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Now that ratings are over you can upload updates. If you do so, make sure to keep the original downloadable, at least until the judging is over on August 2nd 2025. Here's what InboundShovel wrote on Discord, regarding his :

"Please don't update your game until the video releases - or at least make a note and link any patches/bugfixes without replacing the original version! I wanna make sure I play the version that was submitted for the jam!"

Nice level design and well-balanced difficulty that made it fun to strategize. Imagine my surprise when I learned the hard way that the enemy can in fact too cleave my guys. Quite well designed to make the player think about their moves and discourage trying to brute-force everything.

Good job on your first game jam submission!

I'm so glad I saw this on Shovel's stream or I wouldn't have found this gem. This game is a great example that you can make a fun game even with simple assets and whatever you can make yourself if you're creative.

This game was hilarious. It looked unassuming but then I kept finding dialogue after dialogue.

Hahaha, that would be evil! I'm really bad with horror games though so that would never happen.

Thanks for the feedback!

Let me preface this by writing the following:

1. Judging by the comments most people seem to like this game and I'm genuinely happy for you.
2. Souls-like games (which this game seems to be partially inspired by) are not really my thing and I rarely played them. Take everything I say with a grain of salt because I might just not be the target audience.

The game was overall not fun for me. The boss kind of remedied that.

Enemies don't have any sort of collision with the player or other enemies. This makes them either very threatening or almost completely harmless, depending on how you approach them.

• If they stack together they will become a flurry of blades that feel impossible to defeat. If you try to fight them the way it was probably intended, they will most likely kill you.
• You don't collide with enemies and their attack delay is long enough to just walk through them without taking a hit.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." This quote came to mind as I figured out the best way to defeat the enemies:

1. Move all the way to the left or right.
2. Walk through all enemies until you pass the last one.
   1. Do not attack until step 3
   2. Do not dodge
3. Attack the last enemy you passed once or twice.
4. Back off a bit, then go to step 2 again.

I really tried to beat the game properly first but there were so many small issues:

• Parrying feels very punishing to use stamina-wise.
• There's no tangible feedback for a successful parry.
• The health and stamina bars are a bit inconspicuous, making me avoid mechanics that require stamina.
• The rolling distance is way too long.
• The jumping feels uncontrollable. It feels more at home at Jump King, not a platformer. Therefore summoning the boss was annoying.
• Shielded enemies sometimes seem to not get hit, even when I attack them from behind (though that might just be stacked enemies again).

Nitpicks:

• Enemies only lock on by sight. I can just keep attacking them from behind if they've never seen me.
• The player's attacks feel like they have no weight.

The Good:

The boss was easy but fun. All I had to do was dodge when it got close enough then walk around a bit to avoid the projectiles. Nonetheless, dodging the huge attack felt great.

Sorry for the mostly negative review. I'm not taking the time to write all of this to be mean but because I see some great potential there and hope you can improve upon it. Or, again, I might just not be the target audience.

Regardless of all that, I'm certain you put a lot of work into this game and the fact that you uploaded it in time for this game jam is great. Congratulations!

Great storytelling, both directly and environmentally. I also liked the idea of representing your resources and actions with your well-being and healthy habits respectively.

Pretty much everything I wanted to write is already in one comment or another, but here's what stuck out to me the most:

• Two resources start with "Mo" which occasionally tripped me up
• Deck editing didn't work after setting up the initial one
• I didn't understand why the last boss rarely took damage. For every other boss the description, visuals or simple trial and error was enough to understand their gimmick but the last one wasn't apparent to me, apart from "beware, fire!"
• Some auditory or visual feedback that you got a card would make the intro less confusing.

Regardless, I quite liked this one. Congrats on your first game jam submission!

I like the idea and the implementation was certainly fun. The instructions could use more work. I'm certain I've read everything yet somehow I felt like I didn't retain anything and had to learn the game from scratch. That is not so bad because the sorting job was simple enough and the game controls could be picked up in a minute or so.

What tripped me up the most was that the shot always hit. It was so small and linear that I tried go move around to line my character up with my enemies.

Neat. The gameplay is simple so it's relatively quick to pick up even without instructions. I never really managed to figure out when I'd hit a tree or not.

I'm glad you liked it!

