itch.io

It's very cute and has a lot of nice little stories to tell to flesh out the personalities on the train in a realistic way.

I'm probably missing something, but I didn't much get the point of the die rolling whenever I was helping anyone and whether that really affected anything or not. I was able to complete tasks just fine even if I did roll a lot of 1's so I guess I might have gotten a "bad ending", but that's not readily apparent.

Nice entry and an interesting design.

It's a super polished little narrative that varies things up nicely and doesn't overstay its welcome.

The only thing I had an issue with is that I wished the enemies had the same light outline that the main character had so that they could also stand out from some of the backgrounds when they needed to. I literally didn't even see this guy the first time until he stood up and put his gun in my face, lol.

Overall a really good execution that feels quite good to play.

I enjoyed the very straight-forward nature of the puzzles and the introduction of the puzzle mechanics over time. The game starts off super strong with the striking visuals of the crash and the awesome soundtrack really creating the vibe.

I found myself wishing that the complexity/difficulty ramped up a bit faster since a few of the early levels felt a bit like filler since they didn't really introduce anything new or any of the things that I'd seen previously in combination with each other. I also ended up with a soft-lock scenario when I was supposed to stack the idol and a barrel and ended up putting the idol up higher to get hit by an arrow that knocked it out of my reach to get it back, lol.

Overall a very good execution on a solid concept.

The whole thing just oozes character and the color palette selection is right on the nose for the experience.

I would have liked to have some stronger use of either the pink or the white to highlight things in the path as good/bad so that players could have just that much more warning and agency in how to react to things. A lot of the objects quickly blur into "just more pink things" when the speed really ramps up as it is right now.

Overall an awesome entry with a true focus on fun and execution.

Excellent art, audio, and combat design!

As others have mentioned it would be helped a lot with some form of map or compass or other device for helping players navigate the dungeon and feel less dumb if/when they get lost. Even something as simple as some specifically placed blood marks on the wall to help people landmark their location in a couple spots would greatly improve the accessibility of the experience.

I quite liked the enemy designs since they all felt unique and challenging in their own way, but once you got used to the enemy patterns they were very beatable with less tension each time.

I greatly enjoyed the novelty of the story and the interesting twist on movement mechanics.

The boss fight felt a bit out of place to me. It was the first time that the concept of having health and taking damage had come into play and while I was decent enough at getting through the levels leading up to the boss I felt often that the movement was either unresponsive or too unwieldy to feel like I had a lot of agency in dodging the boss attacks. That feeling is made worse when the only place I can damage them is the location where I'm least likely to dodge their attacks since I'm directly below them. A possible quality of life tweak to that fight specifically could be just having buttons or something else to interact with on the opposite side from the respective boss that it affects so that the fight makes me bounce back and forth to opposite sides rather than sit in a very disadvantageous position to try and finish off the last remaining boss.

Overall a nice idea to break the typical platformer mold and a very good execution as well.

A very solid platformer that does a lot with only a few things on screen at a time.

I quite liked the used of positive/negative space and color when entering the cave with the bat creatures. I somewhat wish there was some other audio music loop that played after I reached the top of the tower each time just to have a break from the main loop and signify the level completion, but overall a very solid entry.

It's an interesting idea and a unique combat mechanic for sure.

It feels like you could tweak the combat setup a little bit for some quality of life improvements. If the enemy die had some shake animation for 2 seconds or so before they changed so that it didn't feel as sudden then players could better judge when to approach. If the enemies also progressed in die value in a linear fashion (1->2->3->4->5->6->1) then players could know what value they're looking for on themselves rather than feeling cheap-shot if the enemy switches quickly away from the value that I thought I needed.

Outside of minor gripes like that it is a very solid entry, well done!

Nice boss rush execution. I appreciated that each boss really felt like their own unique flavor with their own unique style of attacks. The only gripe I have about the gameplay is that I wanted more bosses to fight, lol.

Audio would also really help with ambiance and boss cues as well, but overall a very nice entry.

Nostalgic on multiple levels. I don't think any kid with a gaming system from back in the day would have trouble relating to the plot on this one, lol.

The mechanics were well organized and I appreciate the state adjustments based on previous attacks to make a turn-based battle system feel deeper than spamming the same action several times. Isometric is always tricky to feel good controlling with just 4-directional D-pad setup, but the sliding on the walls was very helpful to keep me from getting stuck.

Overall quite well done.

It's an interesting take on the theme to let the player explore their options and decide how they'd like to use what little agency they have in their fate. 

I do think that it could use a little quality of life tweaks to help the gameplay feel less slow and drawn out: reducing the walk distance to the fish, reducing the number of times I need to press a button to get through text prompts, and/or putting the timing somewhere on the screen at all times so that you don't need to keep reminding the player whenever they do anything.

