itch.io

OH!
I'm surprised to hear you haven't played Castlevania, I assumed that's where you got the stairs from, aaaaaaand huh now that I think about it that's probably why I thought they had collision issues! In Castlevania you're holding up to maintain movement up the stairs, pressing up again just moves you further up the stairs (since jump is a button). Since your game tied the up button to jumping, I probably pressed it without remembering it was a jump, assuming I had to hold down up the whole time I was on them... especially because when you "jump" off the stairs in your game currently you don't really gain height, you just fall straight through.

What kind of one button platformers did you play if I may ask? I'm curious to try some, even arcade games like Donkey Kong, Mappy or Bubble Bobble have a dedicated jump button so this perspective is interesting to me

Based, I put parallax in my game too and I think my NES score suffered for it even though I tried to keep it layerless lol. Good luck with the updates!

Thanks for playing, I'm glad it clicked! Making it to the serpent is farther than most (and he is the end boss!)

Lovely game, as expected.

* I really like the yoyo mechanic, it feels smooth, looks accurate, you definitely have a knack for nailing mechanical gamefeel with the pops and spinny jumps.

* Music is such a vibe.

* I love the NPCs and sidequesting aspect. Very Simon. Or Zelda 2? That one guy looks suuuuspiciously like Error lol.

* I like the art overall, the color choices were great, but the buildings felt a little barren in terms of texture. I think it works as a stylistic choice but it did make things feel a little empty...

* I appreciate that the entire game was built on a pun. Everything really tied together with the final boss fight moment lol. I think that boss was also very effective in rounding out the mechanic. Maybe a little on the lax side.

Overall solid game, I think the yoyo mechanic easily is deserving of a full experience, I'd buy it.

I DON'T CARE WHO THE IRS SENDS

Funny game! I also really like sokoban so this idea really vibes for me, it's a really unique take! (I mean I've definitely never seen a rollerblading tax collection knight)

* More on the sokoban, I REALLY like the twist to the formula that the tie adds. It's really very cool.

* Gorgeous environmental art and overall presentation. VERY polished and professional!

* Cutscenes too are excellent that really adds to the polished feeling.

* Some of the chosen effects, while very smooth, are a little outside NES territory. The diagonal screenwipe in particular feels just out of reach of the console.

* Jammin music!

Overall this is easily one of my favorites this jam, fantastic job!! I would EASILY buy a full version of this!

Great entry!

* The music is FANTASTIC, definitely nailed that Castlevania jammin vibe!

* I thought the core mechanics were solid. I really wish I had some kind of duck though. Or maybe if the werewolf dash functioned like a slide.

* I think the tilesets were overall effective, but sometimes the contrast was so high they looked like they were impassable when they were actually just bg. The yellow manor columns in particular, because they match the floors that CAN be walked on they look like walls.

* The character/monster art is all perfect, looks straight ripped from Castlevania.

* Lots of ladders to nowhere, who built this place??? lol. That one at the start of the game that just leads to getting hit by a bat is so funny to me. Would also be nice to shoot off of them.

Nice game overall!

Ambitious game! Going for multiple/secret characters too, that's amazing! Plus they all feel different to play!

* I really liked your stage art! cool color choices. Cool colors on the characters too honestly, I like the rim lighting.

* The movement in this game feels CRAZY fast, you zip across the screen, it's a little hard to process. Well, with Cheetah anyways. I understand Cheetah is... well... a cheetah but still lol. 

* Sometimes it would get pretty buggy in terms of detecting the way the character should face, so neither of us could hit each other, which would make the game unwinnable... (or unloseable really)

* I'm sad there's only music for the title screen, battle music is one of the best parts of fighters!

Cool game!

* I really LOVE the bg art, that is some GORGEOUS rendering for the limited color sets. I think the parallax can't be done (also are those mountains moving on their own? lol) on the NES but the art itself is all fantastic.

* I appreciate some of the small touches, like the READY at the start of the stage, really helps it feel like an NES game. Also the Megaman style room transitions.

