| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #36 | 3.306 | 3.643 |
Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
I tried to incorporate several themes : the main antagonist and most of the enemies are cosmic horrors or great ancients, the game takes place in ancient ruins, and there is a time loop mechanic that echoes the "infinity/the endless" theme.
I liked the characters portraits, they feel nice. Movement felt a bit unresponsive time to time, think its because a fast tap on a direction does not trigger a movement. Combat was a bit slow imo I think the waiting time between attacks takes to long and rendering the player unable to do anything and just wait.
The reset of the game to the beginning was a nice touch, bit it also meant you had to do same stuff over and.
Anyway, it is a decent game and submission!
This game is quirky and weird.
So I approve.
I fought cats, and mud golems, and abominable affronts to my sanity.
And as a bonus, it let me pick the wizard guy for all three slots.
All the stars.
The game looks nice, and it has some interesting features. I do like the graphics! Unfortunately I had a very hard time playing it. Especially the combat.
My first issue was having the characters organized horizontally while the key mapping was done vertically made it unnecessary hard to remember which key was for who. The progression of showing when the would be ready also didn’t really work on the character portrait(s) with dark background. I think the “I’m ready to do an action” state must be much clearer and the buttons when ready shine and sparkle some. The one button that seems to say you can always and should always press as much as possible is rest. But I guess it also is disabled when the character is disabled? It’d be good if that was illustrated on the button. And the button might also be a bit duller in general until the player actually needs to heal and then shine up to let them know they are about to die. On that note, the word “Rest” sounds like something one does between fights and not during fights, so I kind of disregarded it until the very end of my last attempt.
In part fighting might have been made more working for me if it was a bit slower. And as it was now I was just looking at the lower part of the screen watching the bars and spamming buttons. So I didn’t even notice when one of the enemies died.
At one point I got to level up, and there appeared buttons but then the fighting scene ended before I could do anything.
I also felt like the healing potion refused to heal me when I had characters hurt from previous fight. But the portraits were full health, so perhaps I was mistaken. It did resurrect one of my characters though when I finally got it working. Not sure it was supposed to do that.
The font was neat, but a bit hard to read, so I didn’t get all that it said in the intro. It should probably not auto-progress.
Playing through, I’m guessing the crystals did something. Might be connected to the looping time? But I’m not sure. I’m uncertain what made the time get longer. And since it’s a central mechanic it would probably be good if the player couldn’t miss that. Or if it’s supposed to be a mystery, it could be made clearer that it should be that too.
The looping was… well I didn’t really get the point of it. It caused a lot of repeated traversal akin to backtracking. And that might have been cool if there was some foreshadowing. Like if you through a window could see a crystal in a neighboring room and you could set that as a quest for yourself to reach it but your steps run out so you have to find a way to open short-cuts and prolong your loop time. And there needs to be exciting things happening on the way that you have to repeat.
First time I tried to <TAB> out your game to start recording my playthrough the game just exited. Second time, the game survived but when I tried to get back to it, I got no mouse pointer so I couldn’t start it… so there won’t be any recording unfortunately.
Hope this doesn’t come across as overly critic. I’m not. I think it could be a really neat game that I would enjoy playing very much, I’m just struggling right now.
Thanks for such an in-depth review on what didn’t work for you. It’s a shame you couldn’t record anything, but it’s nice that you wrote your thoughts in such detail.
I agree that the font is quite hard to read. You can actually take as much time as you need to read the story text, you have to click to advance to the next scene. But I will probably be replacing that font.
The potions heal the character with the least health/energy when you click on them or use the shortcut key. When you levelled up, the button that appeared was for a new battle skill, so you didn’t miss anything.
As for what the crystals do, it’s explained when you collect the first and second ones, you normally can’t miss it, it’s an explanatory text that stays on screen for a minimum of 2 seconds and until you move again.
Besides that, I agree that battle is a bit messy, I made the first fight almost impossible to lose to give players time to get used to the controls but that might not be enough. I was too far along development to change anything but I considered making it turn based instead, and I think I will do that after reading your comment and some others 🙂 I will take your precise feedback into account because you make lots of valid points.
About the loop, there is actually some foreshadowing. Every 10 crystals you collect, you will unlock an “exploration power”, such has being able being able to walk on water or being able the traverse specific wall portions. You may see a crystal or path just out of reach and then unlock the corresponding power. The dungeon is built like a mini Metroidvania, so there is some natural backtracking. The loop grows longer the more crystals you collect, that’s the gist of it 🙂
Thanks a lot for playing and trying a few times!
I really liked the combat, old-school feel and the time loop mechanic was well implemented. I really like how many different abilities the characters got and the hand-drawn monsters were greate. It kinda felt like one of those 30 second hero type thing, which is cool.