I severely underestimated how long this would take, especially all the visuals. Originally I wanted to have 3 more puzzles plus one "boss" puzzle, which all needed to be cut due to time constraints. I might add them in future updates.

The chart should've indicated that any one of those elements would be fine but your interpretation sounds much more fun.

Lovely character design and SFX and overall nice visuals; controls feel good; mechanics are easy to pick up but are quite fun. Disregarding gravity while switching states is great.

That respawn tutorial was cheeky (and very funny).

I'd love to see more updates.

The sheer variety of enemies, buffs, debuffs, and upgrades, especially considering the time constraint, is impressive.

The basics of battle were relatively intuitive because I was used to STS but everything else was confusing at first. For example, I took a ton of damage because I didn't understand that the firewall buff was actually thorns. A help menu and/or visual or auditory damage feedback would've been nice.

Additionally, the post-battle decisions were even more confusing. The card upgrades were relatively well explained and I think it's fine to let the player just try stuff out and learn, especially because there was a description as to what upgrading a card with a certain element would do. But then there were two cards and I could only choose one of them and I had no idea what that meant. Was that still part of the upgrade process? Then there were lots of symbols and it kinda resembled the upgrade process from before so I thought maybe that too was part of the card upgrade and suddenly the next combat starts and for several encounters I had no idea that I was choosing the path to the next enemy.

The first miniboss felt weirdly luck-based. To reference STS again, if I see an enemy with thorns I know it's my fault or my deck is not strong enough if I let them get to 15 thorns. The miniboss was alone and had so much health that once I got unlucky, she got to 15 thorns and I just had to wait for maybe 10 turns, use only use block and wait for the buff to dissipate.

Other than that, the game had nice visuals and gameplay and for your first game jam submission it's really good.

When gamedevs try to do something novel with a card battler, there's always the risk that they mix mechanics improperly or overwhelming the player with information. Not you though. This game was very comprehensive.

You wrote that you didn't achieve your original vision but from what I was able to pick up, almost everyone in this game jam went through something similar and therefore they'll judge your game fairly considering the time constraints and the unfamiliarity with certain aspects of gamedev.

Thus, considering the time constraints and your unfamiliarity with certain aspects of gamedev: Good job on this game! I certainly  liked it.

One nitpick though: I wish the block did more, like actually preventing damage after you attack, or a brief stun. Rarely was I able to line enemies up for a cleave but most of the time it just did a little knockback and a second later we were back to status quo.

Amazing! The gameplay, visuals, audio, atmosphere and the controls (especially the dash) were all great.

One nitpick though: If you hit the vertical spike wall just right, you'll be stuck in the falling animation and get softlocked.

Simple but fun. The long shot cooldown and ease of dodging the small asteroids meant I rarely shot anything. It wasn't an issue though as the spaceship controls were quite good.

The controls take some time to get used to but over time they felt weirdly both natural but still somewhat difficult. Good idea to give the player ground movement only after they had enough time to familiarize themselves with the vine-based movement.

Considering the game jam time constraints, the size of the map and the variety of challenges is impressive.

Simple but fun. Nice difficulty curve where I could learn the game and be wasteful at first but later on bullet management and accuracy becomes much more important.

Why does this need admin permissions? I am unsure about running this game.

I like where you were trying to go with this but the actual implementation needs more work.

First of all, while I fully endorse a "show, don't tell" approach to teaching game mechanics, this usually only works well if the player is put into a situation where they're given everything they need and can't proceed until they've learned the new mechanic.

The text at the beginning was easy to miss, especially when you lead the player towards the right, not towards it.

The yellow area was easy to avoid, therefore I died a few times and started back at the beginning before I randomly found out it was a checkpoint. I'd either make the first one the player encounters unavoidable or explain to them what it does.

The slingshot mechanic is fun but also insufficiently explained. Some text near the orb with one sentence of explanation or even just the word "[Shift]" would've been enough.

The introduction to the slingshot orbs was frustrating. I'd recommend giving the player a safe space to learn a new mechanic where they can fail several times without getting punished. Then you could ramp up the difficulty and risk so they're forced to get better and better at it. Instead, I died to the first slingshot orb several times and immediately afterwards to the several orbs above a death zone, which feels like too harsh of a difficulty spike.

