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It's a bit simplistic overall (I understand, the time constraints), but I think there's a foundation for something fun. The ship tiles are understated but stylish, and the characters have cute designs. (Like someone else mentioned, I'm also getting more GBC than NES vibes in the choice of colors and style.) The music's not super fancy, but quite fitting to the mood, too. Would have been nice if the book could have been controlled with the same inputs as the rest of the game, instead of relying on mouse controls.

Thanks so much for the detailed feedback! I absolutely need to tune the fuel mechanic a little more. That's a good idea with the signs, maybe I should even add a marker on the progress bar. (I also want to make the tank a little bigger, right now you need to stop at almost every gas station, I think it should be save to miss at least every other one.)

Despite the respawn issues (it seems the game forgot I had gotten the artifact, because the rocks on the way back from the final room stopped shooting at me, but I somehow still got the ending screen when making it back to the start?) , I had a lot of fun figuring out each room. Felt a bit empty at first, but from the second area it picks up the pace. The way each biome has a very different visual mood makes the journey exciting, lots of pretty environment elements. The music's good, but a few of the loops felt a bit too short/repetitive. I would have favored a bit more lenient hit detection with the spikes, sometimes I didn't feel like I was getting hit, but hit I did get. It's a bit hard to get around while swimming. The HUD makes it look like you could get more hearts, but I never found any - are they hidden that well, or was that unimplemented? Only having three hearts felt quite punishing by the final room. Anyway, this is certainly one of the games in this jam I played the longest, good job.

Real, there's never enough time for balancing in a jam...

Cool Castlevania-like music and graphics, especially love the title logo. Jumping through the windows to get to the different levels is a fun effect. The jump feels a bit weird, cause you stop moving horizontally the instant you let go of the directional button, and especially awkward when attacking as the human in the air even while pressing the direction. Most games would implement some form of inertia (like Mario) or have a fixed jump trajectory (Castlevania) for this. I liked the way the werewolf dash was used as a platforming skill, although sometimes it drove me mad that I couldn't attack enemies in certain situations without running off a cliff.

Thanks for the review! You can actually change the key mappings to your liking in the options menu. :)

I dig this game! Nice music and digging around is fun. Also like the implementation of the light and the temporary upgrades for it. Sometimes it feels like bad luck can hurt you a lot, though. I didn't have enough money to upgrade the drill the first two times I encountered the shop, and after that getting through rocks took quite a long time.

Short and sweet! Very creative concept, and having the field get more and more crowded is a great way of escalation. Feels like something they'd have put on UFO50. Only found it a little bit hard to visually distinguish between the charging animations of nice and evil ladies.

As someone trying to make a dungeon crawler as a long-term project, this is very relevant to my interests. Very good audio and atmosphere! It's an interesting idea to have items stand in for party members, and the resulting combat mechanics. Encounter rate feels a bit high, so I never felt quite at leisure to explore and take in the great dungeon atmosphere. It also seemed quite easy to run into overpowered enemies with no recourse to get out of the encounter alive (at least as far as I could discern).

Thanks for playing! I meant to add an automatic transition option, but it kinda fell under the table when I was scrambling to finish in the final few days/hours. Something for an update after the jam...

I think I made it a bit too difficult to hold on to ghosts in curves, cause the car drifts out of them and the ghosts don't. Gotta touch that up a bit after the rating period. Glad you enjoyed the driving, though!

Oh the music takes you right to that NES era nostalgia, very spot-on! The graphics are great too, but it feels like the movement runs on a higher resolution than the graphics, which takes away from the NES feel a bit. The enemies all running on a fixed path makes it a bit too easy to just stand outside of their reach and pick them off one by one. Level design feels a bit aimless. I loved the small part about flying around the star system map, makes the whole quest feel larger than it maybe is.

I think the flat shaded room graphics are very strong. Also loved the music, though to me it feels more computer style than NES, culturally. Scrolling in the outside area is a bit choppy and disorienting (maybe looking at how the NES Maniac Mansion scrolls areas could help improving it). The tasks in the first part are a bit mundane (and I felt the sock sorting puzzle took too long), but I was getting intrigued by the second chapter, too bad it's unfinished. Might actually return when it's done!

Neat puzzle game concept with pleasant and thematically consistent graphics. One criticism: I think having limited lives is a bad fit for it cause on the more complex levels you're bound to have a bit of trial and error and going back to the beginning is no fun. Because of the tile based movements it's also easy to misstep, so allowing to undo a single step would also be great for this, imo. (Not sure if any NES games have something like this, but Boxxle and Catrap on Game Boy do.)

There's a lot of Castlevania-likes in this jam, but I liked this one a lot. At first it seemed overly hard, but once you learn to (ab)use the second dash attack, it's not so tough. Was it intentional for the king to just kind of stand there in his second phase, though?

Pretty nice work, like the little pumpkin dude. I found one dungeon and the boss battle had an interesting design, but it takes way too many hits and kills me in 3, so I gave up eventually. The curse mechanic is an interesting idea, but making the character really slow is maybe not the most ideal effect for it, cause it's more frustrating than anything and I'd rather just die quickly and try again. Graphics are simple, but that gives it that intriguing early NES era feel. Just the large detailed HUD elements take away from it a bit.

Cute protagonist. The backgrounds are a bit heavy on the dithering,  but there are some nice pieces especially in the second area. The mechanic with grabbing the circles to climb is interesting. After a while it's tiring my hand though, could be good to break it up with other types of traversal so you don't have to do it all the time.

