itch.io

Thanks for playing! You might want to see my reply to another comment below for a hint/spoiler regarding getting past the faceless statue.

Tbh, I didn't really think of that as a "secret" ending, just one of the standard failure endings.  The "secret" endings involve fgntvat n pbhc naq/be n crbcyr'f eribyhgvba.

I think I fixed this in my local version way back when it was new, but didn't upload the fixed version because I was planning to roll it into an update that never actually happened.  Sorry.

Simple but very polished.  This sort of folksy-inflected imagining of hell is pretty neat; not quite the same as anything I've seen before, but it definitely feels fitting and not totally out of left field either.  As a fan of the "limited visual elements augmenting text" approach, I can see the bones (sorry) of a more game-y game here; introduce some choices into the dialogue, and a suitable twist ending, and you've got something very intriguing.  As is, it's still an interesting experience and I definitely felt a sense of anticipation and mystery as I reached the top, even if it was ultimately a bit underwhelming.   I'm curious what you originally had in mind for if you'd had more time!

Which OS & browser were you using, and what exactly do you mean by "the game played really slow"?  Was it slow to react after clicking on a choice?

The art is quite nice, and the concept is cool. Controls were smooth and responsive.  In practice, I feel like the enemies felt fairly inconsequential because I always died by just running in to something, and as a whole the gameplay felt kinda monotonous.  But there's a lot of potential for some added juice and variety in the enemies/environment/powerups.

A very interesting and unique puzzle game!  I managed to get to the end, although I don't think I ever 100% understood the rules governing the square wave/triangle-shaped slider, so I often had to trial-and-error a bit to confirm which direction things would move, etc.  The graphics are simple but very polished, and the scanline effect is a nice touch.  Good job overall.

I really liked the audio design and the art (great choice of colour palette).  The puzzle mechanics were interesting, although it would have been nice to see more levels.  It feels like it ended just as it was getting started, but I guess that's fairly normal for jam puzzle games. The shadeslugs are cute.  Solid entry overall.

The music is nice and chill, the chameleon is cute, and the tongue-swinging mechanic seems like a fun idea.  I agree with others that the movement was pretty janky and I unfortunately couldn't progress very far, but if you get that sorted out it could be quite a fun & chill game.

The music and the art is really nice.  Unfortunately, without the translation guide it becomes a sort of surreal guesswork game.  I never got told I was wrong, so either I'm a really good guesser or it doesn't actually matter?

I thought the scaling was pretty intuitive and had fun with the first couple of levels, but couldn't figure out the puzzle in the third level, and gave up after I got tired of backtracking.  The music is very nice.

The platforming felt good, but the scaling was very finicky and often felt like it was fighting me for unclear reasons.  The little tiny rectangular mines(?) also felt bit unfair.  The gameplay concept is cool, though, and the art and music are very nice.  I made it to partly through the green area (with the thing chasing you) before giving up.  Solid work overall.

Super frantic and fast-paced, but I was able to kinda get it figured out, maybe? Managed to make it to wave 17 on my best run, but had to stop eventually because my fingers were starting to hurt.  The art was very clean as always, great choice of colours, and very satisfying sfx as well.  Definitely my favourite so far (not that I've played that many so far, mind you)!

Very cute, and super high production value for a jam! The gameplay was pretty simple (beat every level first try), but that's fine for a jam.  The art direction was super coherent, and the narrative/characterization helped add a feeling of variety to the otherwise fairly similar levels.  A very solid entry overall!

Glad to hear that at least one person found the coup ending!

Tbf I did weaken it slightly to "1:1 for some regions, if necessary," so I guess the exact scale in the end is up for debate.

No longer WR, see Florian Castel's comment.

To be honest, I don't really understand what I'm supposed to do gameplay-wise to not get got.  The atmosphere and sound design is good, though!

The ambience is great!  As others have said, it was a little disorienting to navigate; I feel like the very low resolution contributed to that a bit, since it impacts visibility.  Just the darkness, or the low rez, or the maziness of the levels on its own would probably be fine, but all three combined is a bit too much, I think.

