Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags
(1 edit)

Good central gameplay concept, a lot more fun than I expected from the itch page.   Only played up until the ladder level (which I liked a lot!)  
The game is visually emulating the style of old platformers, but it clearly isn't one, technically speaking.  This means that some 'glitches' feel more contrived than others.

The most fun glitches were the very physical ones, that had to do with multiple systems in the world interacting.  My favourites were spamming e while holding a box to shift yourself backwards, and jump+e while on box to get high up with the box in hand.  These glitches felt like the natural outcome of poorly-thought out, but fundamentally simple programming.  I've written games with glitches like these!  The first ladder glitch felt good, too.

The glitches that emulated old games felt weaker to me, specifically the one about limited numbers of sprites being able to be drawn on the screen.  It's fake: the game box physics 'really' behave the way they do, but this behaviour is scripted.  In old engines, you got that sort of visual glitching because the game was fundamentally low-level and you were reading memory at an offset you weren't meant to.  Here, the glitching is a sprite drawn in an editor!  Because it's 'fake', this glitch can't combine with any other puzzle mechanics (which is presumably why it only exists for one level, then is removed).

In this game, you have the player controlling the princess, and the narrative figure of the dev embodied in-game, trying to fix bugs as she uses them to bypass obstacles.  But there's a hidden, 3rd character:  the real-life Dev, responsible for the bugs.  
The game presents a fiction that it's an old, 16-bit game or whatever, but it clearly isn't.  The sprites move freely
Some of the bugs really feel like they were added by ingamedev.   They feel like a naturalistic part of the game world (that is, the fictional game we're meant to be controlling a character inside of).  The sprite bug doesn't.  It was clearly added in by RealLifeDev, and I think it weakens the game mechanically and thematically, because once I saw it I started second-guessing whether any later puzzle would have an answer that lay within the pre-existing physics of the game world or whether it would be some scripted reference to old game engine limitations (that this game does not have!) that I'd just have to guess. 
If the author had actually made the game 8-bit and actually used sprite slots, that puzzle could have been good - because you'd have been able to integrate it with the rest of the game!
But as it is now, I don't think it fits with the puzzles involving block glitches (which are great).
The other glitches fell inbetween the box glitches and the sprite vanishing for me in terms of how much I liked them.

I like a lot of things about the game.  A game about glitches in the game itself could be really great, and I see fragments of that greatness shining through here.  I hope the author makes a version 2, or in general keeps making games and gets great at it!