* The combat certainly feels NES, with the knockbock, definitely tuned for that, although the jumps are committed ones.

* The camera had a lot of slight lerping whenever you stopped, I'm not sure it was necessary given how tight the frame on the character was.

* I think the HUD was very creative but maybe a little difficult to parse being cramped and unorthodox. I respect the effort though for sure.

* I like the music! Solid pumping beat in the day and a very well suited track for night.

* I ran into some clipping bugs where I got stuck in the wall and died, transitioning back and forth between two screens...

Overall nice entry!

It's good but yknow I think it's a lil gimmicky................................................heh...

No fr tho this is such an awesome game. Beautiful presentation. The art is gorgeous and polished (I love you got the squish sprites on the character), and the mechanic is unique and engaging.

I also wish I downloaded the desktop version sooner cos man a game like this GOTTA go fast. It's the kind of game you wanna get really good at, satisfying and unique movement.

I will say the dive mechanic did not cooperate with my brain often. It's tricky, I think the way you use it to swing spiderman style is very satisfying but there are also times where I'm expecting it to snap you towards the yoyo.

Also the ability to roll on it that's just DELIGHTFUL. Probably my fav game this jam.

Really pretty!!! That intro was so nicely done! Great logo too! Beautiful color choices overall as well!

Platforming reminded me of Mega Man, especially with the tight jumps and dropping platforms. Great distinct enemy variety too.

Great work!

Sick! I made it all the way to Nothing!

* I LOVE the music it's SO funky and well composed. Legit I think this might be my favorite this jam.

*Art is SUPER cute too, all of the animations and designs and even the pause menu looks absolutely stellar with that transition too.

* I uh, don't know what possessed you to include the AK and the car but it was funny lol

I think I would legit buy a finished version of this game, JUST based on what's in this, in spite of how incomplete it is it's really charming.

Just when you thought there were no new game ideas...

this is fantastic! Well designed and fresh!

The art was well executed and had charming characters, the music was great, easy to pick up and addictive!

But please milady hire some more guards 😭

Stellar entry.

* BEAUTIFUL art, fantastic presentation all around. Character/monster art is incredible. The hud and minimap look really good, even. Just a gorgeous gorgeous game. Heck even my nitpicks are basically about it being too cool looking:

* I'm not sure how I felt about rolling, it just felt like it slowed down movement for no real reason, especially since you sit through a message that says 'out of steps' and then an entire bar before it finishes rolling, and then another message and the step number filling up, and THEN you can move again. I'm just tryna make it to the end of a hallway... It's a really neat idea and it looks very clean, but given movement is the thing you do most often I'd opt for a way to fast forward through this sort of thing.

* I feel similarly about the combat, waiting for your HP number to stop moving before you can make inputs, I think it makes the game feel slower than other RPGs I've played (which isn't many tbf) since you sort of just wait there to be able to make an input again. As fun as yu-gi-oh duel number drops a

* I reeeeally like the music, well composed, lots of variety. EXCELLENT battle theme especially.

* The shuffled items was interesting, if nothing else I felt like I had to think a little more and yet process less than other RPG games I've tried, which is a good thing for sure.

* Strange the game over screen just kind of kept playing the battle theme and didn't boot you out... but you had the insight to put quit to menu in the pause menu so no big deal. Given how polished the entirety of the game is, it might be the only part that sticks out

Fantastic game!

Cute game! I'm not very experienced with turn based rpgs but I really like the vibes of this game!

* The text can be pretty overwhelming, there's a lot on screen at once. I think splitting it up into smaller dialog chunks and maybe adding typewriter effect would make it easier to parse

* I ADORE the art, the animated character portraits especially are such a fun touch, and the enemy animations are all really smooth and expressive! The background is also unique and fresh I dig it.