I played it through 3 times and got 3 different endings.  Two were obvious losses/deaths, so it makes sense that they ended abruptly.  But I also got what appears to be the "good ending," and it also ended kinda abruptly and anticlimactically, without totally explaining everything.  A bit more closure would be nice.  But you did a good job of providing clues as to how to get there.

(Also, with a bit of backtracking I managed to get past the door that someone was hiding behind in the docked spaceship, and there was nothing in there.  I assume this is a bug?)

Overall, I had fun! Nice classic dungeon crawler experience.

Wow, this is wild.  There's so much content, a truly insane amount of replayability for a jam game.

I managed to win my first run (as Vampire), which took me well over an hour, but I'll definitely have to come back to play some of the other classes & try to beat it.

It's not the first chess-based roguelike I've ever seen (that would be Chogue) but it definitely takes the concept much further.

One complaint I have is that during my first playthrough I feel like I ran into a lot of issues due to rules not working how I thought they would (the little pictures weren't always clear about certain things, the mega-pieces sometimes couldn't move how I expected them too or I had trouble moving them to a place they definitely should have been able to go, etc), but I was still able to win on my first run so it can't have been too unfair.  It also took me a while to realize that enemies never make non-capturing moves, which makes the strategy much easier.  But I understand that making a strong, more chess-like AI would be a big ask for a game of this complexity, especially in such a short timeframe.

The balance seems pretty fair.  There were several levels where my first thought was "wow, how am I supposed to do this?" but then I figured out a way to handle things that worked out fine.  That type of feeling is one of the main goals of a roguelike, IMO.

Overall, an extremely strong contender for the win!

Not entirely sure what you mean by seriously breaking your orientation relative to the game.  Approaching areas entirely sideways or upside down is valid & intended for basically all areas.

Anyways, thanks for playing!

Nice game.  The dramatic irony at the end (seeing the "only" and being able to guess what comes next) is really good, and the atmosphere in general is on point.  The jumpscares don't necessarily land that strongly, but I think that's because they're both predictable and unavoidable.  I think the important characteristic of a "fair" jumpscare is that it's something that could happen at any moment, but that you're also actively trying to avoid, so when it happens it's both unexpected but also in some sense "your fault."  I didn't really get that vibe in this game, since it's mostly pretty on-rails.  That being said, it was still a compelling horror experience vibes-wise, and pretty novel compared to the standard "walking around in dark hallways with a flashlight" itch.io horror game formula.

The gameplay is pretty monotonous (obviously this is deliberate/thematic), although there was one particular moment where it became much more noticeably confusing/disorienting/uncomfortable for a bit.  I'm not sure whether it's a specific area of the maze, or something triggered by time, or if it was like that the whole time and I'm just unobservant.  But the effect was strong, whatever it was.  Good work.

Beat it in 2:18 on my second try.  I'm not that good at beat 'em ups, but I got the hang of it decently well & had fun.  Maybe the regaining of health was a bit too forgiving, but in general I think the balance was good.

The art is great as always, and I love the setting.  For some reason games that take place on a moving vehicle just hit different, even though I know that gameplay-wise it makes literally no difference.  I also like how you used the tutorial setting to establish some backstory/narrative.

Overall, a great game!

The presentation & polish is really good.  I made it to level 18 before deciding that it's 5 AM and I'm too tired for puzzles and should sleep.  Some puzzles seemed easily guessable, others required thinking, but in general the quality was good.  Nice work.

Thanks for playing! This is by far my most niche game, glad at least one other person was able to get the hang of it enough to get past the first couple levels.

ROT13 hint/spoiler for the end game: Gur svany qhatrba unf "uvqqra" ebbzf abg pbaarpgrq ol unyyjnlf, gur nffhzcgvba vf gung ol gur gvzr lbh trg gurer lbh pna gryrcbeg nebhaq oyvaqyl hagvy lbh svaq gur nzhyrg bs Lraqbe.  Pna'g erzrzore vs gung'f qhatrba 8 be abg gubhtu, vg'f orra n ybat gvzr fvapr V znqr guvf.

