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Once you get through the first ritual stage (i.e. reverse time for the first time and then restart the ritual), it should remember that you've seen the tutorial if you don't close/reload the page. I.e. if you restart by going back to the menu in the lose screen and starting again from there, it should start a new attempt without the tutorial.

If it still shows the tutorial, that's a bug; sorry about that! Someone else mentioned this as well, so it may be something I missed.

The squids, yeah, haha! I bumped their damage a bit very close to the end of the jam, and never got around to really testing them again. So they may be a bit overtuned!

Good idea with the 1x10 card. It could even do only the micro-staggers and no damage, but go fast enough to stunlock enemies, which would help to differentiate it from the other two damage cards as well!

The rewind while you're dying was not intentional, but I did discover it at some point and thought, eh, I can probably just leave it in. It does give a bit of push your luck feeling, and the game isn't too easy, so a bit of rule bending for the player seems fine. Happy it landed well with you!

Thanks so much for the feedback and kind words!

Yeah, agreed! Removing cards from the deck was definitely in the original plan, but sadly I eventually had to sideline it to get the game in a working and beatable state.

Glad you had a nice time with it anyway!

Graphics are really eye-catching, and the impending doom of the shrinking visibility and audio that goes with it really works to get on one's nerves.

I was a little torn on the reduction of visibility, since it eventually gets to a point where the player can't really win anymore, since they can't see anything (unless they happen to already be at the right place). However, when I did finally make it to the end (try 3, I think?), the panic as the light got snuffed out but the continual upward movement really worked well to evoke the feeling I imagine you wanted players to feel. And that feeling when you see the end -- great stuff.

One thing I'd suggest is giving some kind of indication as to whether the player is still moving. When it gets real dark, you might just be swimming up into a ceiling, and there's no way to know.

Also, there were a few places where it was difficult to distinguish where you can and can't go; as in, it looks like there's a wall, but it's actually just a background asset. Having the background objects be darkened or lightened or something to distinguish them would be helpful. On that same note, there are a few places where it looks like there's a gap between two rocks, but then my guy can't manage to pass through; having that look impassable would have been appreciated.

Love the dwarf theme in this! The auctioning itself feels like it could be interesting, but not having any real recourse other than guessing to figure out when to buy hampers it a bit, I think.

I also would have liked to have seen prices change in the market over time, so you're always needing to check to see how things are looking. It feels like this gameplay could pair well with some kind of trading metagame, where you sell your goods to market. I.e. you buy out the stuff at auction when the prices are low, and then manage storage space to sell things when prices are high, etc.

Also, sad that the profit got broken with that bug. I also seemingly randomly lost at some point, but I'm not sure why. Perhaps also related to the bug?

Great point. The idea was to have things you need (e.g. ritual) attached to things you don't want (e.g. bigger monsters), which then requires you to get more damage cards, etc.

But at the moment the pairings are just entirely random, so I imagine the combinations that happen to come up will make a big difference in how necessary particular card pairs feel. So there definitely needs to be more of a drive towards the player needing to pick the things that push them towards engaging with the more interesting mechanics.

Thanks for playing!

This may be my favourite game of the jam so far. Amazing art, great use of the theme, good level design, and a really nice character controller. The SFX also on point.

While the character controller can be a bit frustrating at times, it actually added a lot to the platforming challenges. I was annoyed with it at first, but it kind of grew on me. That said, the bouncing off the walls part of it seemed a bit too punishing. E.g. it makes it really hard just to get up simple little ledges, which is very frustrating.

It took me a while to understand that the orange rooms noted in the "how to play" meant the rooms on the edges, which made me think I was going crazy, being unable to find any other bodies (because I was just carving into the centre, ha). Once I figured that out, it became more viable.

Also, I really liked the minimap being in the middle of the rooms in a sort of diegetic fashion; very cool!

The visuals in this game are incredible. Love the vibe and aesthetic.

I also really enjoyed the mechanic of the timed card playing. I would have liked to have more indication of what counts as a valid place to activate it, as it sometimes felt like I got it, but then it missed somehow. Would also have been cool to have a "partial" hit or something, where you get reduced effects ala rating how close you were to the center or whatever? 

From one eye-based title font game to another, this was great!

It should remember that you have gone through the tutorial if you make it through the first time reversal (as long as you're not reloading the page, and just going to the menu via the end screen). Maybe a bug?

Thanks for playing!

I liked the mechanics in this! The switching of phases was cool, and the fact that you could store them for later is so nice. The shooting mechanics felt good, though the enemy bullets were perhaps a bit too big?

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to tell when to head back; i.e. night caught me out because I didn't know it was coming. Not sure if it's indicated somewhere, but I couldn't figure it out.