* The music was really spooky. I don't think it was bad by any means but it didn't feel like it quite fit the vibe with the silly characters, especially since it was spooky and tense right off the bat and not a key tense moment. It appreciate that it seems to be dynamically more intense when you get into battle, but I think a whole separate battle theme/whole separate town theme would have helped break it up some too.

* The game was a little difficult in terms of onboarding, I'm not used to this genre of game so some of the stats like Ti/T (I'm guessing the recovery time?) were a mystery to me. Lots of numbers like crits and multipliers and recovery all thrown at you at once, a full party of four right from the get go, a lot of text between battles. Even the first menu you see has an overwhelming amount of options on one screen. Might be the nature of the genre I'm not sure. I can see it working as a vertical slice though.

Nice entry!

Impressive amount of work, 80 monsters? That's so much!

* The music was extremely short / repetitive at only 8 seconds per song, but really I do appreciate having the ability to toggle it actually programmed in since I played this on console

* End of combats felt pretty abrupt, maybe a little win jingle would help. It's very easy to spam attack and skip right past the win/lose messages. Similarly I was shocked when I suddenly died and respawned because the message "cinderkit returns to safety" was very easy to skip through, I thought maybe the game had crashed or something for a moment.

* I miss having distinct sounds for monsters like Pokemon does, I don't know how difficult that is to pull off on NES but that kind of thing adds a lot of character to the creatures

* The pixel art on the monsters is fantastic!

In the end I think it was a cute pokemon clone and doing true NES development is a feat in and of itself, good work!

* I loooooved the music. The instrumentation obviously was way outside the realm of an NES but the instrumentation with the Flamenco guitar and percussion went hard

* The game appears to be quite bugged. I was in the negatives on HP and then would just immediately die whenever anything hit me. The music also suddenly restarts sometimes, and the collision with stairs is pretty finnicky- often I'd just fall through them

* I think the use of dithering on the background is really interesting, I assume you're using that to show the transition from night to day which is a really neat idea. It's very flickery on LCD but I'm very curious what that would look like on a CRT I think it'd be pretty cool. I think the flickering thing could have been solved by stopping it from scrolling/locking it to the camera.

* The game's combat felt like it was BEGGING for a crouch a la Castlevania or Zelda II. Lots of enemies close to the ground (including the rats it straight up looks like I shouldn't even be able to hit), lots of arrows and rocks ripe to duck under. I think it would have mixed up the combat a good deal since a lot of it is standing and spamming stab over and over

* I find it interesting you went with up to jump and left the B button open by default, given it's pretty uncommon for platformers and especially metroidvanias. But I really appreciate the control remap implementation! 

* I liked the character art and animations, especially the purple sickle guy he's my favorite

* I like the way the battle screen is separated into windows, I don't think I've seen a layout like that before that separates your character from the enemies

* I like some of the small detail like your body disappearing under the foresty/tall grass parts of the map

* I'm not very good with turn based RPG combat, I died a loooot. Especially the necrosed soldier

* I think the combat window kind of disappears quickly, there's not really any fanfare when you win a battle it just of vanishes instantly, a win jingle would be a nice addition

* I don't know the genre very well but I think it would help to know the HP of the enemies without having to scan them all every turn, just so I can know how much damage I'm doing and who to attack faster

* I think learning spells in the middle of battle was interesting!

Good job, an RPG is a lot to do and you even added post game challenge!

Great looking game, the map implementation is impressive, and the music is awesome, really love that battle track! I'm not really good with turn based combat rpgs sadly, I kept getting destroyed really quickly...

Thank you very much for taking a vod, with lots of thoughts expressed! Just legging it is what you're supposed to do in this genre!

Good to know about the sound, I haven't gotten any feedback about the volume. Most people just turn down their computer I suppose.

The intro should have been skippable by pressing start, by the way.

I'm not sure I have much I can add that others haven't, the game is really hard, knowing what they could see would help. The bird basically always ruins my run. 😭 I like the idea though and the sound design is nice, I also appreciate that you got a sped up version of the song in there for when they get alerted!