This is such a funny and fun game! I gotta admit I don't really understand the controls on a mechanical level, but it's surprisingly intuitive! Falling down from very high can be frustrating, but I guess that's only period appropriate!

Ah I see, didn't notice the randomness/on rails part cause I guess I got lucky on the first run. ;)

I liked the mysterious intro, and the hieroglyph style background tiles are neat, too. Very atmospheric music, although sound-wise it has a certain scratchiness at times that feels kind of unpleasant to my ears (maybe some sounds on the noise channel?) The map felt labyrinthine (complimentary), so I was convinced I was getting lost, but I think I stumbled on the boss faster than I was supposed to? (Not sure it was a bug, but the boss mostly just stood there waiting to be shot at.) The health bars and the bright character outlines kinda make it feel more modern than an NES game.

Very nice tile work on the backgrounds, cool understated background music. It took me a while to figure out how the controls work exactly, but it's a neat idea. Sadly, I couldn't find my way out of the first five or so rooms, maybe would have been nice to have some kind of hint what kind of goal I'm supposed to be working toward. (First I was like, maybe I need to defeat all the enemies? But then they seemed to respawn when changing rooms?)

Love it. Simple and to the point, and definitely something you'd want to play on an old Nokia, and it seems totally possible! Good job!

Loved the atmosphere and look, especially the monster designs! Managing between the clue and map was a bit of a hassle, and the instructions at the beginning went by too fast.

A note aside from reviewing the game itself: My antivirus kept blocking the file and I had to make a security exception for it, which tends to happen with self-built exes since anything unknown is deemed suspicious by many antivirus programs. Since you're working with Game Maker, I recommend going through the few extra steps to make jam games browser-playable. Given how good this game looks, I bet this would have gotten a lot more comments and ratings that way.

Loved the idea of turning the resolution around, made for quite a different feel while still sticking to the "rules". Didn't realize you could wrap around the edges at first, haha! Also, very good-looking start and ending screens!

I think the game could have been more suspenseful if you had to collect all (or a certain number) of the eggs, cause often it was a bit too tempting to just run for the exit and ignore the score.

Killer atmosphere, reminds me of Return of the Obra Dinn. The only things that kinda took me out of the mood where the slightly too 3d-looking balls and the bats sneaking up on me to insta kill. (I think this might have even worked better as a pure adventure without any combat.) Anyway, nice feat within the constraints!

Was in love with this concept from your WIP screenshots in the Discord, but the implementation beats all expectations. Every level introduces a new clever gimmick, and the character's adorable facial expressions do their share to sell the action.

Only negative thing I noticed, the movement of the head(?) was quite jittery on my PC, not as smooth as seen on the GIFs.

Definitely one of my favorites from this jam, though!

Thanks for the feedback! These are some good pointers for improvements, I'll try them out and maybe update when the voting ends. Thanks!

The looks and visual effects in this are beautiful! The core idea is quite interesting. Making a mistake high up can be pretty frustrating, wish there was some kind of rewind option (maybe it could cost time?) I also think it could introduce some additional elements to make gameplay more varied. Otherwise, pretty relaxing and atmospheric experience though!

Music, texts and the main character are very cute, even though the rest of the graphics are a bit spartanic. I dunno if it's a bug, but every time I die I got stuck forever on a black screen and could only quit the game with Alt+F4 and start all over again which kind of killed the motivation.

Oh wow, this game is really fun. Quite a lot of mechanics to learn all at once at first, but once that hurdle is conquered, it's just chock full of interesting ideas. Especially liked controlling the enemies and moving gadgets like trampolins around. Only thing that kept me from playing further was the first boss - too hard with the very limited hearts IMHO.

Wow, harder than it first looked! Was quite fun, though I can't help but imagine what it would be like with gamepad (analog stick) controls, haha!

The real history public unrest setting leaves me kinda emotionally uneasy (although I can definitely say that it made me feel something), but the mini-games are interesting takes on dealing with the different scenarios. Looks and sounds good, too~

Thanks for your kind comments.

About the time, it's actually meant to be this way - the time is just for bonus points at the end of the level.

Love the minimalistic art style, especially the little "U" goblins! The wizards with their tiny rats are cool too. Was fun to get to lead your little army through the maze and let them fight out your battles for you. I keep dying in the second maze though... :D

Really cohesive aesthetics and atmosphere! It was fun to steer the ship and how it behaved around platforms. Would appreciate an "easy gravity" mode though, as the strong pull toward the bottom made things feel kinda oppressive and made things harder than I would have preferred.

Thanks for the feedback! I actually managed to squeeze in a little fix before the deadline that should hopefully make the door issue less annoying. (Would probably have to rethink how doors work entirely to fix it completely, though.)

You are Mr. Brown's trusty sheepdog, tasked with rounding up the sheep and locking them into the corral. But beware of shifty snakes and the dastardly hawk, who are all too eager to capture your flock! :( Only the rancher Mr. Brown can get rid of them with his boomerang, but he keeps falling asleep on the job, leaving it up to you to wake him up and guide him towards the attackers.

This game is loosely based on an idea that was first told in 1983 but never made as a game. Well, until now. It's a long story...

https://derboo.itch.io/round-up

Hmm sounds like you somehow downloaded the browser version? Please try downloading Ninja Massacre 1.0.1a.zip, this should give you a zip with an exe and some other files inside. Extract that folder and you should be able to run it?

That juicy pixel art is so my jam! Kinda has a similar problem as my entry with the keyboard controls in that you basically need three hands, but aside from that very fun. And you win me over with kittens any day. I died or ran out of batteries multiple times just watching the little darlings!