itch.io

Hmm mmm! Immediate 5 stars for sound. Enjoyed the customer feedback messages and barks a lot. Made my wife swear, so that's a good sign. She made a vile dish by combining things not in the recipe book. Really fun concept. Simple gameplay, solid execution, and some lovely clear pixel art. I'll come here again!

Entirely fair in a jam. Still a cool game 👍

Ah good to know, thanks. Played it again, with my wife, and we both loved it. Great game.

I loved this. Great concept, well executed. My game ended prematurely when I somehow clipped through a wall while heading left down the slope into the park (below the awol band member). I couldn't really move from there and had to quit, but I'll play again later and avoid all walls!

It's a shame. Had a real banger of a track going on.

You're very welcome. It sounds like a lot of these things were already in your minds, but I'm glad my feedback could be useful to you. I've followed you and kinatraa but let me know if there's a better way to get notified about any future releases of this, I'm sure I'll want to play them.

Really nice game. Sadly I didn't read the note on the game page about the incorrect equation, so got stuck (I also found some of the writing a little hard to read - "Is this a zero? A one? An eight, a nine?"). My play (of the web version) was then interupted by a couple of bugs (freezing on the computer which was fiddly to get out of, and a game ending crash on the safe) and I stopped playing for now. I really liked it though. The once grand, run down hotel is well portrayed, the puzzles are engaging, and the atmosphere is very well crafted. A little bite of Outer Wilds style play in its own well chosen setting. I hope to come back to it after the jam if the bugs are fixed.

I'll look forward to seeing how the game develops. Congrats again on the jam 

Slashing big groups of slimes all at once sure feels great! I think the attack should come out sooner though - there's quite a large delay between pressing the attack button and the sword swing happening, this feels a bit odd especially as there's no windup animation to fill that space. Cool game!

Looks, sounds, and feels great.  I like the concept and it's good to see in the comments that you may be continuing development on it.

So.. some feedback for you, if you want it.

The UI is generally quite intuitive but I was a little confused at first. Beyond tutorialisation, I think a few small changes could help with this a lot:

• Icons instead of coloured boxes for attack, defense and number of rounds, and specific tooltips to help identify these elements, could make their meaning much clearer.
• Simple animations when picking up a resource of them zipping across to their respective counter in the UI would make the cards effects on resources easier to understand (particularly for monsters giving gold).
• Adding icons alongside any textual references to resources to help make clear which resource the text is referring to. For example when text mentions "coins" it could be written as "coins (🪙)" using your icon.

Given this is a jam game though, the current state is very impressive.

My decisions in the game often felt a little shallow, but I can see a lot of potential for strategic depth.

On my first run I felt I didn't have enough information to make meaningful decisions, but on the second I enjoyed weighing up the merits of each weapon and against saving resources. My decision making elsewhere quickly fell into a pattern. I would generally flip every card unless I thought it was likely I'd found all the resources early on a floor or really needed gold. When a monster appeared I just chose the most efficient weapon I had against that monster. I almost always killed monsters immediatlely, as it always seemed unwise to reveal further cards with a monster present. Similarly, I always took resources immediately as there was no reason not to. The two sets of resources (gold and hearts; and wood, iron and weapons) also felt very isolated from each other - weapons do ultimately gain gold and preserve hearts, and hearts allow you to reveal more cards to gain more resources, but I would have liked to see more crossover in other effects, such as cards like the coin-for-potion card which essentially allow opportunistic resource trading. Because these would still rely on opportunity, each set of resources could still feel distinct whilst having more interaction. I'm guessing traps primarily exist to force players to consider the risk-reward of turning over more cards, but they stood out as the only negative cards which do not give you a chance to respond. I imagine dying to them would feel cheap. Perhaps a little bit of Spidey sense "this floor looks trapped" or a more narrative version "these tracks are human... humans make traps..." on entering a floor with traps would make them feel fairer and double down on highlighting the risk-reward of flipping cards. If rooms became more dangerous for each round spent in them, for example if every other round all monsters on the floor gain 1 attack strength (and the player knows this), this would force the player not only to consider how many cards to flip, but also which to take. I think it's possible a mechanic like that could address several of the points I'm trying to describe here (it essentially makes turns spent on a floor into another resource to manage).

You may be planning this anyway, but I'd love to see a little narrative/world building baked into the cards. Just having a few different images and maybe titles for the wood cards could tell a lot about the world (as long as they are still at-a-glance identifiable as wood cards) - maybe you're scavenging ornate table legs from broken, ash-covered tables; maybe this dead mage's staff is nothing but a big sturdy stick to you; or maybe you sometimes find a 3ft long toothpick that some giant discarded. Cards with reward options could offer atypical choices as well. "Rusted Peacekeeper's Sword" could let the player choose either 1 iron, or a 2-use 2-hit sword - a small but interesting choice.

Anyway, please don't take these comments as overly critical. I'm only taking the time to write them because I think you've got a cool concept and these are the things that I felt needed work. I'm sure there are many ways to handle all of them and I'll be interested to see how you do it. Good luck!

This is a cool and wholesome take on the jam's loop theme, and pretty well executed as well. There's plenty of appeal and it's fun to play, at least for a little bit.

I got up to 120 bows, at which point there really were an enjoyably overwhelming number of boxes on my conveyer. I enjoyed the boxes tumbling about and sometimes adding a suden peril by bouncing forward. The fail condition's timer made this feel fair. I wasn't quite sure sometimes why my gesture wasn't accepted, particularly with circles. I think either the circle gesture analyser needs to be a little more generous or perhaps some feedback could be given on near circles as to why it's not counted as a match (I imagine that this would be much harder to implement however).

I generally need a final goal to keep me engaged with a game, so I would have preferred a fixed number of boxes and a race against the clock to beat pre-determined medal times, but I still think this worked. The early game was good, introducing the concept in a stress free way and gradually introducing more shapes to draw. I also enjoyed the end of my run which was frantic and a lot of fun. The end game was slightly diminished however by the early-middle and middle, which lost my interest a fair bit. I spent too much time just waiting for a box to land with no peril and nothing new being added. Perhaps another game-loop layer would solve this for me - waves of rising difficulty, followed by little audio-visual celebrations and a moment of calm rather than one long, continuous and gradual build in difficulty as is currently used.

The art style is simple and a little rough around the edges, but it's pleasant to look at with a nice colour palette and fits the feel of the game well - really nice. I'm not capable of critiquing music but I thought the music fit the feel of the game well too.

This is a great jam game, nice work!