* Took me a hot second to figure out that there was a flashlight meter and that using it all kills you lol. Like Thorrin said though I think it's a scaling issue for me that makes the bar too small. The game is super tiny on my monitor

* I thought the graphics were really nice, the tilesets reminded me of Metroid and the walk animation was cute

* I also like the flashlight mechanic, having a meter that you also use for hovering is rly cool. Killing enemies takes a long time though. But you really gotta take your time and think about what you wanna do I like that

* There is a bug in the collision esp on the ice level, there are a couple spots like this where you can't get through blocks you already destroyed. It doesn't happen every time but often enough you probably will have to start over b/c the only way around it is to hover way up and waste your flashlight bar (see gif)

Overall I thought it was fun and you had some good gameplay variety in there, great job!

Also here to report I died with the first tiny item and then got softlocked and had to restart.

I think the art is fantastic, the areas feel distinct and very well crafted, great color choices and really lovely tilework! 

The music isn't really in the NES spirit, lots of FM / Mega Drive sounding bass and big siney pads... love that crazy bassline in the jungle area tho.

I thought some of the mechanics were very neat, the flame was cleverly done (and the puzzles were tense), the big/tiny portion with the launching was cool! (I might have turned the gravity down a bit just for that portion, landing without taking poison damage was difficult in some parts, I died a very frustrating number of times to hitting poison because of the spring mushroom)

I think some feedback on the spring mushroom would have helped a bit too, at least in terms of knowing when it was going to launch. Maybe some longer buildup so it feels like it's charging a spring up? The window in which it shakes before springing up is very very short. I thought it was a switch at first.

Really nice entry all around! Good luck in MVM!

Helluva single promo! Doesn't pass for an NES game at all but man what an audiovisual flex!

Really funny game lol, I love the presentation and the idea of taking 'Do you know the muffin man' to its limit. Kino game honestly

I hope nobody penalizes you for the voice acting, I think the processing you did sounded a lot like Dirty Harry on NES you really nailed that! Maybe some of the parallax in the beginning would be tough but like I think the rest could be done for sure.

I'm haven't really played a lot of Beat em' up games so I'm not really sure if I know what to say about the gameplay. My only exposure is River City Ransom and the combat felt about par. I kinda felt like I was just mashing and everything came out fine. Also it seems like... some of the enemies just wouldn't attack you? Like if you just stood still they'd surround you and do nothing. The little pie guys in particular

Muffin man remix goes hard🤘

I thought the boss fight was solid, with the barrels

Overall just a great entry!

I don't think I was on my last life, it was very early on. Maybe 3 screens in or so, can't say for sure. It was definitely different from normal deaths because I fell multiple screens down, like collision had just disappeared, the game over didn't happen until I made it all the way past the starting floor. It had something to do with the screen transitioning I think? Sorry, bug reports are only useful if they're reproducible huh 😅 

Bro went CRAZY juicing it up in here!

* It looks cool but definitely some of this isn't possible for NES. The shadows on the sprites are a REALLY nice looking touch but that kind of alpha isn't possible, and there are copious sprite rotations that aren't doable.

* The screenshake IS possible but like MAN is it heavy, every little enemy causes a MASSIVE shake, it neuters the impactful feeling for the bigger guys on top of being a bit disorienting

* The camera also seemed to move around like CRAZY, it did make me a little motion sick. I appreciate look ahead cameras but it flipped VERY far VERY quickly. I also think the constant lerping every time you stop also contributes to the sickness. I think a frame to activate the camera would have probably gone a long way

* Some sfx were missing, mostly hits. There's screenshake on many hits but no accompanying noise to tie it together, it almost makes things like killing the green miniboss anticlimactic in spite of all the juice.

* I wanna say I do really like the aesthetic, the characters/enemies all look GREAT

* I love the core gameplay, the gliding is very fun and there are some really standout moments like the mob chasing and of course Mr. Sun. Also just a good idea for a boss fight all around

* Music was great, nuff said

* Little disappointed when I figured out "extra challenge" was not an actual secret level but just a self-imposed challenge to not use health pickups basically lol

Great entry overall, EXTREMELY polished, maybe TOO polished for an NES game, but great game nonetheless!

