itch.io

Awesome music (especially Main Menu) and overall great sounds, although I think they could fit the visuals a little better. With music, I would have liked for the instruments to be less modern on the Overworld ost, but I really enjoyed it anyway. Some minor things with the sfx: stereo sounds for game objects don't work too well (especially footsteps, or flippersteps...) and having a stereo reverb muddies up the landscape where your music can't sit very well on the mix anymore. I also would have liked even the tiniest sfx for water movement, and I would add a bit more low layers on your Enter or Exit water sounds. I like to limit the frequency range near the end of the master chain to mimic retro system's audio better, same with dynamic range. And lastly, I would have loved for sfx to go through a bit of reverb, and EQ'ing everything when you enter water. All this said, I still enjoyed both music and sfx a lot, and they helped me immerse in this beatiful landscape.

Art direction is insane, probably the best one in the jam. It looks great, the animations are beautiful, and the tile sets bring a great level design to shine. It really feels as if this game was already one of the classic metroidvanias back in the day. Great great stuff! 

Movement feels nice, teleport is super fun and the hidden rooms are cool to find. Very clever level design! The amount of content you guys made is also very impressive! 

Sorry for posting my review so late, I did rate your game among the highest (if no the highest) entry for the jam, I really liked it. Congrats!

Wow haha thanks again for clearly enjoying our game, we hope you continue to enjoy it, and it'll only get better! You are surely one of our reviewers who has spent the most time on it, although I didn't have the energy to read everything you just said. But when I read that apparently we made a game where you can't beat the final boss (and we didn't include a Lore Tablet right before the entrance to the boss telling you how to beat it) I'm convinced it's best if I just let you keep enjoying the game, and not take your carefully worded gems of feedback too seriously! Do reach out if you're ever stuck on our game again, I'm sure everyone here can give you a hand.

Thanks for taking the time to try out our game, and I'm sorry to hear you were mostly frustrated when playing. We're already working on improving combat, and it will be in update number one post jam. We're confident this will tackle the central issue with the game, as well as many things that derive from that.

About the checkpoints, they're meant to reset your spawn location, they don't touch any progress made (upgrades and new abilities), or any major door on the map. So, maybe you could help out by trying to be more specific with the way you lost loot and abilities? They do reset some levers and triggers, which require the player to solve the mini puzzle again; this will also be balanced better in the future. Again, reusable checkpoints that restore HP and charge will be there from the first patch post jam.

It sounds like you took the time to play at least up until the player gets the Fireball, which is a good 15 to 20 minutes into the game. So that tells me we do use common sense, otherwise you wouldn't have spent all that time playing. We are aware of most of the issues so we'll learn from our mistakes and improve thanks to great feedback from a community built around supporting each other. Jams are usually all about learning.

So again, thanks for playing our game and for the valuable feedback you seem to provide with your comments regularly, it's greatly appreciated. Feel free to check back in the future if you would like to try the game again.

The art department needs a raise! Incredible visuals and music (nice hints of alttp there), supported by great implementation and mechanics.

The game design is great, levels are clever and the tile sets are beautiful (with the problems everyone mentioned). Combat feels super fun, as does slide. The different abilities and the way they synergize is brilliant. Cutting back on the player knockback after landing an attack could help make up for minor imperfections in the level design (like having player knockback transition you to the next screen). 

Movement seems a little on the heavy side for acceleration and on the floaty side for inertia. Controls felt tricky at first, specifically having jump right underneath your action keys, but you very much get used to it. You could add a tiny Pause sfx if there's no visual way to tell the player that the game is paused (other than no movement).

Awesome choice of synths and instruments for the scoring, and very nice songwriting experience there. The sfx were great as well, absolutely nailed what the visuals required. Reverb felt a bit off at times although it's barely noticeable so it's not distracting. Like I said, a raise!

I can't wait to see what your team makes of this game, if that's what you plan on doing! Great job with this one.

P.S: I forgot to say, big kudos for the nice amount of functioning enemies!

Super fun mechanic with the controls, tight level design and clever goals, overall great execution!

The game feels great, is challenging enough to have players enjoy collecting all the keys. Controls aren't perfect, but they're pretty much what the player would need for this type of level design.

I did get tired of the ost after a while, and I also would have preferred more sfx. But what's there is fully functional and works perfectly.

A bit more content would have been nice, but that's about it, very few negatives in general, good job!

