I'm really happy I got to play this before rating ended because this entry was amazing!

The combat system took a second to get used to but after the first battle I think I had a handle on it. It felt very juicy and had nice sounds and visual impacts. I had characters die fairly quickly, but since they're replaced after combat it wasn't much of an obstacle. I did find it rough in a couple boss fights where I only had a couple weapons across my party that could beat the enemies armour.

The graphics are absolutely beautiful, I love the evironments, the little character portraits are great, and man the Solitude rooms are peak save room feel. Regarding the solitude rooms I love the unique reactions from party members, though I do wonder was there anything that could've been done to prevent party members from leaving the party in that room? The only real complaint I have is the enemy sprites don't look pixellated enough to match the background and party portraits. Though from reading the other comments since most of the art isn't original I'm assuming there just wasn't time to adjust them.

The inter-party interactions were very well done, and I was genuinely surprised just how many there were! I initially thought the dialogue triggers should be deactivated after they're played, but tbh I find they make backtracking a lttle less dull.

The exploration was awesome, plenty of little secrets and notes and computer logs to find, with shortcuts scattered around to make backtracking easier. All very well done!

I managed to make it #29 in the Hall Of Fame with a WIN, so I'm at least on the board! Great work!

Everything is really impressive about this entry!

The way dialogue passively triggers is very effective at making you feel like you're in a group, and makes you wince every time you mess up and get one of them killed.

The combat had great depth and choice making, with the randomness and varying encounters keeping you on your toes, but never being so punishing as to feel put down by it, especially with the comeback mechanic of getting extra dice when a team-mate dies.  I found poison and guarding to be the strongest method by the end.

Not sure how much of the art is original (I think the portraits based on the game page), but all the assets are well-utilized, and the level design complexity was well paced with some appreciated shortcuts.

And it all ties together so well.  The dying/retiring and recruiting mechanic feeds into the leveling, insanity, themes and story telling.  It's so elegantly executed.  Awesome entry!

Playthrough: Snake Eyes Pt1 by Dashing Strike Cooper Savage & revaans
(I lost some of the first 5 minutes so there are some discrepencies where I patched things up with some additional footage.)

I’m in awe of what you’ve accomplished here. Love the art style/effects, the battle music, the very funny dead party member text lines and inter-party dialogue, the way XP is earned through exploration, the creative aggro-centric combat-system…

Sometimes you get a set of rolls with inadequate block skills and feel somewhat screwed, but it’s casually fun with the replacement party member system. If there’s something I would want from this though, it would probably be more control over skill selection. (Incidentally, have you played Dicey Dungeons?)

That map navigation thing is an awesome touch. I recall seeing something similar (as well as some of your level design tricks) in Etrian Odyssey, but it wasn’t so conveniently point-and-click there. The map vision cone is cool too.

The sanity system feels a bit tacked on in its present incarnation, with the ability to go and restore it between battles. I like that battles are tactical rather than resource-based otherwise, so perhaps it should be another form of encounter damage instead, like an alternative health bar?

I’ve noticed a very strange bug that isn’t quite an exploit: Switching to the game tab sometimes causes the battle to (mostly) reset. I get new dice rolls, the enemies get their health back and so do I, unless my party member is dead, in which case they stay dead.

I really liked this one! The mechanics are fun, the floor layouts are interesting, and the little bits of lore here and there are interesting. The only criticism I have is that, in Solitude, party members may or may not leave you. On its own, that's fine, but they wait until you take a few steps, so you can upgrade someone and have them immediately leave you two seconds later. This only happened to me once (3 total left tho, with the last two being back-to-back right at the end), but it's worth mentioning.

Really damn good game! Makes me wish there was more of it tbh.

(Btw, at the time of making this comment, I'm #18 on the Hall of Fame. Wonder how much that may change in the next 3 days)

It is a nice game and it feels very polished. Not sure how you got time to polish it like this, that usually takes weeks. 