Really cool game! Capped it off at 16630 cos i assume it's endless.

I LOVE the soundtrack. Those bitcrushed drums are going hard lol. and the dynamic transitions into and out of the pyramid HIT so well. I'm a little... skeptical this music is possible on an NES given some of the sounds and definite presence of stuff like reverb but it sounds FANTASTIC

My biggest difficulty was not being able to jump while rolling, even though jump+roll was an expected move. Whenever I died it was always a very tight jump.

I gotta say that transition into the pyramid was SUPER impressive, slick and unexpected in a really good way.

NESwise I think you did a great job with the palette limitations and art. The multilevel parallax as it is likely isn't possible and some of the color blending in the pyramid might be too smooth but overall I think it's very doable.

Overall though it's super fun and definitely leaves an impression, great work!!

Really funny and cute game lol! I loved it.

There's some kind of crazy bug that insta-game overs you, like you jump and suddenly go hurtling toward the bottom of the stage and it ends the game... but I only encountered it my first go.

* The NES feel is fantastic except for the sprite rotation on the dead enemies. I'm also not too sure about dithered transitions but yknow it looks cool af.

* The music is a bit short and doesn't loop 😅

* I really like the art! The bg is simple but very effective, great color choices! I was especially impressed with the spiderwebs and small details like the frog blinking on the pause menu.

* The game loop is solid, it feels like a high quality port of a high quality arcade game. (I think the SFX design in the silence also contributed to me feeling that way lol) Also, the wall jumping went a long way.
 * Fellow cheat code implementer!! That's so dope!!!

Super nice entry!

Help I'm too stupid to beat level 2 😭

Like I thought for sure I had to launch the goat up onto the platform but he just immediately runs off of it 😭

Cool game! Here are my thoughts as I played:

* Couldn't start or restart the game with controller rip

* The graphics are beautiful but well outside the NES' capacity. Sprites with alpha on NES are limited to 3 palette colors, bg tiles 4. This is why it feels like a 16 bit era game to some. Dithering wasn't common on NES but I think that's perfectly legal... the true parallax clouds maybe less so. Same for the color blending on the death screen. The scaling and rotation as well on the game over. Most of the later details are nitpicky and honestly I like them outside the context of this jam; but I gotta point them out since this is a jam with an entire category for being anal about NES-ness.

* Similarly the music, I'm a sucker for breaks but stage 3's music is a little hard to believe for an NES lol.

* I like time as a health system but frankly I think it's a bit unintuitive; from a design perspective I think an easier to understand approach might be to respawn the player at a checkpoint, or have a physical downtime to respawn. The difference between an arbitrary 10 seconds being removed from the clock, and an actual natural 10 seconds you need to make your way back.

* Some feedback on time running low would go a long way. Something like the music speeding up or some flashing red somewhere. Maybe even a "hurry up" type track. Many times I would suddenly combust and not even realize time was out lol. The timer glazes over your brain with numbers the way that a health bar doesn't quite. If nothing else a time bar that you can see diminishing would also be helpful, although I understand that's tricky given how flexible the time length is.

* Could benefit from a retry button given the nature of the game. Sometimes I know a run is cooked, I got 20 seconds left and I took a big fall. Esp on stage 3

* The graphics on stage 2 are GORGEOUS but it is a little hard at some points to distinguish what's a wall and what's a bg element. Especially here:

I think because it's all very dark with low contrast. The gems are a good hint though. Also after that segment you're sort of awkwardly placed with the screen moving up and down a lot.

* It's not immediately apparent that collecting gemstones gives you more time, I legit did not realize this until the end of stage 2. Something like clocks/hourglasses would signal better, or having the gems go up into the clock so the players' eyes follow and understand what they do. Gorgeous art tho.