That's strange; sorry the syncing messed up for you! 

The one desynced thing I'm aware of is if you go through your deck really fast, you'll get the "the reversal spell is ready" message before the message telling you that you'll need to gather ritual to get the reversal spell, but it sounds like you didn't get those?

Thanks for playing, and glad you stuck to it so you could experience the intended gameplay!

Thanks for playing and the kind words!

And yeah, the tutorial also feels a bit too rapidly in succession to me too. Ideal would have been to delay the introduction of some mechanics until later so I could spread out the tutorials a bit.

Also, in terms of the discarding, it's the button with the arrows on the right side if you're still trying to find it!

Thanks for playing! 

1 & 7 - Yeah, I think controlling the randomness of the shop is something I should have spent a bit more time on. Currently the only thing I'm modifying for the random is that the Lv2 cards only start showing up after the third (or fourth maybe?) time you visit. But yeah, getting a drought of ritual cards basically just dooms your run.

2 & 6 - I straight up just forgot to update the lose screen with different info when you die because of your tower dying, and didn't remember the cancelling of cards when I made the tutorial. Good points!

3 - Having some rare opportunities to get positive cards without the negative ones could be cool, yea!

5 - Currently there's two things that happen when time gets low: there's a ticking that gets faster in the music, and the timer shakes, and then eventually scales dramatically every second. I was a bit worried about it still being too subtle, as I'd also been caught out before. Should probably have some big gong or horror sting sound effect or something when you get to 5ish seconds.

I think the concept for this is really interesting, but the pushing control scheme combined with the incredibly sensitive physics made this very punishing. I wonder if having the player click and drag rather would have given more control over what's going on?

I suppose there's a bit of an almost rage game vibe if it's intentionally hard to control that could certainly play well with particular players. 

Also, the art is really clean and nice to look at.

This is so good! Really enjoyed my time with it. I lost to the boss the first time, but in my second run I managed to eke out a win with just a sliver of health left.

Drawing the dice cards (or rather, not drawing them) was sometimes a bit brutal. I wonder if having the dice roll automatically every round, and having only cards the modify (and then obviously also rebalancing) would feel nicer? You could have upgrades then that lets you roll more dice per round, etc.

Loved the shenanigans you could get up to with the x2 and +1 cards, and the restrictions on attacking certain enemies (e.g. only evens) was really fun as well!

Because the cards discard at the end of a turn, and there's no cost to playing a card, there was often not much incentive for me to not just play out everything every round. Might be interesting to see what a card playing cost does to the game (even if some cards are perhaps zero cost or whatever).

I also would have liked to have seen some way to heal a bit. I know that hitting the exact number heals you by 1, but that feels kind of meh (in fact, it does feel a bit bad for putting in the effort to get the exact value for such a paltry reward). Maybe skipping a card could heal you? Or it's a separate thing that only happens every X encounters ala Slay the Spire? Or maybe you can have cards that use dice values to heal rather than do damage?

On that same note, I kind of wished I could defend somehow. I.e. when you get to the boss at the end, you basically just have a countdown of how many turns you got to beat it (which is just HP/10). So on my first run, I had like 9 HP left, so the fight felt very futile, because no matter what I draw, I can't beat it.

Anyway, great game, great art, and nice mechanics. Bravo!

Very cute art and animations; love the little waddle.

The control scheme takes quite a bit of getting used to, and it's quite difficult to control even when you do. This might be intended? (I.e. to make it a bit less precise.) But I did find it a tad frustrating.

Having the feathers float around (with very natural feeling movements, I might add) was great. Running after them in circles was really fun (and the waddle animation really sells this whimsical feeling as well).

I wish the sell values were noted somewhere. I.e. I want to know how the game calculates how much money I make. To me, it seemed completely arbitrary/random, where sometimes I'll get a bunch of money I didn't expect, or make almost nothing when I thought I had a good haul. (Also, the wait for the line-up of ducks to get my money was a bit too long, in my opinion.)

As for the upgrades, I didn't understand some. For example, the denser pillows one seems a bit counter-intuitive. If I get paid per pillow, why would I want denser pillows? Even if the pillow sells for more, I'll make the same amount. Unless there's a premium on top of that? Would be great if that was clarified a bit. Also, the waddling speed seemed kind of useless because I could already go incredibly fast, but that may be because it's played in a tiny window, so I can drag my mouse very far away from the duck.

Speaking of the tiny screen, I would have liked a fullscreen option or something, because the font is really small and also very stylised, making it hard to read in such a tiny window.

