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Very on theme! The horse puzzle was fun in that it asked the player to go a bit beyond the standard riddle; the rest of the puzzles were pretty easy. I liked the Trolley Problem one; I feel like you could add a lot of fun twists on this by mashing it up with other common riddles or thought experiments.

Fantastic art and atmosphere! Pretty challenging especially as some of the parts are visually just hard to make sense of or distinguish. I'm sure some of that's intentional, but sometimes it's not quite clear, like there's that at least one facial expression which seemed like a frown to me but didn't seem to violate the "sadness is banned" rule.

Overall, definitely the most visually interesting entry I've seen so far.

Great entry - it's funny, it's visually interesting, it's frustrating but in an enjoyable way.

Good use of the theme! Creates a good sense of paranoia in the player - "aw man, I wasn't focusing on that part of the screen but *someone* just twitched... but who?"

A nice amount of material for a jam! I really like the map display. Having reactive AI, even a simple one, in such a short timeframe is great. Combat is challenging especially with the tank control scheme but not excessively so, and being able to use the anchor to make tight maneuvers is cool. Great work!

I like it - really unique mash up of ideas/genres and a creative take on the theme. Trying to place blocks *and* get around them *and* compensate for trick blocks all at once makes for a fun challenge. The jump is a *little* restrictive; since most blocks are 2 high, a 2 high block jump makes it very easy to get stuck.

Nice work!

A strong start! I like the idea of a singleplayer social deduction game. I think you could iterate on this in a lot of different ways, like adding more crew members or more ways to deduce who the alien is. As is you're mostly guessing, and the scan range is so short/difficult to judge you'll typically be killed as soon as you scan

Interesting use of the theme! The ability to actually say no and skip the timer would be nice. I like the idea of a game where the environment around you is built by implication based on answering these leading yes/no questions. I think you could improve it by building the horror atmosphere over time, like starting with fairly straightforward questions and slowly working in the weirder ones. 

Great take on the theme and some pretty unique mechanics! I like how a big team can start to become a hindrance as upkeep increases and defections become more likely.

I'd love to see this developed further with more ways to interact with the trust mechanic (or better signposting of it - as is, I had trouble telling what caused a character to lose trust or switch sides) 

Thanks for the feedback! Different expressions are definitely on the to-do list. (Our artist gave us some alternate sprites for varying levels of suspicion/alarm but unfortunately we didn't finish integrating the suspicion system, hence why that alarm bar over characters' heads stays mostly static!) I'll look into why dead characters aren't being taken off the board, that's definitely a bug.

Neat! It's a frantic little simon-says game, reminds me of those old games where you have to read out the color of a string of text, but each word is itself the name of a color. Or like trying to pat your belly and rub your head then switch directions.

The idea of painting vector fields onto the map to guide your units isn't one I think I've seen in an RTS before - very clever! I like that it kind of encourages you to try to build different paths for your ants depending on their goal.

The balance is a little whack but I think with some polish you could expand on this in some creative ways.

Our artist did some amazing work for the backgrounds in this game! Unfortunately something broke in the web version of the game and background transitions don’t occur. We’ll have to post a fixed version after the jam rating period ends

Discount Elysium (complimentary)

It’s crazy how well you nail the style here, and the whole thing is just packed with solid lines. The silly VO chirps are the icing on the cake. Really great entry!

Reposting this critically important gameplay footage

Thanks! I'm running through all the narrative games now so I just played yours and thought it was incredibly sweet.  I think nearly anyone can identify with the feeling of struggling to find a "right" way to say goodbye to someone.

Really stellar! I ended up with 24:11 remaining: not too bad but I kept accidentally coming in too fast due to firing into groups, whoops.

This is definitely the strongest use of the theme I've seen this whole jam. There's thousands of entries where the theme tie-in is "you're on a timer" but it's something else to make one where the player literally counts down out loud as they play.

Wow that background is gorgeous! Love the visuals

The page views for this one are probably about to jump by quite a bit, and as they say a rising tide lifts all boats, so if you had a more narrative-focused game in the jam this year that didn't many eyeballs on it, please reply to this comment with some shameless self-promotion.

I'm genuinely so touched that this thing connected with people! I was pretty anxious right up to the submission time that people were not going to like it or that it was too sophomoric and whiny. I kind of can't believe it ended up anywhere in the top 1000 for the category, let alone top 10, especially when there were so many great narrative games in this jam. I'm excited to go through the ratings now and check out some of the other narrative ones that I missed.

Thanks so much to Taeko Salter (https://www.tumblr.com/paintingpuff) for turning around the art assets for this on such an absurdly tight deadline. I gave them practically zero time to do a half-dozen characters and a whole environment and as you can see from the captain's dorky-ass ladder climbing sprite, I don't think my own art is quite up to snuff. It would have looked absolutely miserable without their help.

What do you mean "Narrative: #1"

That's a typo right??