* I like the core mechanics, I think they were pretty well done. I struggled a little getting consistency especially on stage 3 but I think that might just be skill issue on my part. Am I right that your proximity to the orbs when you grab them matters?

I had to stop after the stage 3 rooms with enemies you need to throw at the wall. I worked my way all the way back up there, broke through, saw there was an EVEN HARDER one with the moon, ran out of time and was like alright I gotta come back to this later I'm too bad at this. I would really like to come back and see the boss before jam ends

Sick game but f u guys for the secret fourth boss phase of "u think u win? jk bullets"', that killed me twice lmao

Tense af. I think of the games I've played this is the most authentically NES feeling, especially in terms of the game design. Maybe because it's heavily inspired, but it was executed very well.  Knockback was perfectly tuned, I loved the wall guys and bats' movements, Mr. Bones is just as annoying here as he is in other games. Core mechanic was simple but solid. Some of the level design felt a little repetitive I think, but the boss fight was so engaging I completely forgot about it, def on the edge of my seat at the end there.

Aesthetically it looks great, sounds great, I know y'all got an eye for authenticity and it shows.

My only other thought was about that the second subweapon, I think it's invincibility or reduced knockback or something, it was unclear what that was or how it worked since I was in the heat of it and couldn't even tell I was flashing(?) when I had it since I was amid getting hit. And I only saw it that one time. I expected it to work like the slash / Castlevania subweapons so I think that could have used slightly slower onboarding.

Overall though great game one of my favs for sure!

Nice game!

The theming may have been Castlevania with the subweapons but it felt like I was playing a Mario game (not a bad thing), with the coin rooms and bullets and such lol

* I liked the art on the enemies and character! Cute!

* The lack of music made me very sad. Maybe there is free chiptune music or something somewhere, this game deserved a banger song!

* The rotated pixels when you die are kind of impossible for the NES, tho it's a bit nitpicky. They break the pixel grid and the NES couldn't really rotate sprites so a more realistic approach would have been having it be limited to maybe 4-8 sprited frames. Other than that and the modern particles though I think the game felt very NES!

* I think the secrets were very well placed, discovering them felt pretty natural, I was surprised!

* I liked the patterns you came up with for the final boss, I wish he moved around a little more or had some sort of introduction, I was surprised when he was the end of the game.

Nice entry overall, good work!

* AWESOME art in the cutscenes, well done on the art overall really!

* Dialogue really needed a skip / hold-to-speed-up button / faster type time overall, ESPECIALLY because the game constantly kills you and expects you to start from the beginning. Also for some reason I got a bug where the game wouldn't start. I sat through the whole opening cutscene like 3 times and then didn't even get to play the game without refreshing the page aaaaaa

*INSANE dash effect, I love that, I'm not sure I've seen a dash effect that looks quite like that but it might be one of the best I've seen period. Probably the only thing you have that's too strong for the NES but who cares it looks sick af

* I think given the puzzley nature of the game, you probably could have made it so that last heart jump doesn't kill you until you land, it makes the final heart sort of pointless and it felt unfair when I jumped and could have grabbed a heart that was right there.

* I don't think having lives were necessarily given the extraordinarily high death circumstances and given the game is more of a puzzle platformer. I do really appreciate the generous checkpoints though. Especially in the later stages of the game it started to feel like Celeste tier difficulty but with the risk of starting the game from scratch, the game is hard enough as is!

* Despite that I liked the existence of the 1ups, they felt like extra challenges.

* The music was a bit repetitive: 40 seconds is maybe a bit on the short side, but also it feels even shorter than it is because the first 15 seconds or so repeat before the key raises for a brief moment. I think a B section with a different idea from the A section would have helped a lot. It was also slow and vibey which didn't quite match up to the spooky castle or the constant peril I was in. Some extra instruments could have helped too, it's only the drums and one channel, you could definitely squeeze some bass in there at least! I also find that having extra instruments makes extending tracks easier, because you can let the bass play by itself for a bit before adding the main melody, or add instruments one at a time. Mad respect though, doing every aspect of game dev is a lot of work!

