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Interesting take on a cookie clicker, and it's strangely hypnotic! I was clicking in time with the rhythm for more than 6 minutes, pretty decent for my old-man brain. Don't think I ever worked out how to score the "horn" clock mind.

It's a rare case of a timer with narrative and mechanical justification, and it doesn't add pressure. Great stuff!

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of games with timers. Artificial pressure, and sudden failure that you can't really do much about. I think that in most cases having timers for timers sake is a little bit lazy. You can sometimes justify them with more context, and you can build them into the core mechanics in clever way. Mostly though, I think they're not great game design.

There are a ton of other ways you could interpret the theme. Count (as in enumerating a sequence) Down (as in broken or offline) for example. Countdown was a popular TV quiz show in the UK too...

Anyway, thanks for playing and reviewing!

I think the ability to skip levels is almost essential in a Jam context (assuming you have 'levels' in your game). If you've made content, you want people to see it really. Given how little time people have and how many games there are, and my own behaviour, I know how likely people are to keep trying a level they aren't beating easily.

Thanks for the kind comments!

The game is about figuring out an approach that doesn't go over. Sometimes it's impossible, sometimes it's skillful, sometimes it more luck based (eg, the last level).

Thanks for the kind words!

It actually runs really well on mobile, although it wasn't specifically designed for it. It's a bit fiddly trying to grab the smaller things, and your finger tends to be in the way.

Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks for your kind words! Glad you enjoyed it.

Great extension of the basic Sokoban mechanic! It's a great implementation too, and wrapped with an interesting narrative! So much work has gone into this, it's impossible not to be impressed.

Great work!

This is an almost perfect entry! Fits the theme, simple to grasp, juicy, clean presentation (Shapes, right?), unique idea...

Only improvement I can think of is to let people explore all the levels. I got to a later stage that I couldn't easily solve, and would have loved to be able to skip forwards.

Still, absolutely top notch. Congratulations!

Interesting concept, too chaotic to be much fun. Also, don't require people to read a huge wall of text to know how to play. They just won't. It's a games jam where well over 10k games are made. You have to convince people in about 5 seconds that your game is worth their attention!

Well done for getting a finished game entered, that's no mean feat in itself!

Lovely Win95 slice of life! Really nails the "this computer is dying, save what you can" vibe from ~30 years ago. Beautifully presented, fairly unique idea (although it does remind me of the high-stakes admin-under-pressure from Papers Please). Not sure I'd call it fun... Funny perhaps?

I really didn't enjoy Papers Please either. That doesn't mean they're 'bad games'. Just not for me.

Excellent entry nonetheless, I applaud your effort!

So much promise! Great idea, great presentation, settings, title animation, fit for the theme... But the gameplay is too frantic for me. I often failed to notice new rockets appearing, and couldn't keep track of the fires moving along the ropes. I'm probably just too old for this style of game, but I also feel you could have introduced new rockets with a clear sound, maybe a little movement - they could fall in perhaps and stick in the ground. Also, would be nice to have the fires give a little tell before they spawn.

It's still a wonderful achievement in 4 short days, of course! Just getting a project out at all is an achievement, let alone such a polished and unique one.

It does actually run on mobile. The design doesn't exactly work, essentially your finger is too big and covers up the thing you're trying to move! Also, no keyboard means you can't easily restart levels etc, but that could be easily fixed with a few buttons.

Interesting, but not balanced all that well. I love the feel, presentation and sounds, but the core loop is has a couple of flaws. First, when you run out of shots, you have literally nothing to do but wait. It might have been interesting to add some sort of melee mechanic so you had something to do. Also, the enemies don't drop enough gold for the upgrades at first. So it takes a while to scrape together enough gold to buy extra bullets, more damage etc. I played until I had the max 4 shots, and a damage up. I was able to kill all the enemies with a single well placed shot, but then had to wait for them to beat up the chest to continue.

I couldn't see the point of making the 'tower' have more health. That would just slow the game down even further. The other upgrades made less sense too. And if I were to save enough to get the double gold, what is there to incentivise me to keep playing beyond that?

It's a wonderfully ambitious game to attempt in a Jam. It feels great, I love the excessive knockback on the shotgun. It's just challenging and engaging enough during combat. But the core loop doesn't work from a player's perspective.

I'm pretty sure there's a good game in there somewhere, just needs a little bit of tweaking to find it.

