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Wow! I'm shocked our game was able to excite you that much, but it's honestly the best reaction we could have hoped for. Thank you so much for the incredibly kind words.

We have plans to expand the game's scope and narrative after the jam. They're not definite, but if you're interested for more info then follow my Bluesky account here. I'll post updates on how that goes.

I'll review your game back at my earliest convenience! :)

Thank you so much! We're hoping to flesh out the game after the jam - follow my Bluesky if you're curious about that!

I'll review your game at my earliest convenience :)

If you're curious to see more of the story, the answer to Session 2 is in this pastebin. Give Session 3 the ol' college try, but if you can't do that one too, there's also a pastebin with the answer for that one a few comments up.

Thank you so much for the feedback! The puzzles are a bit too hard, which is fully on me - I plan on updating the game after the rating period to flesh out the features more and make the puzzles less dependent on a person's personal interpretation/sense of hearing.

I put the answer to Session 3 in this pastebin. :)

I accidentally wasn't paying attention during the opening tutorial, so I was even less apprised to the situation than expected, and I was still able to intuit it all out just by trial and error - a sign of a very well-designed puzzle! The game had great character and charm, too. Not to mention it stuck to the theme very well, and didn't suffer for it at all. Very impressive work for 5 days! :)

Love the sense of humour, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. A couple times, I had a bug where dialogue would get stuck, and then repeat itself once after I clicked the window and pressed enter again (accidentally apt for the theme haha). Other than that, this was a great refresher in my long day of rating games. Nice job! Best of luck in the jam :)

Hey, nice to see a fellow horror game in the jam! I think the use of the theme was slightly tenuous, but it worked out pretty well and I liked how subtle (but not too subtle) and creepy many of the anomalies were. Also, the game had a good sense of humour!. At one point, an anomaly appeared on the camera while I was looking at it, which I assume was a bug - just thought you should know.

The game also could have benefitted from more content (more nights, more anomalies), but that's mostly a moot point - the jam was a pretty strong time crunch.

Great job! Best of luck in the jam :)

Love this, it's got a "Shaun of the Dead" sort of charm to it. Plus, the gameplay loop where you barely survive a difficult battle, and then spend a brief cooldown period cleaning up the scraps and salvaging whatever you can, is a tried and tested one and this game pulls it off simply quite well. The immersion was broken a bit by the audio being too repetitive - even some minor random pitch changes on often-repeating sound effects like the footsteps would help.

Overall, great job!

Lovely art, enjoyable music, and a great concept. As said by the reviewer below, the difficulty curve is pretty steep - maybe some sort of highly limited "slow time" power would be a good way to keep the strategy intact but reduce the reliance on reaction times?

This was pretty fun! The game looks amazing, and I liked the variety in enemy types and the basic idea of blocking bullets as a ghost. I had a lot of issues with enemies phasing into walls and disappearing, or in one case becoming protected by the wall such that they were able to shoot me but I couldn't hit them. Skipping the opening cutscene was also a bit too easy - I thought E was used to skip to the end of individual lines, not the entire thing. Because of that, I missed out on a big chunk of the story, but the part that I heard was quite charming and creative.

Good luck in the jam!

I'm biased, because I like stuff related to public transit and infrastructure, but this is a great idea and a good interpretation of the theme! I like how the limitations and challenges placed on the player are difficult and interesting to work around/with, but don't feel inherently ridiculous or unreasonable. The dashed alternating colours when two lines share a road is a nice touch. I felt a little confused at points, but that was partially because I was looking away and missed parts of the tutorial. In addition, I found a few spelling errors here and there, and I noticed that the player has no bounds checking when they pan the camera around, so it's possible to go infinitely far away.

Good game! Best of luck in the jam.

This is genuinely the best game I've played so far while doing reviews!! It's amazing how much content/replayability/strategy you managed to pack into this game in such a short timeframe, all the while keeping it linked to a creative narrative that was still nonetheless very faithful to the jam theme.

The art suffered a little bit - I can only assume from the sheer focus you had on designing such a tight game loop - but it actually ended up contributing to the game's charm. I also found that some songs didn't seem to have any strategic value - no matter how long I tried to make my playlist, Jumping Beans never seemed to actually increase my mood, and thus didn't seem to come in handy. I won't deny that I might just not have the strategy down pat for the game yet, though. 

Regardless, I'll be giving this very high ratings. I even downloaded it to my computer so I can play it again another time. Amazing job!

First, I LOVE the thumbnail. It's beautiful. Also, I enjoy the simple, transparent design - you just race your Chevy around a loop, and that's all you need to know. The music is really good too! I like a little bit-crushed beat to spice up my day.

The driving model is a little confusing, because it seems like the car is rotating around a point in space slightly behind it, and there's no drag/friction against the ground. Could use some tweaking.

The idea is really creative and feels quite satisfying to play, the artwork and ambience even more fun and whimsical. One request would be a short tutorial detailing the gameplay, or a brief description of the parameters of the goal, it was a bit confusing as to the expected trail length and the end game of the level. Overall thumbs up!  

This is really charming, I loved it! Driving around a curved space is disorienting, but in a fun way. And I really like that you managed to fit in functionality for designing custom levels. Also, I love the speed lines that show up when you're going super fast.

