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Hibro123GameDev complained in the jam comments that he had 20-second freezes in the Web version. We were discussing there that it was probably due to shader compilation. Maybe the same kind of freeze happened here? I think the wall is supposed to appear on screen at that moment, and it runs exactly on shaders.

An hour? I don’t get it… The wall code is written so that it just constantly moves the wall forward. And if the player’s X coordinate becomes less than the wall’s X coordinate, the player instantly dies… How would the wall not kill the player if they’re standing still?.. Well, of course there’s also that catch-up part, but it should only move the wall forward…

Well, it seems I overlooked some bug with the wall-sticking mechanic. I had issues with it in general. But there’s no softlock here — a softlock is when you can’t even die — and here, the assembler wall is already rushing to the rescue! Just kidding.

Thank you!

Unfortunately, I draw quite poorly, and what’s even worse — very slowly. The graphics I do have already took me a full 2 days of work. I had plans to at least add more variety to the background — if you look at the code, that picture with the skyscrapers is even called Paralax1 — I was planning to add another layer of closer, more “slum-like” skyscrapers. But when that picture, completely devoid of any detail, took me 2 hours, I realized I couldn’t handle a more detailed one for the foreground. I didn’t even think about adding variety to the foreground, because I knew I definitely wouldn’t have enough time for that. Though it was a bit frustrating — in my previous jam game I had at least made some attempt at environmental objects, but here I didn’t. But that one was 1-bit. That was easier.

As for the “don’t run” mechanic, I tried to experiment with it in the last two levels. I didn’t in the earlier ones because I was afraid it would raise the learning curve too much.

Oh, by the way, regarding the runner aspect. I realize that what I ended up with is essentially a runner (I even considered adding that tag). But in practice, I took inspiration from Super Meat Boy, or more specifically from the first boss in that game. I just wanted to make it more dynamic. It seems I went a little overboard :-)

I like it! It’s fairly simple in terms of gameplay, but the work on the art and sound is just magnificent. Visually, for some reason it reminded me of Diablo II. The game creates an oppressive atmosphere where you’re constantly expecting a threat. The fading torches are an excellent idea. The jumpscare is unexpected and works because of that — especially since it has great buildup: you’re peering into the darkness to spot the threat, but the threat has already reached you.

As for downsides, I’d mention the stamina indicator — initially I mistook that screen for a loading screen and was very surprised it was even there. But that “loading screen” ended with a jumpscare and me losing ;-). I also felt that it’s too hard to spot the threat once too many torches have gone out, though I fully accept that might have been the intention — that you should spend resources not only on warding off enemies, but also on checking whether they’re there.

Also, I think it would be nice to make the stamina cost for keeping the light on smaller, but in return add a minimum time the light stays active. This would improve the visuals — warding off enemies with a flash that lasts just a couple of frames looks unimpressive and a bit odd, even though that behavior seems to be the best tactic.

Good luck in the future!

Thank you!

On level 5, the tiny shaft isn’t an entrance — it’s an exit. The entrance was earlier. But while testing, I discovered that you can actually climb all the way up this tiny shaft, so my plan for it to be a one-way path doesn’t work.

The visuals are charming in places, but they’re pieced together from scraps. The main character is pixelated with a black outline. The environment is also pixelated, but has no outline at all. The backgrounds are hand-drawn, but for some reason they constantly have holes, seams, or entire fragments going missing. The only enemy I saw — it’s also pixelated on one hand, but the pixel size there is about 6 times larger.

The collisions on game objects are strange. The crates are somehow hollow on the sides. The enemy can kill you even when you’re not touching its sprite, as if its collision box is larger than the sprite itself.

The in-game music is apparently a 35-second clip that not only repeats endlessly, but also contains many repetitions within itself. So it gets annoying very quickly, even though it initially sounds decent, creating a melancholic mood. Otherwise, the game is silent.

The core game mechanic sounds interesting enough on paper, but the execution is lacking. The controls in the attached state aren’t comfortable enough. There’s no coyote time, no jump buffering, yet the game expects you to make fairly precise jumps — and under a time limit with an enemy flying after you. On top of that, the movement controls are very abrupt, turning the platforming into a test not of the player’s dexterity, but of their nerves — how many times they can redo a section while cursing the jump button that failed to work yet again.

Overall, I like the author’s concept, but I think they lack experience. I’m sure that once they gain more experience, they’ll release something truly interesting and atmospheric.

