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I knew this was going to be a banger when I started the game and was immediately greeted by MV's Theme6 on full blast.

Seriously though, for as simple as this was I thought it was funny and I liked that my answers to the questions had an effect on who was available at the end.

😁Thanks for playing, Phoenix! I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Quick, simple, and cute. A good jam game!

Things I liked:

1. It's very direct and to-the-point. Nothing too complicated or overly long.
2. Even when I'm not sure what to do next, it doesn't take long to find the answer or brute force my way to it.
3. The maps are reasonable sizes and look nice.
4. Multiple endings (even if they aren't very different)

Things I did not like:

1. There are a fair few grammar issues, and having the ! marks always a space away from the word looks odd to me.
2. There are some issues with player guidance, like where certain NPCs are or what I need to buy.
3. Some interactions need to be repeated or a choice needs to be made when they could just be automatically done for the player.

I don't think the issues are a big deal in a game of this size, but it would be more annoying if the game were longer. I hope this game has helped you improve your game making skills!

Making puzzles in RM can be a rather complex task, so you have my respect for the effort. Making the puzzles timed felt a little frustrating since it interfered with planning and experimentation, but I did ultimately figure things out. It also would have been nice to have a reset button on the first puzzle so I would not have to wait for time to expire, but at least I never had to wait long.

Good jam game, and I hope you found the experience enlightening.

Cute game, and I'm impressed with the stealth mechanics. I also like how there's a fair bit of flavor text throughout the game, it gives it charm.

Sometimes Kasey's name is spelled "Kacey." You might consider fixing that.

You're welcome! I'm thrilled that you enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing! I had a good time writing the dialog, I'm glad you enjoyed it. 🙂

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The soundless title screen threw me off and had me thinking my speakers weren't working, and when I got into the game it was a bit too loud.

The invisible walls had me wondering if my keyboard wasn't working at first, but then I realized there were invisible walls.

Criticisms aside, this is a cool concept and a fun little jam game.

My thoughts on the games

Rat World:

It's a basic grindfest. Kill rat, try not to die, repeat until you either are one-shotting the swarms or you die to attrition. It's basic, would be better if there was more to it, but I think it did what you intended.

Rat World Ace:

There's a little more to this one. Greater skill variety gives the battles a little more depth (not much, but it's something) and there's even some variation in enemies! Player guidance is lacking - I never found the town or the final boss - but I appreciate that this one is a little more fleshed-out than the previous iteration.

Glad to see you're back at it! I'm looking forward to seeing your progress.

Some quick thoughts:

• Compelling story
• Too long
• Rafflesia cameo!
• Hawk gets a cameo in both his human and hawk form. Awesome!

Thanks for playing and giving a review! Steel (who helped make our "for real" entry, Necrocism) was not able to start on our project right when the jam started, so I ended up having 4 days to blast out this little project.

I'm glad you enjoyed the game and your comments have given me something to consider should I try this concept again.

3 things I liked about this game:

1. Those colored lines that lead me through the labyrinth of a ship
2. Restarts on death are near the point that I died on, so backtracking is minimal
3. Really good atmosphere. I was actually scared in a few places.
4. Bonus: having the controls displayed right away was a good move and made the controls easy to understand.

3 things I did not like:

1. It's not clear where you need to run to when you need to run. I didn't see a colored line and I didn't know where to go, so I suffered several needless deaths.
2. The terminals are not well distinguished from the doodad boxes and their hitboxes are hard to find. There were times I wasn't sure if I was in the right place until a prompt randomly appeared. (Also contributed to some of those needless deaths in the previous point)
3. I had a hard time finding the circuit breaker when I got to its room, and only found it by chance.

Overall, this is a very strong entry. Good job!

😁Glad you liked it! Thanks for playing!

Thanks!

My thoughts of the game as I played:

Some indication of what the controls are at the beginning of the game would have been good. That said, it wasn't hard to figure out.

So, this is a shoot 'em up in which your shots get better and better as you get more and more candy. Cool.

I have played other games like this in other jams where the devs overestimated their players' skills. You definitely avoided that pitfall here, though around the time I had 1000 points it was too easy. I almost quit, thinking there wasn't anything more to the game, but then I saw the boss. In other words, the main gameplay is too long, but still fun.

The boss wasn't too hard to take down, either.

If you made the levels shorter you could ramp up the difficulty as the levels progress and have a really fun SHMUP.

I really liked this game. Good job, Wrath!

Here are my thoughts on the game:

There needs to be an options menu for adjusting sound volume. The intro was very loud.

I liked how animated the intro speeches were, with characters moving in the background and the camera moving a little to make things a bit more immersive, but the story went clear over my head.

The shaky first person movement camera was OK by me, but I think having an option to turn the shake off would be a good QoL touch for some people.

When the prompt appears to press E to show the map, I kept trying to press E but nothing happened. I then tried stepping forward and it worked. The prompt should appear at the moment the player should press the key, not before.

It's unfortunate the main gameplay was unfinished, it seemed like you might have had a unique take on the squad-based tactics genre where you command your allies to defend you as you move through the level.

Maybe this was just one project that didn't work out and next time will be better.

I struggle with games where you have to explore and find that one right thing to progress. I found lots of places to die but never finished. Pretty solid game overall, just too challenging for me.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. BEAUTIFUL hand drawn art through the whole game!
2. Cool concept - Reverse Phasmophobia
3. Lots of good QoL touches in the game, from the controls preview intertwined in the into story to the van that tells you about your powers and lets you try them out to even being able to review the objectives during the mission. It's good stuff.