My only real note is that I think the driving would benefit if it had less drag, like if you had more time to drift after letting go of the gas.

Fun game! Love the art style and the way that the sounds of the trains stopping goes from a nice musical melody to a cacophony very fast. And as with any idle game, watching the number go up is very satisfying, especially on the line graphs.

One small note - "passengers" is spelled wrong in the "train window", i.e. the one at the top right of the screen.

I'm happy to join in as an artist, composer, or supplementary programmer.

My Discord is @kineticcrusher if you're interested.

Hi! I'd love to join - I can help in any discipline you need, but I have the most expertise in programming, graphic design, and music.

If you decide to bring me aboard, my Discord username is kineticcrusher.

I'm at a decently intermediate level in C# and Unity. I also like other disciplines like writing, composition, 3D art, and graphic design. I'd love to join you guys if there's room?

Super well made! Graphics and sound design were top notch. It didn't overstay its welcome either. Well done. :)

Thanks for the review! The thing about getting stuck is definitely a bug. I plan on fixing that when I work on the game after the jam is over.

I love the art style of this game. The music is nice too, although it would benefit from being less repetitive. The concept behind the game is interesting and enticing, although it was explained rather confusingly for me - I didn't quite understand how my number influenced if I was going to lose a life or not when I attacked an enemy. Of course, take this with a grain of salt as it's very warm and I've been reviewing games all day, so my brain is a little fried. Overall, well done on this!

Great presentation, and almost oddly relaxing. I could see myself playing this game to destress. However, I was a bit confused on whether I was eliminating dice based on the top-facing number I had when I attacked them from an adjacent spot, or the top-facing number I had on the spot they were occupying.

This is certainly an interesting concept, and I found that it did a good job at integrating randomness without creating edge cases that are unreasonable or unfair for the player. Presentation is also great. I would have appreciated if the tarot reading was slightly quicker or could be skipped; I found myself antsy to get back into the game after my first round, and waiting was slightly painful.

It took me a minute to realize that I was allowed to throw enemies off the board due to the wording of the rules. Despite this, the game still has nice presentation and a really interesting concept.

My first impression of this game was that the title made me chuckle. Playing it, I found that the controls were appreciably difficult, and the levels equally so. Maybe a quicker cooldown on your moves would make the game a bit more balanced, as in certain environments I found it extremely hard to get past large stretches of spikes because I was unable to chain dashes and jumps quickly enough.

This is a really nice integration of the theme into a fighting game. It was well-stylized and difficult, although some of the difficulty - as a few comments have pointed out - seems a bit too reliant on the dice rolls. Perhaps a weighting of the dice rolls depending on previous rolls would help to maintain the randomness of the game, but prevent the player from losing entirely out of poor luck regardless of their skill.

An incredibly well-designed and presented concept. If I weren't busy with other things, I'd probably obsessively play this game for several hours. I really enjoyed the tough-yet-fair increase in difficulty as time progressed, and I also appreciated all of the minor details mixed in with the presentation, such as how the die gradually create desire paths in the grass, and how the lose condition is actually shown to the player, rather than the game just ending as soon as the wall is breached.

This is a great concept, and surprisingly well-designed given the time constraints. The addition of the 'invest' slot adds a whole new layer of elaborateness to the player's strategy. I'm not sure if it's intended for multiple dice to be able to stack into one slot, but I must say that being able to do so really helped me when I was served unlucky rolls.

I enjoy the rather literal interpretation of the jam's theme. Given more fleshing-out, this concept mechanic could really go places, too. Level 4 was a bit of a step up in difficulty, but I would blame that just as much on me being bad at puzzles.

Spectacular presentation given that it was just made in 48 hours. I also particularly enjoyed the fact that the bomb doesn't kill enemies, but rather toss them all around the map; this made for a particularly harrowing realization when I was on low health. A pause menu would have made the experience a little smoother.

This is a very enjoyable - and remarkably creative - concept. I can see it benefitting from more variation - such as different platform types for different dice roll values - and from a more stylized presentation, but in terms of the game you've created using only the time from the jam, this is pretty impressive.

A strikingly difficult game, but certainly not in a bad way. I feel like the likelihood of the room or inputs being randomized should become increasingly high as you gain a greater score, as to deliver a sense of difficulty progression. Presentation is good, albeit the music is a bit repetitive. Overall, this is a great submission. 

I've been holding off on leaving comments with my ratings recently so I can rate games faster, but this one deserves some special praise; I really like the art style and the concept in general. It feels very polished and well-made, and could really benefit from more features and enemy types. Well done!

This is an awesome game! As many have mentioned before, the art and sound are top-notch. One of my favourite touches was the varying jump height with how long the player presses the jump button. The controls are a little hard to wrap my head around, but it's likely just because I'm used to the spacebar. All-in-all, this is a great game!

This game's aesthetic is among the best I've seen in the jam so far, and it's a great implementation of the theme. It's a great time-killer. 

The music and art are great, and I like the general idea of this game. It was a little tricky fighting smaller narwhals without running away and coming back really fast, which I found was an imperfect strategy, but this is a very well-made and polished game otherwise.

Super amazing look, fun gameplay, and a perfect adherence to the theme. You did well on this one!