With each death I got more and more exasperated as I had to wait for the "FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF" to finish. This is essentially a long "You Died" but I think your game is not the right place for that. With the difficult mechanics and the frequent deaths, the e.g. Super Meat Boy or Celeste approach of immediately trying again would work much better.

The text that preceded the red block falling onto me was funny.

Everything seems to smear at high speeds. This is especially apparent when the camera shakes from taking a great fall and my entire screen becomes blurry/smeared.

I quit the game out of frustration but there's definitely some potential there.

It doesn't run on my machine. The PCK file is missing.

This is the first time I've seen a game utilize your remains both as light sources and platforms. Combined with the quick respawn system and frequent checkpoints this felt like a fun exploration puzzle game.

Lovely visuals and a relaxing atmosphere. A more expansive and polished version of this would've totally been one of the more popular flash games back in the day.

Even though there aren't many individual cooking components, the possible combinations of customers, ingredients, and ways to prepare those made me want to experiment in all kinds of ways.

The easter egg with the controversial radio station was amusing.

Overall, a great game jam submission!

I liked the humor of the game and the absurdity of its consequences. What I liked less was how long it took to try again after crashing. The combination of difficulty, janky NPC movement and long unskippable intro was frustrating. With just any two of those it would've probably been quirky but fun. Trying to see how to get past the crowd of people only to get blindsided by a far faster and more agile car, or having an ambulance seemingly seek me out like a homing missile made me quit after several tries.

 A movable camera would've been nice but the nauseating horse's FOV kinda compensated for that.

The city looked nice. On closer inspection there were a lot of reused assets but the color swapping made it so it wasn't apparent during normal gameplay, so it was quite immersive.  That every single object and NPC has a reaction to you crashing into them is impressive.

Nitpick: The clock hands are moving along the wrong axis.

I have no idea how much of this is already provided by Unreal Engine, but either way It's really impressive how much you managed to managed to accomplish as a newbie and in only half of the allowed time.

Making a fast paced 3D platformer FPS game is quite the commitment that you don't usually see in this game jam.

There are of course things that could be improved. The thing that stuck out to me the most is that the terrain felt somehow haphazardly placed. I could go somewhere and do a big jump or a wallrun but I couldn't smoothly chain these movements from one section to another.

Throughout the game it wasn't apparent to me how much energy I had or for what reason I died. I don't know if there was an HP or energy bar but nothing stuck out to me.

Congrats on your first game jam submission!

I'm glad you liked it!

Regarding the controls: On one hand I was inspired by old puzzle games like Myst. On the other, I already dabbled around with old-school dungeon crawler movement in a previous project and thought "Why not put it into space?". I was so focused on the other parts of the game that I didn't really consider how the movement might come across.

I was originally planning to make sections of the spaceship more unique to make navigating easier but unfortunately there wasn't any time left for that.

Sorry about the jumpscare. I was worried that might be the case but it was one of the very last things I added to the game and that point it was so late that I just had to wrap things up.

And of course thanks for the feedback! Once the game jam is over I'll work on fixing those issues.

The concept of beating levels by flinging yourself and your enemies around using a gun and bullets with ridiculous knockback seems fun. The implementation could use a bit more work though.

The first level was practically unplayable, as has been mentioned in another comment. The others were comparatively fine, though there were some sections where I apparently randomly died and got returned to the start.

I like where you were trying to go with this game. Good job on your first game jam submission!

Impressive how many minigames there are, and all with their own style. The humor was top notch.

It would've been nice if there was more to do after purchasing two more guns but it's a good start.

Good job on your first game jam submission!

I like where you were trying to go with this and I tried to give this game a fair shot but I gave up halfway through the game.

Pros:

• Dashing is fun
• Bouncing off enemies by downwards attacking is fun
• Nice visuals

Cons:

• The tutorial at the beginning disappears too quickly.
• In my opinion your most used actions should not be shared by the same finger (run right and attack with D and F respectively).
• The delay between the input and the actual attack is way too long.
• The light and heavy attack feel equally heavy.
• Falling to your death when you spawn is something I'd expect from a troll platformer game, or an intentionally bad one.
• Sometimes when I run into bats they stick onto me like a tick but stay outside of my attack area so I'm guaranteed to die. This was especially apparent when two of them were hiding in a tree, which is ridiculous.
• Attacking downwards to bounce off an enemy seems to work arbitrarily and at most two times in a row. The section where you had to bounce off several red enemies on spike platforms looked like it would be fun but turned out to be the section where I quit out of frustration. I would've had to compensate by properly using my double jump and dash to land on a small platform at the end which was too much of a difficulty spike for me.