Thanks for checking out my blog, glad to see a nonzero number of people reading it.  Maybe this is the motivation I need to actually start posting there again.

The Franklin expedition would definitely be a compelling setting for a game!

Surprised it works on mobile!  Here's a ROT13 hint/spoiler if you want: Lbh pna'g trg cnfg gur 5gu punzore, ohg lbh pna rfpncr sebz gur rkcrevzrag ragveryl, juvpu vf gur bayl "tbbq" raqvat.

The repo is now public.

Thanks for playing! If we end up updating it I'll see about adding a toggle option for the background animations.

Very compelling.  The re-contextualisation of familiar religious content into a horror framing is bold & interesting.  The archaic language was a bit off at times (saw a couple incorrect -st /-th endings.), but I totally understand the KJV vibe you were going for and it generally works well.  The atmosphere and imagery are strong, good work overall.

The art and music are nice.  Good steampunk vibes.  I was hoping for a possibility of failure if you make the wrong choice; it doesn't seem to be possible after a second playthrough, but that's ok.  Nice seeing another game that goes beyond standard Ink (this is binksi, right?).  Nothing wrong with standard interactive fiction, of course, but the great thing about Ink is its versatility in other applications as well, which binksi demonstrates.

I beat the game, despite being bad at horror games.  The ambience is really good.  The audio design and lighting work very well together.  The fact that the game still progressed during narration is very anxiety-provoking; the brother crept into my vision while I was still stuck adding ingredients to the bait, which really freaked me out, but I was able to exit the dialogue and run away in time.  It's nice to see Ink being used to compliment a more gameplay-ish game; haven't seen much of that this jam, but it really is one of the great things about it as a tool.

I enjoyed it.  I like how it has a sort of folkloric/fantasy element to it in an otherwise very grounded sci-fi setting.  Not really magical realism, but sort of in that ballpark.  Very cute.  I noticed that at least some of the modifiers (e.g. "+1 temper") had noticeable effects on the narration and outcomes. Even though one ending is obviously the intended one, the others didn't necessarily feel like "bad endings," which is nice.  A solid entry overall.

Thanks for playing! I wanted to add more of a running narrative in the question-answering segments, but ran out of time.

Thanks for playing! We'll get around to posting the repo eventually (gotta double-check a possible licensing issue on some of the audio assets), but the short answer is we used Google MediaPipe, which provides a facial landmark recognition model that runs locally in the browser.   And then just communicated blink events to Godot via the Godot-JS API.  And in ink, I just made choices with the text "BLINK/UNBLINK" which get selected automatically when you close/open your eyes.

It's stated twice in the description: "The inkJam is an annual community organized jam focused on storytelling and narrative games written in ink," and then later "As long as you are using ink in a way or another, you can use absolutely anything."  Plus it's in the name.

"Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?"

Seriously though, I think that line from Blade Runner (which you're clearly referencing, of course) hints at the problems with using a supposed "normal" baseline to decide who is or isn't worthy of scrutiny, which is a particularly relevant concern these days (because of the increasing use of potentially biased machine learning for these sorts of surveillance purposes).  Seems like your game pursues this idea further.  I like it, it's a good use of the interactive fiction medium to make the player consider a particular idea.

This was a pretty fun platformer, albeit not exceptionally innovative.  Not really sure where Ink was used, but I'll trust you.  Definitely fits the theme.

A fun little narrative, which actually has a lot of variety and non-linearity to it.  It has nice chaotic energy, and it's short so you can replay it a bunch and see all the different paths. Very cute.  A bit of a stretch regarding the theme, but that's fine.

EDIT: Ok, I went back and played it some more and found even more content.  This is arguably the most interactive of all the interactive fiction I've played so far this jam.