I also forgot to mention the crates. You can place crates with E. The main character is probably a crate factory, because I can’t otherwise explain where he gets so many of them. Though I still didn’t understand what these crates are even for. The best use I came up with was to box myself into a corner with them and softlock the game that way.

The game constantly takes place in complete darkness, where you can literally see nothing. The lack of information about what’s going on is made worse by the fact that the Web build can’t be expanded to fullscreen for some reason. The music seems to do its job, but all other sounds are absent. But there’s a problem with the music too: they forgot to enable looping, so when it reaches the end, the game goes completely silent. The frog-people with their strange animation aren’t scary — they rather evoke a mix of bewilderment and laughter. Besides, they apparently can’t even deal damage to the player — to take damage, you have to purposefully bump into them. What you’re supposed to do is unclear. I just walked for less than a minute through pitch-black darkness, after which I got a message saying I’d won. Along with the victory message, there was a “Play again!” button, but no matter how many times I clicked it — nothing happened. And there are zero-thickness walls scattered throughout the level too.

Thank you!

I think something needs to be done about the dice-rolling mechanic itself. Because rolling dice is just plain boring — you have absolutely no influence on the outcome. You need to add some additional activity for the player. For example, the ability to cheat on your roll, but in a way that your opponent doesn’t notice. And during the opponent’s turn, you’d need to keep an eye on them to make sure they’re not cheating, and spot it based on certain tells. Basically, do something so that the dice roll button doesn’t feel like a “next” button — otherwise it ends up feeling like a Windows installer wizard.

I absolutely didn’t understand how to play. The game explains absolutely nothing. And the giant wall of text added in the description doesn’t make things any better. All I did was just click on random blocks, trying to figure out what I need to do to make them disappear and what match-3 has to do with it. So I can’t say anything about the gameplay, because the core game loop remains a mystery to me. As for the rest, the graphics in the game are all blurry for some reason, as if they forgot to set the pixel art filtering to nearest. There’s no music, and the SFX sound out of place at times — there’s a constant rockslide happening in the left audio channel, and I can’t see any connection to what I’m doing.

Thank you! I’m especially glad you liked the music. I’m a total newbie when it comes to making music, so I was really afraid it would just be annoying.

Well, it’s not perfect (not even close). But it’s gotten significantly better. In some aspects, the combat is even more polished than in some other, much more polished overall, games from this jam. Here’s what I can note:

Sometimes something weird happens with the animation, and it starts convulsing as if dropping to 10 FPS.

The weak attack does something incomprehensible. It looks like it keeps poking the spear to the left of the opponent every time.

The menu with the restart button is great, of course, but could you either add keyboard controls back to it or show the mouse cursor? Reaching for Esc to release the mouse capture is inconvenient.

The health indicator isn’t informative. It doesn’t show your maximum health. It doesn’t show the damage you’ve taken. It only displays your current state. In my project’s description for this jam (the More Information button), there’s a link to GitHub with its source code. You can check out how the health indicator is done there — might be useful.

P. S.: While writing this, I went back to double-check something, and the cursor capture wasn’t working at all, which turns camera control into something impossible.

I played while switching to QWERTY. But I was taking notes in another window in Russian, and coming back to the game, it was a bit annoying to realize I had to switch the layout back.

Adding AZERTY support would obviously make things better, but I’m afraid in my case it wouldn’t fix much, since I had issues with the ЙЦУКЕН layout.

At least in this jam, I only saw two other games that had issues with ЙЦУКЕН. I think the lack of problems is mainly because almost all of them were made either in Godot or Unity. And there, the engine itself handles that (though I can’t say for AZERTY, since I’ve never used it). And this game, as I understand it, is as custom-made as it gets.

Oh, by the way, one more note. Don’t use alert(). Every time I clicked Quit, terrible things happened.

The game really lacks polish, but for something made under tight time constraints, it’s just excellent. Everyone seems to be praising the death animations, but I think the real standout is the main character’s running animation. It’s simply gorgeous. I also liked the atmosphere — those purple eyes really create an oppressive mood. The music is just great too.

But still, I’d like to mention a few shortcomings:

• I got softlocked. In the purple area, under the corridor with that long dotted path. There are two platform chunks shaped like a + sign. Before the first one, there’s a row of platforms. I fell into the gap between the +-shaped platform and the path leading to it, and it seems like there’s no way out.