Visually this is a really interesting concept, it has the feeling of looking at a stereogram and trying to sort out what you're seeing by the fuzzy edges of the pattern. I'm not quite sure what it's doing thematically or mechanically though, besides just making it more difficult to play.

The static loop could be longer; at only a few seconds the cutoff is noticeable.

Really love the art style, and the core concept both mechanically and narratively is very strong.

I'm not great at these types of games so I didn't get far but I like this premise of a game that gets more difficult because enemies stay the same but the player gets weaker.

Man, this took me back. Just stumbled through the first two levels and will have to come back to the others when I have some more time.

I love an educational game. This one does seem to be a little all over the place in terms of difficulty and the expectations you put on the player.  Concepts are presented without clear definitions or explanations, just formulas, so I assume the target audience is calc students who are reviewing known material. But the questions themselves would be pretty trivial for anyone who already knows the material to the level you're expecting. (slope of x^2, area of rectangle [2;0] x [0;5], etc)  Edit: Then again, the time pressure makes even the simple questions much more difficult! I like that the boss fight is a more involved, multi-step question.

The formulas themselves could be presented better. I had a really hard time just visually parsing something like this:

∫_0^1 dx ∫_x^1 f(x;y) dy = ?

I eventually figured out what was going on here but if you could get some latex like formulas working in here it'd be so much nicer.

I say all of this but I haven't touched a calc textbook in a million years so I was remembering how all this machinery works on the fly. Overall I had fun waking up some long-neglected parts of my brain for this one and would definitely play more.

You've got the bones of something interesting here. Was it intended that I can keep drawing cards indefinitely? I was able to repeatedly buff the soldier with strength and just defeat all enemies without taking any damage.

Agree with what others are saying - the level layouts are nice but the platforming is difficult due to just how fast the character accelerates.

Really great visuals! I think it would have been nice to have a speed up function or something, since the frogs move pretty slowly and it takes some trial and error to get them to jump at the right places.

Nice, I like the dual pressure of finding good places for your bombs and exploring while also making sure wherever you eventually detonate is ore-rich. It was pretty easy to get far ahead of the curve. I liked hunting down the lava cloak, I think if you develop it further, more artifacts to find would be a highlight.

What kind of a fake made up name is Ethan C 🤔🤔🤔?

I like the creative setting. The platforming feels pretty floaty, making it hard to judge jumps, especially since the pulsing effect on the player obscures how high off the ground they are. You might consider implementing some "coyote time" to make it easier to nail the jump timings.

A really neat and satisfying incrementally game. I can see what you mean about some elements being a bit underdeveloped but what's here is already pretty strong. The emojis are a nice way to make economical use of limited assets.

If you develop it further, I'd love to see more meaningful differentiation between weapons. As is, I just kinda tried to estimate the DPS of each one and pick the highest.

Neat twist on the theme - the idea of each enemy dropping a custom bullet that'll fire off in the future is great, just needs some polish. You could definitely iterate on this after the jam.

This concept of needing to align automated units with the timers is cool, but since rocks last for so brief a period there's not much use in micromanaging and it's easier to just click. Still, it'd be cool to see some development of this idea. I really like incremental games that include these more puzzley optimization mechanics.

A neat start - might want to make it so that using an item's cooldown power doesn't count as a turn for activating other cooldowns, otherwise you can just fill your inventory with weapons and cycle cooldowns to take infinite turns.

I like the visuals a lot!

Clever! I struggled a lot on the spike maze, it's pretty tight quarters to maneuver in. I did like the puzzle with detonating the bomb to turn your corpse into a raft. The sounds are nice and punchy - landing on those spikes makes you wince!

The CRT screenbend effect is too strong IMO, it's a bit nauseating. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do and couldn't tell what effect my timesteal ability was having (using both Give and Take on enemies didn't seem to do anything, nor did they do anything when they touched me.) I'm curious if I was missing something big.

Pretty fun one - I like the diversity of minigames. At first I thought it was a mistake that the minesweeper game doesn't reset after losing so you can just memorize the board positions, but after my second run I had a good time trying to memorize each puzzle solution to zip through as fast as possible.

I think I got the best ending (saved the crew member, disabled the transmitter, and escaped) but now I'm curious if there were other tidbits I missed. Good bit of mystery.

I don't know what an Even G. Alien is but I did find this to be a fun jumble of ideas. I like how hectic it gets as is goes along and the health midpoint starts to shift while the new minigame is added.

I liked the art style but found it a little hard to parse what was going on in the comic sections. I'm not sure if I failed or if the game always restarts immediately upon completion.

Aww, this is really sweet. As someone who spent a lot of my childhood building horrible failed terrariums for the isopods in my backyard, it's nice to play a game that engages with my true power fantasy (knowing enough about insects to not accidentally kill them).

Fun game - I seem to suck at it so I didn't get super far. Man, that combo saver minigame is tough!