The highlight of the game was the voice acting. Not the script, the voice acting itself. It was a fairly convincing crazy person / entity. However, the character acted out didn't produce a convincing deception. It was obvious from the off that the character unstable and shouldn't be trusted. I don't know if I had any options other than following instructions. I assumed I didn't, so I followed the instructions just because I thought it was the only way to progress. In my view, the script should have been substantially more subtle to produce a convincing liar. This also made it so that I felt unentertained by the narrative, generally, and that both jump scares had no effect whatsoever.
I did appreciate the breaking of the fourth wall at the end. I think that was the best executed "lie" so to speak.
I have no idea why you guys decided to go with the minigames. The problem of minigames is that in such a short time, you're essentially making each minigame be as good as totalTime / numberOfGames. So if you could make a decent platformer, you end up making a dreadful one instead, where moving platforms don't affect your physics, it has terrible animations, it looks ugly, you have no grace and modular jumps. The air control is absent.
You can't really go that wrong with the puzzle one, except there were no instructions on screen, so I didn't know to press space to rotate them. Had to consult the game page. Also, for some reason, the picture didn't fit INSIDE the frame, but under it.
The gumdrop one also looked pretty terrible, with the player collider not touching the ground, a generic fillable bar coloured solid red. Yeah, I maintain many games during a game jam is not ideal.
Graphics were all over the place. I suppose that's kind of intentional, but it didn't help with suspension of disbelief.
Audio was great thanks for the voice acting, though the samples were unpolished. Full of humm, and no ending fades even, so you could hear an abrupt ending when the file would stop.
In conclusion, lack of polish and believability hurt this game in my opinion.
Viewing post in Super Surprise Party...? jam comments
Thank you very much for your feedback and suggestions! As this is our first game jam and first time creating a game together, our team looks at this project as a growing experience and we really appreciate your detailed review :)!
I think, ultimately, we underestimated the time required to make a game of the scope we had planned and agree there are definitely opportunities to polish different aspects of the game.
Thanks again and good luck in the jam!