• I didn’t like the jumps. I’m not sure what exactly is off about them, but something definitely is.

• The bats are annoying because if they’re flying at you, you might not have time to hit them twice since they don’t react to your attack at all.

• The huge purple bat flies backwards for some reason, which gives you the wrong idea about how it actually attacks.

• It’s really annoying having to wait for enemy death animations to finish before you can walk past them. Especially considering how long they are.

• I feel like the attack animation and the attack sound are poorly synchronized.

• Restarting the level with R doesn’t work if a non-English keyboard layout is active, even though ZXC work. And I don’t quite understand why the game treats WASD with such neglect.

I liked it! A cool puzzle with an interesting mechanic. The music is good. However, the visuals need some work. The character’s leg animation when moving sideways is just awful in its complete absence. I also noticed an issue where the game doesn’t respond to WASD inputs if a non-English keyboard layout is active. And I’m too dumb to beat level 9 :’(

I liked the game overall, but it feels like the author lacks development experience. So I’d like to point out several shortcomings, both serious and minor, that prevent me from properly enjoying it, so they can be avoided in the future.

• The game lacks quality-of-life features typical of platformers. There’s no coyote time. No jump buffering. This is especially unfortunate given the visual style, which makes it hard to accurately determine the size of platforms.

• The player character apparently has no maximum fall speed, so during a long fall they reach absolutely astronomical velocity.

• The visual style, while fundamentally nice, suffers from inconsistency. Despite being pixel art, the game runs at an incredibly high resolution (for pixel art). As a result, I can see pixels not aligned to the grid, rectangular pixels, pixels of different sizes, and so on.

I also want to say something separately about the main menu. The pixel art in the background is decent, though it’s ruined by stretching on a 21:9 aspect ratio. The pixel size of the text on the buttons doesn’t match the pixel size of the background, but we’ve already seen that. But the main thing — the shape of the button outlines… they’re oval! Everything in this game is pixelated, while the button outlines showcase all the advantages of vector graphics!

And another one a small note on the graphics: on a 240 Hz monitor, the player sprite gets very blurry during movement. I’ve run into a similar issue before — I think it’s caused by camera movement smoothing. Though I can’t suggest a proper fix, unfortunately.

The game has a nice, slightly sinister atmosphere. Music is decent too. But I feel like the mechanics aren’t thought through enough. What am I supposed to do when I run out of energy in combat? Just keep pressing “end turn” until I finally get killed? I tried that. The doctor died, the elf died, the knight died… and then the game just stopped, not letting me do anything — no cards were being dealt, and “end turn” wouldn’t work. There’s no Esc menu either, so I had to yank my computer’s power cord out.

A few minor notes:

• The cooking mechanic is weird and unclear. I combine A and B — I get a card that restores 2 energy. I combine 3A and B — I get a card that restores 1 energy. Where’s the logic in that?

• Groceries are cards. Food is cards. Skills are cards. But in practice, they feel like three different unrelated entities. It’s confusing.

• I really didn’t understand why finishing a battle requires playing a card that appears when you kill a monster, instead of just pressing a button.

• The cards really lack some kind of appearance animation. When they teleport upward and grow larger on hover — it’s a bit jarring.

• I’d like to be able to play cards just by clicking on them, rather than having to drag them.

Well, as a foundation, it looks decent. The visuals are pleasant and reminiscent of good old Flash games. But as far as I can tell, despite the variety of weapons, there’s no one to try them out on. I think next time it’d be better to focus on developing the core gameplay loop rather than adding different variations of essentially the same thing. Why would I need 10 types of weapons if there’s nothing to shoot at?

Also, I’d like to make a couple of notes on the controls:

• Esc is a really bad binding for a web game, since in the browser it’s assigned to exiting fullscreen. And yes, I keep making that mistake myself over and over again.

• I see no reason whatsoever to bind jump to W when Space is free.

• RIGHT Shift? With WASD controls? Seriously?

Visually, it looks interesting, but it feels more like a bunch of decoration with a tiny gameplay window, like in Zero Tolerance. It’s unclear what you’re supposed to do. Why you’re playing as a glitchy neon cat is also unclear. What to do with all the code on the left — unclear. There’s some kind of bar at the top, and it depletes when strange things fly toward you… or are within half a screen of you… but when it reaches 0, nothing happens. 10 “I didn’t understand anything” out of 10.