* I really like the idea of the game, and when I discovered I could jump on skeletons I was like wow, that is such a great idea dang

* Because the jump button basically immediately hurts you, I think it would have been helpful to have the buttons written on screen. Many a time I was trying to think of what to do next and then I was like heck... which button was jump again... I only need to dash here I don't wanna press it on accident...

* I liked how you taught the player! I think the disappearing blocks were onboarded perfectly!

* You got a lot of great variety in here!  By the time I got to the autodash arrows and the cure I was like wow you've really taken this concept places.

I really really liked this game but god it's just too much to be sent back to the beginning... I made it to the part that was essentially a cage of spikeballs, I hope it was near the end. It was very tense up until that point (and obviously at that point). 

For a first public game and first jam game I think you did an incredible job!!

Really hard but really cool game! It made me think of Blaster Master or maybe a procedural Zelda.
* INSANE music, that bass is HEAVY wow. Definitely my favorite I've heard so far, talented chiptune sounds. Makes me want to pick up LSDJ again. If anything it might be TOO jammin' for a game about surviving brutal alien worlds lol.

* I think the ship could have used some feedback to tell you were accelerating, like some fire coming out of the end when you press to accelerate, since it's hard to tell you're actually moving given the nature of space having no tiles to ground you.

* I strongly think the space map should have wrapped like Asteroids rather than have invisible walls, it's very hard to tell your movement in space to begin with so it's unclear you're hitting a wall, particularly if no planets are around. If nothing else some sort of asteroid belt or something blocking your path and grounding your vision would have helped

* There's no fanfare or feedback when you pick up a thing on the planet... I feel like I picked up things that looked too big to be items and didn't even know what they were.

* You spend a lot of time walking through very similar rooms completely lost... I think it could have benefited from a minimap so I at least stopped retreating ground lol. Maybe it'd kill the lonely worlds vibe, but I swear I lapped through one world 10 times before finding the room with fuel in it

* I think the art is superb, definitely at home on the NES. The bg tiles were a little bare, but the creatures and character were awesome; tilesets looked cool; space, logo, sun look sick affff. Great vibes.

Very cool entry!

* I love love LOVE the characters, the dialogue is so charming and fun!

* The game also looks great. Maybe a little mixely here and there with the UI elements like text and character portraits but the presentation overall is very nice, I like the way the water was done, the ship, the characters, the fishing line, it all looks great.

* The actual gameplay itself really confused me. Sometimes there were arrows, sometimes there weren't, sometimes a fish would come and escape without any arrows ever appearing, sometimes there was music and sometimes there wasn't. I like the idea of centering it around rhythm, not sure if it was buggy or if I didn't quite grasp the execution, was it half regular fishing game half rhythm?

* The book looked really good, I loved the page turning animation, but why was it mouse only? I couldn't figure out how to turn the pages for a while because it was not an NES control and not mentioned, so I thought the common fish were the end of it at first lol. Like ah, I got the hook, I guess that's all of them, where's the dragonfish LOL

* There was also a minor bug with the ship music (great track btw, mad respect the vibe was nailed) not coming back consistently. I think it only comes back when you fail a fish.

* I gotta say I am DEVASTATED that there's no proper ending, I was...heh... hooked!! I understand a cinematic ending is a lot but man. The characters don't acknowledge or really explain anything in the end. I thought the storytelling was really cool otherwise, was always looking forward to the next item to pull up.

I'm terrible at minesweeper but I gave it my best shot lol

* INCREDIBLE music but definitely waaaay higher fidelity than a 32 bit console let alone 8 lol. It's like a Jake Kaufman remix album or something.

* Aesthetics are fantastic, it's very polished and juiced to a tee. I think it would work on an NES too minus the volume of the particles.