Really solid core mechanic that is expanded on with clever level design / puzzles. I had fun figuring out the right order to do things, and liked that the four guys weren't entirely interchangeable (e.g. for a timed switch, only the guy directly after the one pressing it can be the one going past the door).

I initially thought that skipping to the next character saved the time, but I figured out later that it didn't. That might be something that can be indicated more clearly via the things that happen when you press the button (e.g. maybe the time speeds up rather than just instantly skipping?). But it could also just me being a bit dense, ha

Hilarious. No notes.

The presentation for this is so on point, and the gameplay itself is simple, doing exactly one thing. Marvelous.

Insanely polished, and quite fun! I managed to get to the end with a random deck that got me some good stuff to start out with.

The combo system is pretty interesting; it added a lot of pressure to make decisions quickly, and mapping all the controls onto arrows/WASD (even the menus!) was inspired, since it created a very seamless UX. 

I was a bit frustrated with being able to accidentally shoot myself with a fireball, or heal an enemy. I'm not sure there's anything to gain from being able to do that (unless there are some builds I missed?) so it feels like it's just arbitrarily punishing the player. I wonder if having healing always target yourself, and maybe having attacks with up attacking a random side would be a better experience for the player?

The enemy variety was great, though they all had so little HP that it didn't really feel like I needed that big of a combo to deal with them. Perhaps I'm misremembering enemies towards the end, but either way, I never really spent any effort figuring out who is the best enemy to attack at any given moment, except when counting number of enemies per side for AOEs, or the mirror specifically. I.e. it feels like the player should be rewarded for getting a high combo, such that they're able to beat enemies they couldn't otherwise beat?

(Also, art and music was incredible.)

I love the ragdoll Count; very cute.

I enjoyed the puzzle of figuring out what the best path was; initially I'd get stuck on a seemingly impossible path, only to realise that there was an alternative, so that was nice level design.

The game does strike me as a bit of a rage game, and it certainly brought that out in me, ha. I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but the bat is nigh-impossible to control, flying at insane speeds sometimes and barely moving at all at others. Perhaps part of the issue was also the controls? Having to have a hand on the mouse meant that I couldn't really mash the space bar as much as I wanted, which probably led to some of my lacklustre lifting power.

I got a bit too frustrated and quit before finishing level 4 or 5, but I had a good time when I managed to pull off a seemingly impossible task!

Great concept, and good execution.

I enjoyed the puzzle aspect, figuring out how the flow will go. I often found myself putting down random numbers and then adjusting over time, which I assume is the intended flow? In that, I really appreciated that the times on platforms were remembered into the next planning phase so I didn't have to memorise them!

I would have liked to have a bit more control over the number (i.e. finer than 0.5 increments, as I'd sometimes have a really tight jump that I'd want to make just a little bit easier by delaying it another 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.

Also, it would've been nice to know what target to shoot for in order to get the one/two/three stars; at the moment you're just sort of doing your best and hoping it's good enough.

(I also enjoyed that the 0.0 made it look like the platforms had little faces.)

The vibes in this game are great!

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what to do until I looked at the GIFs and remember that you said there were camera controls. Whoops.

Once I found the charger, what I was supposed to do was easy to figure out. I like the "try to keep everything afloat" feeling of keeping different things charged up, though I eventually rebooted with like 60% chance, because there's so many checks per battery that even with a fairly low chance, the odds are in my favour.

I will say that it feels like maybe there's too much time given to the player? I spent a lot of time figuring out what to do before actually starting, and still managed to finish with like 2 mins on the clock. Could probably cut that down a bit to add a bit of pressure?

I don't know why I'm a knight on a bike, but it just works.

I had a bit of trouble figuring out how the food and the power interacted, but once I figured that out, I was able to pull into 2nd, and then 1st place after a few runs. 

Art is amazing, vibes are great, and it just plain feels nice to play.

It might have been that your tower was destroyed by enemies? Sadly I forgot to update the text in the event of tower destruction, so it just says you ran out of time when that happens. 

Very sleek! The tutorial is quite elegant as well.

The gameplay has a very "one more try" energy to it, making me try more times than I'd originally planned (but also, I kept dying by running into things over and over, which made me think I could surely do better than that). My best run was only a couple of seconds over the 1 minute mark, which I imagine is not that great, ha

The controller support is nice, and I appreciated the little health pickups!

I'd have liked some more feedback about what happened when I lost (i.e. did I lose all my health, or did I run out of time?), but it's a minor gripe, really.

Also, the music is great, and the art style, while simple, looks quite polished!

Love the concept, and the art and animation really sell the vibe!

It was a bit confusing initially with the more complex items (like the wizard hat, I think?), but eventually I mostly figured it out. The game is also quite hard, so could probably use a bit of a shallower difficulty curve initially?