Just an excellent game! I completed it fully. The only thing I don’t get is why disparagingly call it a copy of VVVVVV. I don’t remember it that well by now, but from what I recall, only the visuals are similar — and even then, just similar. And indeed, those visuals are good, and the sounds are too. The gameplay is great and it’s fun to play.

As for drawbacks, I can note:

• The game lacks music.

• Having switch bound to Enter is very inconvenient. Why not use Shift for that?

• The fullscreen mode isn’t actually fullscreen. It doesn’t stretch the image, leaving a small window in the middle instead.

• I found the logic strange that while in the ghost state you collide with enemies who don’t look ghostly and can’t even walk on the ghost floor.

• For some reason, you can die by passing through spikes from their blunt side. I expected that would just result in bumping like into a wall.

• While flying after enemies through a looping tube, you can die when trying to kill an enemy by dropping onto it. It seems to happen especially often if you land on them right as they warp from the bottom of the screen to the top.

• Ghost spikes can sometimes be hard to notice.

I think the music completely threw me off and I forgot to say anything positive at all. If there’s one thing to praise, it’s the visual style. In static shots, everything looks just great. It’s stylish and beautifully drawn. But, I’m afraid, there’s nothing else good I can point out.

The gameplay is too simple. If you think about it, it’s not much harder than Flappy Bird. And it brings absolutely no enjoyment.

The character sprite is too simplistic. It’s literally a single frame that gets mirrored back and forth. While it kind of works for the arms, creating an illusion of climbing, if you focus on the legs, it starts to look downright ridiculous — like the Thriller dance from behind.

The music is just awful. It sounds like the author not only doesn’t know music theory but, on the contrary, knows it and does everything against it (though I fear that’s not the case). It sounds like a cat climbed onto a piano keyboard and is pacing back and forth. What’s more, the beginning feels like a straight rip-off of “Oh, Pretty Woman.” If this music were text, it would look something like this: “Pretty woman wakim’ pown de striet / Pheggy sdfa jsdlkasdaf sd sdlfasdf lklsadlfj.” It creates no atmosphere whatsoever — it just makes you turn the volume down to zero so you don’t have to hear this incoherent mess.

If you put the game in fullscreen on a 21:9 monitor, everything gets stretched out of place.

Also, the tower sprite has obvious texture bleeding.

A small game in the spirit of Doodle Jump. I like how it looks and sounds. And I think it fits the “Corrupted” theme well. But I feel like playing something like this on PC with the arrow keys just isn’t satisfying enough. It doesn’t give you that tactile feedback you get when you play by tilting your smartphone, where you have to be fully focused so you don’t make an unnecessary movement. Here, you’re just casually tapping right, left, left, right. And so on, in a loop.

Overall, I liked it. I’m not a fan of horror games, but this one felt more like a thriller than horror to me. I especially want to highlight the visual style. Though I didn’t quite understand why I needed to kill so many L’s from Death Note ;-). The gameplay was decent too. It just lacked some kind of ambient sound to create the right atmosphere. Nothing too loud though, so it wouldn’t distract from the metronome.

But I noticed a few rough edges that keep the game from being 100% enjoyable:

• The tutorial for pressing to the beat would be better if it required three consecutive successful presses, not just three presses total. As it is now, it doesn’t achieve its goal very well.

• The pop-up hints in the game are impossible to read in time. They need to be slowed down by about 3 times.

• I’m pretty sure I saw a bug where the Q-turn rotated 270 degrees to the right instead, but I can’t prove it.

• At the moment when the second monster appeared, corruption swallowed me 4 times in a row, even though I didn’t seem to be making that many mistakes. It’s like the game demands absolutely perfect dancing on the Space at that moment.

• When the spaghetti ghost crawled out at me at the start of the level, I had the same issue. It’s made worse by the fact that it constantly rearranges the hearts and adds new ones. After a while, I managed to beat it without dying, but I never managed to find the right rhythm to restart the heart. The sequence at that moment was: empty-4hearts-empty-heart-empty-4hearts. And I couldn’t even die. I just sat there spamming space, trying to hit the rhythm, until the game just froze :-).

• Also, it would be nice to add a short delay at the start of a level so you have time to sync yourself with the metronome. As it is now, you’re forced to do it during gameplay while already taking hits from enemies.

