvest loop. my only hint that I had maybe completed the game was the fact that the flavor-text stopped coming. if there is some kind of ending, you need a pop up of some kind, or something really flashy in the console. maybe you pause their ability to type or execute commands-- anything, as long as it's impossible to overlook

also, I seemed to experience a bug where the feed state of the middle tile never deteriorated. this didn't affect gameplay at all, it was just sort of strange.

all in all, I really enjoyed whatever you've made here, but feel like in its current state, I can't recommend it to anyone as a "game" so much as a cute, atmospheric,  interactive art piece.