Thanks. I totally get the reference to Pikuniku there too, that's a great game. I didn't actually have that in mind when making mine though. I probably had my entry from a few years ago, "Reversegle" in mind, if anything.

Thanks, I enjoyed your game too!

I think if I were to play this outside of a jam context, I'd like it as part of my daily puzzles (Wordle, Waffle, Strands etc). It would take a full rewrite to make it the 'same' for everybody that day, and to strip the presentation back. But I really think the central mechanic and concept would work pretty well.

Great concept, and lovely presentation! Kinda weird gameplay. I understand that the "meteorite" changes colour according to what it wants, but giving it what it wants seems to explode it anyway sometimes? I think the main problem is that I can't distinguish the colours well enough. Seems like a few different channels of communication would work well. It's quite expressive as a character, you could have augmented the colour messages with what it does with its eyes, how fast it's shaking, is it pulsing vertically, shrinking and growing...

I never got to the end of the time limit without blowing it up by accident at first. I realise that's just to satisfy the theme, but I'd still have appreciated an option to turn it off. I dislike being arbitrarily put under time pressure. It stops my critical thinking and makes me panic the first few times! Only on my third run did I actually examine the environment for clues.

Also, for us old guys, we'd appreciate an option to invert the mouse controls for look up/down. When I first started FPS gaming in the mid 90's, the norm was completely opposite to what it is today. I spent half of my time in your game looking straight up or straight down! I mean, you have a settings menu, and it's just an "if (inverted) look the opposite way", right?

I hope I haven't over-criticised above. I actually rated you very highly, despite my niggles. I'm hugely impressed at what you've achieved in just 4 days...

I kinda love this! Great concept, probably not totally new, but what is these days? It puts a lot more action into regular 2D golf games than having to wait for the ball to come to a complete stop, and the level design leans heavily into that mechanic.

I got to about level 7 before it got too tricky for my ageing brain and failing mouse abilities made me stop. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it up until then. I think I could have completed that level if I'd persisted, but there are tonnes of other games to play...

Juice was expertly done. Adore the sounds of the game (except the background wind - too loud in the mix for me, especially as I didn't see any wind mechanics in the parts I played), the stretchy ball etc. Slo-mo when you're holding and aiming your next shot is great, although not quite slow enough for my skills!

I totally get that the stroke limit is there to fit the theme of the jam, but it might be better with no limit. Just do your best, as in regular golf. Maybe a stroke limit that's much more generous would help?

Nicely done!

Love it! Great concept. Looks intimidating and overwhelming at first, but I like the way it's not about mathematically subtracting from a few million to zero at all. It's about waiting for the better cards in the later rounds to 'cheat' the individual digits to zero. I played it 4 times, and opened the safe on all of those occasions.

My main criticism is that the background 'music' (ambience?) is painful. It definitely give an edge of suspense and tension, but it's just too painful for me. The other sounds and the rest of the presentation are excellent though.

Minor criticisms include the overpowered "Set all odd to 0" and its "even" counterpart. I once got both in the same run, that is the ultimate easy mode! Also, I'm not sure if there's a minor resetting bug. It seemed on my first run to pick low quality cards that made it look like an impossible task. Then in subsequent runs I'd start with some of the more powerful cards in my hand. Maybe the shuffle isn't doing quite what it's supposed to?

Anyway, a little balancing and I'd play this game as a Daily Puzzle for sure!

Thanks, I'll take a look at your entry in a bit.

Thanks, I'll look at your entry in a bit

Just read the blog. I love how seriously you've treated this seemingly trivial game. You've thought it all through, done the hard work and the results speak volumes! My attempts at multiplayer have been rather less robust. Perfectly serviceable for the volumes the received, but wouldn't stand up to a serious amount of traffic.

Pretty standard platformer, with a tricky time limit. Reminds me a bit of Super Meat Boy! Both have huge sawblades, and I'm pretty terrible at them!

Movement is a little glitchy. I got teleported to the top of a few ledges, and it didn't register my wall jump in a few places. I get that you can only jump off a new wall.

Do we really need to see the entire tower scroll by each time we run out of time? Making that skippable would have been a nice QoL addition.

Still, great achievement in the time! Just finishing and releasing is a huge achievement!

Really ambitious for 4 days! I liked the concept, narrative and vast tech tree, although I kinda ran out of upgrade options by my 5th or 6th attempt. I'm not sure if it was laggy, but it felt a little sluggish for me. I'm not really sure what I can do better or worse with my seed placement.