* The movement of Sweepy was very frustrating (probably due to my playstyle see below)... sometimes I would be pretty sure about one or two but there was no rhyme or reason to the order the car went so I just threw away perfectly good runs on some bomb in the corner of the map. I wish he was a little more predictable, or there was another layer on the game where you plotted the sweeping route. OR maybe he has a limited number of lives that I need to repair, punishing me for playing recklessly and fitting with the rest of the store that I have too much money for.

* I found having to mine the squares with gold on them twice as unintuitive at first. Maybe if the squares looked more like ore that you had to mine? With regular rocks you want to try and put flags there and find they don't work so you try mining them, but with gold squares there's obviously no mine, so it took me a bit to get clued in that it was free money.

* Sometimes I would start a level with 0 flags and not even notice? Not sure if bug

* The mechanical purpose of the rocks/pickaxe didn't really work for me, probably since my playstyle was weird. I was doing a lot of short "just get some guaranteed coin and get out" runs rather than trying to clear the screen, because it's safer for my lives that way and there's no real penalty other than my time. I always had a huge surplus of pickaxes. At worst I'd lose one heart and 2 coin is a pretty measley price especially as the level rewards go up.

* I loved the idea of taking both the mining and sweeping parts of 'minesweeper' and transforming them into something new

* I thought the boss fight was really neat too! Adding a boss to minesweeper is not something I ever thought I'd see in my life but it works lol.

Great entry!

Wow that's some high praise, thank you!

Thanks for playing!

Yeah the freezing is frustrating. I really need to nail down what's going on with web stuff.

Also you should be able to hold down B and have it rapid fire, like in shmups and later contra games, so machine gun is not a problem!

Damn I suck lmao

The knockback is intense but I think the bigger problem you feel with it is how intensely strong the gravity is. You CAN NOT react to save yourself. Buuut I think it fits what you're going for still. 

I think the presentation is great, I think the graphics work well and the CRT shader was nice

I think the height being tied to your distance was a good idea, it reminds me a lot of the SMB3 P-bar; and likewise I think it would have benefited from the character having visible acceleration or something like the p-bar to show your height potential.

Also yeah when you discover the tech with boosting through floors the game becomes SUPER fun, I know it wasn't intentional but yeah. I can't get a score as low as whoever got sub 1 minute tho that person is cracked

THIS IDEA IS AMAZING

It's like a sampler tray of every curse a roguelike game would have, it's shockingly fun considering those are supposed to be the part you don't want lol. Like most I peaked at floor 11

The feedback I have:

* It feels strange that diagonal shooting is not allowed, only because diagonal movement IS and the cursor points that way. My brain definitely expects bullets to go the direction the arrow faces

* I wish the current curse had been displayed at the top of the screen instead of needing to press a button for it, sometimes I would be going too fast and misread which curse I got and mess up; and there's some spare room at the top of the screen, at least to fit some keywords I think, even if the bars that sometimes show would be moved

* The graphics have quite a few mixels, like the UI Cursor and hearts. The enemies are also a different resolution from the Xs on the floor, the bullets, and possibly the main character. It's probably technically legal but I think the game would look a little more cohesive+NES accurate if all of the pixel resolutions matched. Also the player's direction cursor has diagonal pixels that's definitely not possible lol.

* One of the instruments sounded like it was being played through a speaker for some reason? Overall solid track though

* Great gameplay variety, there's really a lot of mechanics in here, it's awesome! Every room is a whole new strategy! Parry in particular is fascinating I don't think I've ever seen a bullet parry lol.

* 3 lives is tough as NAILS, especially on higher floors, even though you heal on perfect rooms. I wish when you got +1 heart on a full health bar it added a heart or maybe a piece of a heart or something. Or maybe if it was an option to get an extra heart container in the upgrade rooms, I didn't see any if there were

* It's small but I will say I appreciate the downtime inbetween floors, it's enough time for me to reset my brain after coming off of a inverse control. It works better than if it had been rooms side by side.

Really fun entry overall!