This was a very unique and fun art direction, from the deep story to the collage graphics. The M64 type of levels is cool and each one is very much its own.

Some of the mechanics like the line caller and jetpack are really cool, but the controllers were a little awkward sometimes. Also, small things like the text scroller tester were a nice touch!

Although I think it matched the game very well aesthetically speaking, the music didn't do much service to the game IMO and it could have been mixed a little better. The lead synth is too loud compared to the rest, and it wasn't very pleasing in general.

It's missing some sfx, but the ones that are there are very cool! I wish they wouldn't compete so much with the music's instruments, but they made things more fun.

Shout out to the sense of humor in the team, although I would prefer if I could skip in game text boxes from time to time.

Overall, this was a cool, fun and unique game which I enjoyed! Big kudos for being so original, I'd love to play a polished version after your team work on it further (hopefully you will). 

Muy buen juego! No estoy seguro si termina el demo luego de recibir los guantes o no, pero nunca pude jugar después de eso. Tenía ganas de usar mi nueva habilidad :( . Me crasheó varias veces, y hubo un par de bugs que me dejaron atrapado y que me obligaron a comenzar de cero, pero seguro son arreglos sencillos. Así que me concentraré sobre lo demás!

- El arte está genial! Las animaciones y los tiles están muy bien implementadas, y la paleta de colores es adecuada para poder destacar lo importante. De pronto la única excepción son las plantas enemigas, que se pierden un poco en el fondo, pero sospecho que fue una decisión intencional para hacerlas parecer más como si fuesen parte de la cueva. Felicidades, mucho talento en este departamento.

- Las mecánicas son sólidas y el combate es divertido aún cuando podría ser mejor. En cuánto al movimiento, lo único que cambiaría sería reducir el tiempo en el que el jugador se queda inmóvil luego de saltar. A veces entorpece un poco el flujo, sobretodo en la sección de las plataformas donde debes moverte rápidamente luego de saltar para lograr el siguiente salto. 

- Me quedé con ganas de seguir jugando, pues sólo conseguí una habilidad nueva antes de que termine. En cuánto al resto de elementos, es un buen metroidvania dentro de lo poco que ofrece. Cuando iba a agarrar el cristal, estaba convencido de que sería algo para el jugador, pero resultó ser un switch para abrir puertas. Visualmente no hay mucha coherencia, pero es un detalle menor. Tampoco hubo momentos de desafío, pero entiendo que es cuestión de gustos y que para un game jam, queremos que la gente vea todo el contenido y no se quede repitiendo una y otra vez lo mismo. El wall jump estaba genial, una lástima que no haya podido usarlo más que una vez. 

- Faltó música, obviamente. Creo que ayudaría a cubrir un poco el reverb de la cueva que estaba un poco alto en la mezcla, y a cubrir la repetición de los sonidos. Uno de los sfx para los pasos no cuadra con el resto, faltó sfx para el salto y (dado que hay un sólo tipo de ataque) me hubiese gustado un poquito de variación en el sonido para los ataques. Por otro lado, los sonidos que están implementados son muy buenos (quizás le daría más peso al de las puertas, parece ser una sola layer de ladrillos).

En general, me llevo una buena primera impresión y creo que tienen talento. Me encantaría saber si planean desarrollarlo a futuro para poder seguirlo de cerca. Entiendo que el tiempo haya limitado la cantidad de contenido, pero quizás hubiese intentado aprovechar poco más de lo que tienen para que el jugador utilice el wall jump, para que se pierda en el mapa con caminos no lineales, o que tenga que resolver puzzles complejos. De todas formas, es un buen trabajo, con mucho potencial! 

Hi, I do sound design and I've worked on a couple of games on itch.io and couple more college projects. I'm super interested in this jam so I'm looking for a team that needs my services. I do anything audio related, including implementation and some music composing, but mostly sound design. Thanks!

Hi, I'm a sound designer with some moderate field recording experience, hence I have quite a nice personal library regarding sound effects. I also have some knowledge about audio implementation within Unity, Unreal, o middleware. I'm looking to expand my portfolio in game audio, so let me know if you're interested! DM me on Discord: jaavwm#9277 .

Thanks, and good luck to everyone!

Hi, 

I'm actually looking to team up with anyone for this. I do everything game audio related, so I need a team of designers, programmers, etc... Any idea on how to do it?