The movement was a little weird, like I had to keep pressing the button to get moving, it might need some fine tuning there. It's also painfully obvious that some of the art is AI too, which is fine but it just has the grainy artifacts that make it kinda ugly, but comes with the territory these days. Also the monster skulls clashed with the environmental art/tiles so there's some inconsistencies there.
Overall I had fun with it! Good submission!
A super solid entry, despite movement not being all that fantastic (the others said why). The time loop thing has been tried by others in this jam, but so far I like this implementation best, because it allows you to go further and further each time and there's a soft, not hard reset. Combat was decent, art was very good, although there is a dissonance between the environment and the mobs. Good job overall!
I think except the enemies all art is AI generated but that's fine, they look good. I like the old school art and feeling of the game. Movement controls are unresponsive, you need to hit w at leas two times for the player to move and it moves with a slight delay. The enemy sprites on the map an battlescreen are different, i don't like that. Their artstyle is different too. The enemy art is not consistent with overall artstyle and it's sticking out too much. You could have make the battles random like JRPGs. Battle system is fine. But characters like cleric earned the healing ability later on after i did some fights. Is there a levelling mechanic in the game bcs there is no sign of it in anywhere on UI.
Time loop mechanic is interesting but i think unncecessary, it could be incorporated in a better way. Also it makes the game more repetetive and tiresome.
Overall it's basicly a working and good looking Dungeon Crawler game which needs some fixes and improvements. Ah some other posters mentioned it too, closing the entire game when pressing escape is very annoying. You should fix that too. Imagine players hit escape by mistake and their entire progress gone :)
Thanks for taking the time to give your in-depth opinion, there's a lot of useful feedback here!
I agree that the controls need more fine tuning and the graphics could use a good dose of unifying paint, I had to stop somewhere to make progress on the actual game mechanics and progression, but I wasn't fully satisfied either. For the time loop, I also agree with you there, it was an afterthought to fit one of the themes, but I won't keep it if I create a new and improved version.
About making the battles random, I could have done that but I think it would have made the game more tedious, honestly. I placed the encounters so that some are mandatory but you don't have to fight all the time to get from point A to point B, I think the pacing of the game is better for it.
Yes, there is a levelling up mechanic, that's how you unlocked that healing skill for the cleric. The level of each character is displayed at the bottom right of their portrait in both battle and exploration, when you level up there is a popup that appears on the portrait, and there are lots of tooltips. You probably never saw them if you played only using the keyboard, but you can hover most UI elements with the cursor and a brief explanation of what it is will be displayed. To be fair, I'd say there are lots of signs on the UI that the characters can gain levels.
About escape quitting the game, you don't actually lose any progression if you accidentally hit. The game is saved automatically after each battle and each time you collect a shard. I take player time very seriously and wouldn't dare taking their entire progress away 😉
The mage does in fact start with a magic ability, he’s the only character whose base attack consumes energy points (it’s also stronger than a basic sword attack, for instance).
For the cleric I think I will do that, but I will have to carefully rework the game’s difficulty progression (it will take way more than the few hours I took just for that Saturday night). The basic idea for not giving her a heal spell immediately was to make the beginning of the game a little bit harder but make her more useful as the game progresses.
Also she needed a base attack in case anyone wanted to play with 3 clerics. One of the earliest ways to play Final Fantasy 1 in “hard mode” was to pick 4 white mages for your party. That was my reasoning 😁
Thanks a lot for detailing your thoughts, I’ll use this game mostly to improve my new dungeon crawler engine, so your feedback is very valuable!
Really nice oldschool Might&Magic 3 or something like that feeling. Good graphics and enemy sprites, nice music and sound effects with a punch. Seems to be very complete, with the roster selection and everything. The loop mechanic is very interesting.
I defeated both Flubb and Yibb-Tstll.
I have to say movement did not feel that great in this one because you have to wait after you step on a new tile.
However overall the game was super cool anyway. In practice combat consists in mashing the 3 last buttons but when using only the keyboard it controls well, I like that it does not take long and party assembling (now that's my thing), character progression and ridiculing stronger and stronger enemies is fun. Maybe art is not as coherent as it could be (it's far from terrible) but what's certain is that every part of the game looks great, the big intro image, the character portraits, the enemies, the walls (some of the walls like the ones in the Yibb-Tstll area are really cool). Finally as you unlock navigation though gaining new powers I want to say the dungeon is specially good.
Very cool entry, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for your kind words and for playing my game 100% through! Yes, I struggled a bit with input management, this was my first time using a framework instead of a game engine. Now I have a year to refine the controls 😁 I was going for a full hand drawn style at the beginning, but after drawing just the enemies I realized it would eat up most of my time, so I had to stop halfway.
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
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