• And I don’t understand why this game even needs WASD — I played the whole thing just pressing space to the bar at the top.

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thank you!

The idea is original, but the execution is mediocre. The zombie combat itself isn’t very comfortable. You can’t tell when the zombie is hitting you. Your attacks seem to only strike left and right, but not up and down. Also, I really don’t understand why this game needs constant digital glitches. In a fantasy setting, it just looks weird. Something strange also happens when talking to visitors — for some reason, either the visitors or the main character keep getting duplicated. Overall, I think the game needs a bit more polish, especially when it comes to the combat mechanics, since that’s the core mechanic.

PSYCHOPATY.exe You must install or update .NET to run this application.

The only mechanics are movement and playing attack animations. Attacks bound to the U and I keys while moving with WASD and controlling the camera with the mouse — it’s just some kind of unfunny joke. The game even has bugs within its bugs, because the list of known bugs states there’s no sound, yet I have footstep sounds and something resembling music. There’s really nothing more to say.

P.S.: And the main character is definitely a witch, since she somehow manages to walk without having any feet.

I finished the game, and it was actually quite fun. There are still issues, but they’re no longer critical and don’t get in the way of enjoying the gameplay. The chests during the boss fight were especially pleasing — they no longer dropped bombs, as if tempting you to just end it all by blowing yourself up.

Issues I noticed:

• It’s funny, but the goblin now has a different problem: a projectile flies at me first, and only then does its attack animation play :)
• Texture bleeding is still present on the signs, the yellow cupcake-like mushrooms, and the yellow trees (or whatever you call them). Both the rectangular tree and the one made of spheres. And it seems to not happen all the time.
• For some reason, I couldn’t find the codex button in the main menu, even though I saw it in the previous two versions.
• I think the goblins’ mushrooms should have their entity collision removed. It’s one thing when they sometimes launch the player into the air, but just now a goblin himself came flying at me along with a bunch of mushrooms after being catapulted by his buddies.

The game is well made. The visual style is great. It sounds wonderful too. You can tell the authors really put in the effort. But I found it boring to play. The “free or pay” choice usually isn’t a choice at all, because you have no money. The success rate for the free option is way too low, so you know in advance what’s coming. And what’s coming is a tedious QTE. It really reminds me of that song: “When you start to play Resident Evil 6 / You hammer the buttons and wiggle the sticks!”

The game could have been saved by a frightening atmosphere, but there isn’t one here. And mind you, I’m not some horror-hardened person — quite the opposite, I avoid horror games like the plague because they scare me and I don’t enjoy that. But here? Nothing. The only scary thing is the jumpscare when you choose the free path. But even that isn’t scary, because you’re fully expecting it.

So… yeah.

“Decorrupt powerup”? The one that “heals” a key? Over all my runs, I’ve only seen it a couple of times. One of those was during this hard run. I lost the healed key about a second later. And by that point, all my keys except two had already been knocked out.

I completed it on easy and hard difficulty. I think the easy difficulty strikes a perfect balance of mechanics. The hard difficulty, on the other hand, isn’t so much hard as it is unfair to the player. I spent most of the run just standing still and spinning the cursor around my character to attack in a circle. Simply because out of 5 keys, I was left with only one and there’s no way to get them back.

I think a small but polished project is clearly better than a big one that simply doesn’t work.

Thank you!

I finally played a bit more. Aside from the aforementioned issues with the tutorial and animations, I can also note the following:

• The goo puddle at the start of the game is just awful. It’s literally placed exactly where your dash runs out. And when you start the dash, you can’t even see it. It just feels like a slap in the face to the player.

• The entire game is riddled with inconsistent pixel sizes. Some of them aren’t even square!

• The game is full of chasms. But in some places, it’s completely unclear whether it’s a fatal drop or a path to the next part of the level.

• It seems like the game is made of softlocks, because the Q-jumps appear to be a finite resource, yet they’re essential for progression.

• The living statues are weird and confusing. Sometimes they kill you on contact, sometimes you can stand on them, sometimes they chase you when you’re behind a wall, and sometimes they just stand there when you’re in their line of sight. What you’re supposed to do with them is also completely unclear, so you end up just ignoring them like some strange artifact.

Overall, I think the main problem with the game is that the developer forgets that the player doesn’t know what they know, and the player needs to be guided.

But I can’t go right. I literally just have a screen with 5 starting graves and a chasm to the right of it. Nothing else.