Sorry for being so negative. I'm not writing this to be mean but because I think this could be a genuinely fun game if you work on it more.

Nonetheless, congrats on your first game jam submission!

I don't know what you mean with the ghost.

Here's a recreation of how I did it: 

Interesting concept. This is the first game in this jam I've seen where you do research by trial and error.

Quite fun, though after several days it did get a bit tedious to see several of the same seeds day after day and repeating the same steps each time.

Congrats on your first game jam submission!

Simply put, I didn't know it was possible to dash diagonally and several levels either worked with horizontal (e.g. left to right) dashes or could be cheesed to kinda work with them.

Not bad for your first game. When developing platformer games, I'd recommend looking into coyote timers to improve the feeling of the character controls.

Not sure if that was already the end but I didn't know where to go from here.

The music was... very repetitive.

Nonetheless, good job on your first game jam submission!

Reminiscent of old 3D puzzle games. I quite liked reading about each ingredient and trying to figure out what they'd be used for.

I know it has already been mentioned but the camera-related controls could use some improvement. The turning speed was very fast and having to click the ingredients table twice to pick up a single ingredient and then clicking twice again to return was inconvenient.

Another nitpick would be Reliyad's Fall. I kinda stumbled upon it but in hindsight the way it was hinted at was clever. What was less obvious was it not being the fuel. Two times before that puzzle, I was presented with a problem and, after some reading, a somewhat clear solution (pun not intended). Some sort of feedback that Reliyad's Fall was not what I needed as fuel would've been nice. Perhaps the well known dialogue from the previously mentioned old puzzle games, like "I can't do that.", "That doesn't make sense", "That doesn't fit there.", "Nuh uh". "I don't know how to do that.", "No.".
... I might be getting off track.

Other than that, the puzzles were really well designed

The stop + act movement system was fairly easy to pick up thanks to the well-made indicator above.

What took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out though was how to get past the balloons. The box I was supposed to interact with was so inconspicuous compared to the much flashier character, the tutorials and, ironically, the balloons. The roll/dash tutorial near them also kept my attention and made me think I had to roll at them a certain way.

The efficiency of rolling + the desire not to smash my face into a wall made moving around interesting and the game overall fun.

Well, over the course of four minutes I managed to make it from the lowest left part of the level to the lowest right.

Not sure if I'm doing something wrong but from what I figured out the only ways to move are left, right and jumping to the right. From there I didn't manage to make it past the first vertical section, no matter how much or in what ways I flung myself against the right wall, and every time when that happened I lost control until I touched the ground again.

I feel like at the core the movement could be quite fun but unfortunately I couldn't really play around with it.

Nonetheless, congrats on your first game jam submission!

Nice character design. Not much in terms of gameplay. Since the enemies can be defeated by just spamming attack, I ended up doing that. That way I also found out that you can cheat multiple attacks by rapidly clicking that button.

Congrats on your first game jam submission!

Getting the game to run was actually a fairly short and easy process. I think when you edit your game page on itch, you can add Download & Install instructions.

The game itself was short but what was there was nicely implemented. It was pretty fun.

Pros:

• Nice visuals and SFX
• Good character controls
• Long playtime for a gamejam submission
• Quick to learn new mechanics thanks to well-made invisible tutorials
• Good difficulty ramp

Cons:

For several levels after acquiring it, I thought the dash only worked horizontally. You can beat several levels by only doing horizontal dashes, although from what I remember some janky walljump was needed at least once. It's only when I got stuck at the level with the spiky pyramid and the long bounce pad jump for ~20 minutes that I figured it out. During that time I found out that the non-spiky tip of that pyramid was deadly but the area to the immediate left and right were safe (which is also why I didn't learn how to dash properly there):

Conclusion:
Absolutely incredible. I had a lot of fun playing this and I'd totally buy a full release should you keep working on it.

Kinda fun for a few minutes. I feel like the game would've been more fun without the C key ability. Having to actually move and dash around to hit it was more entertaining than just playing horizontal pingpong with myself.