This game… Well, it’s not quite a “game” is it? It’s more like a moment. A moment in time where one finds themselves asking many introspective questions, such as “what’s the meaning of life?”, “what is a Metroidvania anyways?”, “why in this game is there a single brick house you can enter, with nothing inside it?”, and most puzzling of all, “why is the downloadable executable called “index.exe” like it’s a web build?”
This… moment, has no interest in answering any of those questions, but it does offer the tools for the player to do so themselves. For you see, it appears that the downloadable build of the "game" is a debug build, and comes with the ability to view a console window where secret messages from the developer can be parsed.
So, with that in mind, what’s the answer to all this then?
…the game wasn’t finished in time. Most ways in which you were probably already aware of before submitting. It’s difficult to write much of anything constructive in this case. Regardless, I’ll list down a few of the things that stood out to me.
The player character’s design is cool. I know they were supposed to turn into a dragon or something, but to be honest I kinda like them as is.
The one music track here is neat. Kinda reminds me of Pokemon, although I suppose that tends to be the case for me with a lot of JRPG-esque battle music. I did notice that it fades out after some time then starts from the beginning… and that perturbed me a little.
There's a drop shadow, and a realistic directional shadow. Very peculiar (also the drop shadow looks kinda weird to me).
There is no physical collision on the levers, you just phase through. Seems odd for such big levers.
It seems like those giant doors can be opened with no requirement? Or at least, that’s what it seemed like, but I’m not sure.
Spamming the attack is faster than walking; It can even function as a janky dodge.
I realize there was probably supposed to be much more to the single enemy in the game other than just being unthreatening fodder, but throwing around crowds of those things into the air is still kinda fun in a primitive way.
The shopkeeper's design is cool…although in this state there is no shop for them to keep, as that part is unfinished.
The boss fight thing’s visual design is kinda... endearing in a way, although it kinda looks like it too was rushed out. The fact there is a boss at all though is impressive in its own right given whatever troubles I assume must've happened during development, even if it’s a pretty simple boss.
This momen—excuse me, this game has no form of an ending, and it doesn’t even really fit either the “metroidvania” or “magical girl” genres. That being said, it still has neat aspects to it. I imagine there was supposed to be a lot more to it than there ended up being; it would be neat if you worked towards that after this jam I feel like.
P.S. This isn’t even close to your biggest concern with the game, and you might already know this but; if it wasn’t clear from that intro, I believe you shipped a debug build of your game. Even the debug console is included where you can peer into the output of all the “print” statements the code runs 👀. Just felt like pointing that out.










