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What an amazing game ! I really love the concept, especially because, during our brainstorm for the jam, the idea of "hey, our character could fall asleep/die/coma and have an irreal projection of himself that could do stuff" also came into our minds, but we just couldn't find a way to make it interesting, so we scraped it. Your "fake death" mechanic is genius, and is the final piece of the puzzle that we were not able to find, so kudos to you =) !

The game itself is very incredible. The general atmosphere is enjoyable, the graphics are very good, and I really like the "dream" visual effect ^^. The sound design is also well done : every action has a distinct sound and there is a little background ambiance that is really fitting and help with the game's atmosphere. The only little flaw I see here is the lack of music : I would have loved one, with a variant that plays while in the "dream world" =p. But, to be honest, it's just me being fussy, your work on the sound design makes the absence of music not really annoying.

The level design is also on point : the puzzles are clever and it felt really rewarding to find the solutions. There are a lot of levels for a game jam, and the difficulty curve is managed perfectly. The mechanic is greatly exploited and leads to really interesting scenarios : it completely blew my mind when I understood that I had to lure a guard in a pit for him to kill me. That moment made me say "Oh wow !" out loud, and I had to think about "do I really want to kill that enemy ?" for the next levels, that was soooo cool. A little complain about the puzzles is that I would have liked to know in advance the actions of each buttons, like having wires linking a lever to a door or a button to the spiked ground. My first attempts in a room were always trial-and-error to gather intel about "what does what" before being finally able to think about the puzzle. Games like Portal are a great exemple of this : every button is linked to its action, so the player can directly focus on resolving the puzzle. But, don't get me wrong, once I got all the pieces, it was really enjoyable to put them together and think about the solution !

The gameplay was smooth, dashing through the levels was enjoyable, even if I'm not a fan of the key-binding you chose ^^'. The game never felt unfair, and I always could do want I wanted to do.

Overall, that's a really, really solid entry. It's a great and polished game, and I'm really curious of what else can be done with that concept. I feel like there is a lot of potential for more complex puzzles : maybe having something like "sleeping pills" in later levels that the player could collect to fall asleep anywhere, without the need of a bench, or go full "inception" with dreams being able to dream and have their own projections, for exemple. In short, that is an amazing game, I enjoyed the time I spent playing it, and really I hope you will make something out of it after the jam. Congratulations !

Hey, thanks a lot! :) you have no idea how much it is relieving when people get that aha moment in your game, it's so similar to how GMTK explained that in his video.

Those dilemmas are the thing that makes puzzle games fun, and as a developer, to make a cool mechanic twist that is clear enough that players will understand and challenging enough so that players will not find the solution immediately is the best part about making a puzzle game!

So as for your suggestions, I'll not lie, we couldn't find any song to fit the game, we've tried making some tunes but it had to be atmospheric and not melodic at all, because everything with a melody would just ruin the whole dark and mysterious vibe of the game, we were aiming for something like the Hyper Light Drifter OST, but the sounds there are so hard to create, we'll definitely add background music when we'll update the game, because we're planning to continue it (probably after ludum dare 50)

Wires would've worked with the puzzles, if it was only easy to implement a system like portal that auto-connects buttons and doors easily, I think we'll end up using tile-maps or something for that to show a line between the door and the activators

As for the controls, dumb mistake by us, you can use the arrow keys to move, I don't know if you knew that, out of habit we just wrote WASD even though while testing we've used the arrow keys, this is why we added the screenshot in the home page, but I guess it was too late

Also I agree, this concept has a lot of potential, our ideas include making a second bench that will swap you and your clone, making a clone variant of you that has different abilities, or pausing time when you're resting with your clone or something, the last one is the most promising I'll not lie

Super happy to read your review, really, we'll make something with this game, boss fights and more mechanics are coming, every comment just drives us more and more to continue this game and finish it properly

Also congrats for the 8th place, you totally deserve that!