I also almost completely missed the entire shopping experience because I thought I would just need to stick it out on the dock or going back to the fish so a push for players to go into the shop and at least look in there would be helpful to make sure players realize their options.

Overall quite nostalgic and a nice entry!

Great vibes from all aspects of the presentation and the idea definitely feels original. Well done.

I had trouble wrapping my head around some kind of strategy to try and "play better", which I personally value in games so that players can get a sense of accomplishment when they figure out how to be better at the thing. Each slot ends up being so randomly selected that it's hard to think of a way that players could take actions that better accommodate for things not landing the way they'd like.

Overall a great entry that gets right to the point and presents itself well.

Thank you so much!

Sorry for the "900's Score Bug". I'll try to have that fixed quickly after the build is able to be updated when the jam wraps up, but it has to do with dynamically trying to figure out the best value for your current combination of Ace's (which it obviously doesn't 100% get right every time, lol).

Top marks in basically every category.

I only regret that I pretty much only ever bought 7's once I realized that I had to put the icons onto the slot machine after they were purchased. It made me not want to try the other things until the game pushed the issue on me and made me feel the "need" for more power. I wish I had more time to run back through it more and play with some of the other toys, but absolutely a great entry here.

Good survivors-like and a great implementation of the theme in the context!

As others mentioned, the player hit-box seems big so it's finicky to try and get close enough to attack enemies without getting touched. Feels like there are other vectors that you could also play with for player scaling: radius that the bats circle the player, enemy projectile speed, shield that regenerates, etc.

Overall great work!

Cool premise.

I think it could benefit from some quality-of-life edits to really help players avoid frustrations from missing specific events when they're off the screen. Things like a timeline or clock for each run-through of the day would help players figure out when they're supposed to be at what spot. Super extra effort types of things would be markers on the timeline if players had witnessed an event on a previous run-through or little icons on the edge of the screen that hint at "something is happening over this way" to help players shift their focus if they're paying attention, but that's likely getting into the weeds of extras and might take too much away from the intended difficulty.

Great work!

Great art, audio, design, game flow, balance, and so much more! 

There isn't really much to critique so I'll just say that it would "be cool if" there were caps that allowed players to have an effect on the enemy attacks. Things like decreasing their chance to hit or the damage they dealt to allow for builds that debuff in addition to the buffing synergies that you already have in the game.

Excellent entry and excellent work!

It's a good foundation, but I feel like it could use more options for the player to interact with it than just push the button to roll again. If there were ways for players to change the dice or ways to earn more dice or ways to take risks that would let me win bigger but possibly die then I would feel more engaged as a player.

Sorry to hear about the input issues on the item selection screen. I hadn't experienced that problem while testing the game, but there are definitely a bug or two that others have found (like hand values in the 900's like you mentioned) so I probably overlooked something somewhere.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

Thanks for playing and the bug report!

A hand score in the 900's is likely a bug with the math used for figuring out which value should be used for the different Ace cards you currently have in the hand. I need to revisit that function to figure out where it's failing out, but appreciate people finding it so that I can tidy things up, lol.

There's a lot of nice themeing across the entire experience with each suit having their own flavor of bad luck.

Once the player gets scaling it felt like I could always stay ahead of the enemy scaling though and only the Hearts blood tax or Clubs enemy speed even had a chance of killing me. The Diamonds attacking me turned into extra XP most of the time in addition to the money as long as I kept my damage up to one-shot them and the boss from the Spades kinda turned into a free boost of XP since I could 2-shot him and not get hit by his charging attack.

Overall a really good execution and a fun game. It felt nicely balanced for a jam entry to let people have more chance of seeing the full experience so if people find it "too easy" then I think it's currently in a good spot, lol.

Very clean implementation, visuals, and audio. It also uses the theme well and stands out from other games mechanically.

If I had to critique anything, I'd say that the pace of the game can drag a bit when you get a lot of failure blocks in a row or a bunch of TNT basically stopping your progress. You get enough money to keep going most of the time so the balance of the game seems good, but the novelty of the slot machine roll wears off and it feels more like a chore over time having to wait for the slots to finish. If I could just speed up the slot roll animation that would give me an option to avoid that feeling once I'm already into the game.

It feels like a good setup and a nice start, but probably needs more push towards a final conclusion.

If the black hole were expanding over time then it would feel more like a high-score challenge to try and get as much of the 'E' resource as possible before being inevitably eaten or if the 'E' resource allowed you to scale in some way or open an actual escape from the area then it would be a race to finish your job before running out of time. If that's possible then I totally missed it and that's on me. Right now it's fun to just go around collecting the stuff, but you lose a sense of purpose after a while and I honestly had to hunt down the singularity my second time through after finding it by accident my first time, lol.