The enemies with the "shy" ability felt a bit bad, since it basically disincentivises looking at the enemy, which feels counter-intuitive. 

Thanks so much! This game has a special place in my heart, so I might return to it at some point to see if I can expand it into something more.

But in the meantime, it's so nice to hear you enjoyed it! 

There's also one level (1-3) that's very wide, so when you're at max light expansion, it looks like there's still more below to expand to, but there isn't. (But if you're missing eggs, it's probably the Egg Clowns, as mentioned.)

But as far as light goes, if you got the button that lets you end the level, it means you've reached the max light expansion level, so you're definitely not missing anything.

Thanks for letting us know about this. I've found the cause of the bug, so we'll do a small update that fixes this and a few other things soon.

To merge, you need to move one of your split units into the space of another, and then allocate all the points in the window at the bottom and click "merge". Are one of these steps not working for you?

Are you clicking on the node you want to send from first? If you then click on another node, it should bring up a popup that asks for an amount.

Do you have a 16:9 aspect ratio on your screen? We've not focused on adding support for other aspect ratios yet, so that could be the issue.

Hey, thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I think the balancing needs some work still (that heat-to-elixir one probably needs to be a whole lot smaller to make it worthwhile). I had a plan for resources going beyond 20, but forgot about it in the end; whoops. I'll probably patch that in soon.

This is just a prototype; if there's enough interest, I have a lot of directions I want to explore with this.

Seems to still be working on my end. What browser are you using? Are you getting a crash, or are you seeing the loading bar and it just stops?

I couldn't for the life of me manage to recreate this bug. There's one place in the code that could theoretically be causing this (not likely though), and I've fixed that. Also changed the compression for the build, since that's caused errors in the past. I.e. the new build I've put up may be free of this error now (though I can't test it myself).

If it still happens, can you also let me know which browser you're using? Just so I can try to match the conditions as closely as possible.

Oh, that's strange. Do you have a 16:9 aspect ratio screen? And what browser were you using?

Ah, that helps narrow it down; I'll investigate that! Thanks!

Thanks for the report; sorry about that. Do you happen to recall what you were busy with when you got the error?

I managed to get to 2 days left with 4 pineapples and 4 boozes and like 15 slots, but somehow couldn't manage to get more than 3 pineapples into our intrepid hero's mouth, both days. Sad times.

I liked the variety in options for the fridge contents (though I'd have liked to be able to remove some from my deck). Here's some nitpicks:

- The eating animation is a bit slow, especially when you have like three rows of food to eat.

- The wording of the burger is a bit vague; I thought that each burger would be worth the amount shown, but it seems like it's in total? But then for e.g. 3 burgers giving 8 cash, it means two have to be worth 3, and one worth 2, which seems needlessly complicated. Feels like the simpler explanation would have been to have each burger be worth the number of burgers that were played out (e.g. if you played 3, each burger is worth 3). I think that's basically the system you have (other than the rogue 3 burgers = 8 cash one), but the explanation could be much simpler.

- The fact that the day immediately ends at the last placement is a bit annoying. Probably only the salad is relevant here, but I could have e.g. cleared out a slot if the last one is a salad, but the day just ends, so I can't.

- I'm very risk-averse in games like this, so take the following with lots of salt: I'm not sure about the binge mechanic. While there are some mitigation strategies (i.e. the salad and mushroom, and picking with booze and hotdog), the cost for them is too high. E.g. the salad's removal effect is nice, but because it does nothing but uses up a slot, it's a net loss, except if you need to remove something for the binge issue, but even then, the cost feels very high. And so, the binge foods don't really seem worth buying, because the downsides are huge, especially as you get more space, and the ways to combat the downsides are themselves kind of problematic, in that they only solve the binge issue, but don't give you anything else. I feel like if the e.g. mushroom also gave you 2 cash, it would feel a lot more viable. But as it stands, I basically just never bought any binge foods.

Overall, I think this has a really good game loop and interesting decisions; great entry!

The animations in this are incredible -- I particularly like the goofy walk of the kaiju. It was great fun to indiscriminately destroy buildings as I proceeded towards my goal, and I enjoyed the little apologies I offered to the townsfolk.

I'd have liked to have gotten some kind of score / destruction counter or something for my troubles. I also tried in a second attempt to destroy as little as possible by weaving through the gaps where I could (and using the space at the bottom to avoid most of the big stuff), hoping to get a different ending, but alas.

It feels like there was some potential of making this a game about trying to avoid buildings in a tightly packed city, but also, the destruction is the fun part, so I don't know if that would've been good even, so maybe this is a moot point.

Anyway, nice game!