Interesting effect on the background, but it was a little distracting!

Great effort for 4 days. Just finishing something is hard enough.

Lovely little puzzle game. Not too taxing, which is great for my post-jam state! I love the way you stop the action , music etc when hitting spikes or running out of steps. Excellent tonal shift!

I tried something a bit like this a couple of Jams ago, but I made it too complicated and nobody played it. Congratulations for making a simple idea so compelling! Not easy to do at all, especially in a few short days.

I really hope you enjoy my game! Please feel free to leave a review/score.

Weird and wonderful presentation, and a very creative idea! Love the short looping video clips giving little dribbles of narriative.

Excellent to get this done in four days, nice work!

Neat concept. Quite hard mind! I'd like to be able to see a bit more around me so I can plan my movements. I wasn't nearly as bothered by the constant rotation as I thought I would be, I just sort of adapted somehow.

Congrats on a solid entry to the jam!

Beautifully presented, and a unique concept! Excellent audio too.

Nice entry!

I rather liked that! Very clean artwork, reasonably clear gameplay. Pretty decent level layout... Sure, it has some flaws with the movement and portals, but the core concept is very solid.

Well done for getting it done under games jam time pressure. No small achievement!

Thanks for the kind words!

Thanks for the kind words!

One of the features I wish I'd got around to was feedback about how and when you earned points. The bonus hexes work just like regular Scrabble. You only score when your word makes a loop with existing words, then you score all the connected words.

It actually tracks all the scores from each of the words behind the scenes, but I ran out of time to present this to the player.

To be fair, there's literally zero audio in this game! I just ran out of time, you know games jams right?

I wrote the multiplayer server during the jam, from scratch. It's a database and a few PHP scripts, but it's fairly solid. I haven't had to do any maintenance other than moderate a few really bad words so far. I'm calling that a win!

There's a lot of polish I wanted to do, but I had to get the core game working first.

Thanks for playing!

I was considering letter restrictions, but thought it's hard enough to find a suitable word without all that.

I wanted to add a rule that every successfully placed word had to be unique. I am tracking the words in the server's database, but didn't get time to add the restriction to the game itself. Ah well, jams and all that.

Thanks for playing and commenting!

I saw your exploit! I had intended to disallow repeated words anywhere in the game, but didn't have time to implement it.

Yes, you're also right about parallel words in regular Scrabble, but this isn't regular Scrabble. Words of length 2 are ignored anyway.

Thanks for playing for so long by the way. You discovered a bug I wasn't aware of where if you scroll far enough, the background tiling stops repeating!

I just wish I had enough time to polish this properly and get it finished. Ah well, too big and too complex for one person to build in a few days.

Thanks for playing/commenting. Much appreciated

That's a really nice game. Initially, I was a little overwhelmed at the complexity, but I soon figured out that I didn't have to understand all the nuances to play. I also failed at 45 weeks on my first go.

I'm not convinced you could last forever. Rent is constantly increasing, but your ability to generate money is limited. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the game will always end at some point. It's nicely balanced however. I felt under pressure to make the rent each time it was due, and only once had a comfortable amount of money from the sale of a $5000+ orchid. I also got lucky with sheers and a bonsai tree which was worth around $4000 I think.

Beautifully presented with top notch art, sound and gameplay.

My main niggles are minor, but important:

• When it gets busy I can't see the prices at a glance. Sure, I can hover over them to see a pop-up panel. I'd like to be intuitively aware of how the prices are affected though.
• It would be lovely to have visual feedback of where you're clicking. Just a simple rollover would probably work. I would click on taller plants, sheers etc and find I wasn't selecting them, or I'd select the wrong thing. This minor annoyance took me out of flow several times, and would be pretty easy to address.

Well done, a great entry!

Thanks for playing and commenting!

If you hadn't mentioned it, I would not have been able to tell English wasn't your first language.

I often overlook the fact that not everyone has English as their native language. It's definitely something I need to address more in the future. Games are for everyone, not just people like me.

Thanks, multiplayer was something I wanted to attempt for several Jams now. One of my previous games was sort of similar, Team Codebreakers MMOG was realtime multiplayer. I discovered late in the 2 days that the back-end I was using wouldn't work from a WebGL build, so that became a Windows Executable. Hence it kinda never really took off.

This time I wrote the back-end from scratch and hosted it on my own site. That way I can be certain it will work!