There is some quality sprite work in this. It is pretty easy to mess up and need to start over so I would have appreciated the ability to skip through cutscenes since I had already seen them at least once or more.

It's a nifty way of playing with Sudoku. I got a bit lost towards the end of the puzzle and ended up falling short due to being tired in late hours, but I can attest that the similar symbol highlights whenever you're over a given symbol were super helpful in-game feedback to run through my logic easier.

Has a very Gameboy platformer vibe to it! The nut shell helmet is quite cute and really plays into the baby nature of the character.

I definitely struggled with the difficulty of figuring out the launching mechanics as well.

It feels like the bombs should have more of a timer/fuse after they've hit the ground that has a lot of feedback so that players have a couple seconds to get into position for a proper launch, but really feel the time pressure once the bomb is on the ground.

Nice little back-story setup and a very cute presentation.

It's an interesting take and a nice challenge at the same time. 

It feels like there's room for playing around with the speed of the run vs the speed of each of the player characters: it's difficult to truly react for both characters unless you set them each on opposite sides of the stage to let Joe blast across if he needs to or you do a quick dodge if there's something on your own side. If the dog were faster and the scroll of the level were slower then the game could turn into much more of a reaction steering game rather than a setup-and-side-swap type of experience. Either way honestly works, but it's worth bringing up in case that was or was not your intention for effective player behavior.

It's a clean design and the pieces show a lot of promise (art, music, sfx, etc.). Keep doing more jams and you'll get better at coming up with more content or working with others to do just that.

It did feel like a natural progression of mechanics would be a level with a jump into a glide rather than each of them in isolation, but each level served as a good proof-of-concept all the same.

It's a great entry for one of your first projects and the fantasy is quite fun from the beginning.

As others have mentioned, having a score meter for distance or time before you die would be a great way to give players enough incentive to go for more runs to try and beat their high scores and really round out the experience.

It's a very solid runner and the ability to quick-fall really does add some depth to the mechanics once you realize that it's possible. 

I quite liked the horse-shoe pickup, but found it odd that it wasn't used more than the one time at the beginning of the run. It feels like that's a great tool for giving players a little breather in the tension if they know where to look for it.

It initially comes off as possibly a top-down action type of game, but quickly starts to feel like power wash simulator types of vibes: pretty calming and pleasantly slower paced.

I quite like the vacuum audio even if it doesn't sound particularly Gameboy in nature, lol.

The full screen mode option is enabled for the app on itch, but the exact resolution for the game is currently set in the build. So you're able to click the button to go full screen with it, but the game isn't currently stretching to fit different resolutions as it's locked to the exact dimensions of the window.

There's definitely Balatro inspiration across a lot of the game (especially the tutorial section, lol).

Thanks for playing!

It's definitely slower-paced than a lot of other games that are made for jams, but it definitely has its appeal. 

The art is excellent, the music is ambient and appropriate, and the narrative is actually pretty engaging with a lot of character to it.

If I had to criticize something, it would be nice to have the cursor position on each screen initialize to the center of all of the button options rather than the top-left corner. I had to wait for the slow cursor movement to get from the corner down to the buttons a lot with all of the inputs necessary to complete the game.

It's well executed, well polished, and from what I can tell well balanced as well (so many wells, lol).

I felt a little like my actions didn't really have much consequence as the game played out: I would eventually beat the boss as long as I just kept hitting the button to buy either thing. Having said that, it did feel good to see the cards grow in strength and the in-game feedback was great both visually and mechanically so there are definite merits to the design.

Thank you for catching the bug with the scoring display.

I was on the fence with some of the modifiers, since a few of them are arguably detrimental like you said. I decided to keep them as they are right now at least for the jam entry since it's a bit "unlucky" to get those modifiers as options rather than some of the stronger options.

Sorry about the bug when trying to skip items.

Thanks for playing and the feedback!

An interesting take on the classic brick-breaker. The ball seemed to bounce a little awkwardly at a couple points and ended up shooting straight down after I got a Fastball and Inverted controls so it's possible to feel like the game gave a "cheap shot" kill, but overall it's well made.

Short and sweet little platformer. 

It was tough to make the mental connections between the things that I was doing and the events that opened the path further for me.

I had to reset the game a couple times because I missed the bomb throw and couldn't get a new one without starting the game fresh. Other than that it's a pretty cute little platformer with some nice audio.

An excellent demo that could easily turn into much larger puzzles with more inter-connected interactions.

Since the later interactions only happen after several seconds, it would be nice to have some kind of fast-forward option for testing after trying a guess or two.