The dungeons looked ok and traversed good, but they were not really engaging. This game is 90% about the combat so the dungeon is just a canvas to place it in because of the jam restrictions. However it is a more fair use of the dungeon than other games I have seen in this jam. There is some story sanity revival positions and cats etc. That said I really enjoyed the gameplay combat mechanics, it is a nice game to manage the numbers, and there is a lot of calculations going on once you figure out how the system works. The game got very hard in the end, but then very fast my low tier characters got replaced which evened it out. The final boss was a bit of a  anticlimax cause it died way to quickly. I had lots of spare xp but the way back to the assign area was to tedious so I went for the boss anyway. Boss died easier than some of the encounters leading up to it. Maybe have the last room before the boss be an upgrade room. I appreciate the variety of abilities of the characters, it made the thought process wider when thinking up a strategy of how to play. I felt a bit sad for losing some of them in combat. Not sure how I feel about this constant renewal. Think I would prefer to have them fixed and maybe able to revive them instead. Or some way of deliberately swapping them.

The dungeons felt very linear, I didn't have to backtrack anything I just kept going and reached the end. When the enemies attacks the player hp is reduced instantly but before the animation plays out, maybe have this happen at the actual animation hit instead. 

Not sure if this was implemented or not but its nice to have different enemy types use a different skill set and having that fixed. It felt like now the skill set was random as well as what sprite showed up for the enemy.

Anyway Nice entry!

Alright, wow, that’s not how a game jam game should look, play and feel. This is pretty amazing really.

I liked the density of secrets. There was a lot of design around that. And the areas had somewhat different feel in their layout too to reflect their setting. That said the combat system with full health restore made the intensity level quite even / casual and there wasn’t that much of elevated risk from having multiple enemy groups in the same area for example. That said, I’m not really complaining, I feel like the target was a casual strategy dungeon crawler and it nailed that perfectly.

It would be easy to make it much more scary if new party members didn’t automatically come to you after each fight, but again, I don’t think that was the aim.

Equally, not really saying it would be good but that there always was a constant symmetry for all dice options… it could have been interesting if there were 5 members and die value 1 and 6 only mapped to the first and last weapon while all other had 2 so that these could be a little extra special.

It probably made perfect sense, but it was a little obscure upon death, why some came back with elevated level and why some skills remained leveled up while others reset though they had icons that at least looked like what I had leveled up.

The mysterious prompts on getting sanity restored or increasing it out in the world. I liked those, even if I didn’t figure out what they were hinting at. I don’t feel like I wanted or needed to understand them though. They added to the uncertainty and hostility of the world.

There were a lot of nice text prompts too. I read them all, or most of them, and they added nicely to the world even if I often have a hard time to stop and read when gaming brain says explore, fight, come on! But the centered text combined with rolling out made them a bit annoying. I wanted to read at once but stuff kept jumping around until it all was visible. So I’d prefer instant show, some animation of perhaps transparency along the text, or left orienting the text and then let it roll out. Not jumping around text please.

I do have one strong objection though! PET THE CAT, I want to pet the cat. Should almost remove one star because of that :)

But seriously fantastic entry!

Playthrough: https://youtu.be/7ixT153CDvs

"The sapling grows into a tall[...]and die unafraid."

Damn is this polished !! 

I love everything about the game. First thing first, it's super fun to play. Your game from last year was great, and as this is basically the same with a great combat system instead of automatic combat it was even better. Spending your XP is very interesting too, it's very rare that you don't have several cool different abilities you can choose to spend your XP on. Choosing between two new characters is always an interesting decision to make too. Finally I love gaining XP for exploring (rather than all after combat). 

I like these visual asset packs to begin with but you make awesome use of them. The game sounds great too. The writing is pretty cool too. It's very atmospheric (as are the other parts of the game),  all of it, from the papers from the hidden doors to the comments of the characters, which feel appropriate. Also there's a cat, which is a plus. There's some extra cool technical features that are not always a given like manual saving.

There was an extra hilarious part during my playthrough, as I reloaded my game exactly one, near the beginning, to preserve a dead character and when I got back he left basically where he had died.

This game is amazing, thanks for sharing.