Three things I did not like:

1. The player's ghostly body gets in the way of the effect when they interact with something - although there is an audio cue to tell you that an interaction has happened, it's not always obvious what changed until you move away.
2. It takes a lot of interactions before your friends are convinced of the existence of the ghost
3. There isn't much strategy involved in placing evidence - it boils down mostly to keeping certain points "haunted" and placing handprints where you hope the friends will walk to (when applicable).

That's a fascinating experience you had with the game. Thank you for sharing the detailed feedback, it has given us some ideas for how to improve the QoL in future games. Yes, that zombie is the one Hawk got hung up on, and I'm pretty sure I know where the bug with it lies, so I will fix it after the voting period. We are glad you ultimately enjoyed the game!

Hey, thanks for playing, and we appreciate the feedback! Glad you enjoyed it overall!

😭 I knew I was forgetting something!

Ah shoot, I was so focused on making the battle inputs clear that I completely neglected to clarify on-map controls! (WASD to move, mouse to move the camera, and left-click to interact, for anyone reading this. On Xbox it’s X, on PlayStation it’s square).

I’m surprised the camera movement was so wonky. I’ll have to look into the cause of that. While it does have to do with your mouse sensitivity I should build in a mechanism to address that.

The heat is expected, though - Unreal is a big ol’ resource hog, and it doesn’t help that the game has a bunch of uncompressed textures so it’s trying to render a lot of detail all at once. Definitely some lessons for next time!

As for the story and voice lines, that was all Steel. He sure knows his stuff, and I doubt you’ve heard the last of him. 😉 

Thanks for the comments, they will help us in our future efforts!

A short, straightforward game with a big helping of creativity - I like games like this.

I don't fully get the choice of lines, but poetry isn't really my strong suit, so take the criticism with a grain of salt.

Having the "click to grow" prompt on the screen while the scrolling text went by felt a bit misleading, and while the scrolling is an artistic touch I felt like it was kinda lacking. But then again, this is a jam game made with very little time, so it being rough isn't a big deal.

I loved everything else about this: clicking the flower image to make the plant grow, the subtle music that changes as the plant grows, the cursor images, even the little animated picture touches.

It's a simple, sublime, and heartfelt game. Good job, Chevie!

I'm thrilled that you enjoyed this silly little game so much! Also, thanks for the detailed feedback.

3 things I liked about this entry:

1. The click battle system is unique and an interesting touch.
2. The art is expressive and interesting (an irony, considering the game's thesis)
3. The story was cute and funny (until the end, anyway)

3 things I did not like:

1. The heavy-handed message at the end. I get that you felt singled out for the ban on AI art in this year's jam, but just to reiterate what others have said: we didn't ban it specifically because of you, it was an oversight and we decided to correct it this year.
2. It's pretty easy to make some animations bug out.
3. Not much consideration went into the audio experience here, so sounds become grating quickly.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The visual presentation is amazing. The way the characters emote, the smooth pathing of the enemy movements, and even the way the text pops in to the text boxes are just some of the highlights of this game and give a feeling of quality.
2. The character switching mechanic is well thought-out. There are clear reasons for using Harold or using Marsha, and while there are times where you must use one or the other, there are times where the game leaves it up to the player.
3. The dialog does a good job of telling the story without overstaying its welcome. There are some fun banter moments throughout, too.

Things I did not like:

1. Punishments for missing skill check sections are a bit brutal. For example, if someone misses a complex platforming section, there isn't a need to follow up with a skill check of jumping over spikes as they walk back.
2. Having both a collect-a-thon on top of a time trial is great for replay value but might be a bit much for a game jam, especially when the skill requirements are as high as they are here.
3. It feels a little too long, but that may be due to having to slog through retrying sections.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. Using dice rolls that can be modified by various factors is a cool concept that I had fun with.
2. The art is the usual excellent Nowis standard of quality!
3. The visual novel presentation kept things moving along at a steady pace while still giving a Dark Souls-like feel to the game.

Three things I did not like:

1. The background music gets a bit too repetitive after a while. Another tune or two would have been nice.
2. I didn't find much gear in my playthrough, and what gear I did find didn't seem to add much to my build. I played the majority of the game with my starting gear.
3. Related to the point above, strategies revolving around custom builds is implied with the gear system, but the gear drops are too infrequent and random to deliver this experience.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The whole game looks gorgeous!
2. The music is also very fitting for every location (even if I am a little biased about one...)
3. Once I realized the map in the different eras is the same, just with different dressing, it eased some of my navigation woes. It's also a clever way to subtly reuse maps.

Three things I did not like:

1. The password mechanic. I was one of the unfortunate ones to miss the password. This stumped me until I reviewed Hawk's playthrough. What might have been better is to "give" the player the password so when they interact with the robot it would automatically work.
2. As beautiful as the map design is, a lot of things get in the way of navigation. More than once I got caught behind something I couldn't see and had to brute force my way out, or in some cases wait while the character blocking my path got out of the way.
3. Player guidance is also a little lacking. I know that a big deal in this type of game is letting the player figure things out, but don't be afraid to railroad your players at strategic moments or reiterate what they are looking for.

Another thing that isn't important for a jam game, but something you could consider improving in the future: improve the characters' individual voices. Most NPCs were either flat "welcome to our town" characters or very wordy people. Some different quirks, like clueless, obsessed with something, or one-word talkers can help differentiate your characters so they don't suffer from the dialog equivalent of "same face syndrome."

It still was a beautiful game. Good job!

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The graphics look pretty good. I especially liked the robot's sprite.
2. Footstep sounds that change depending on where you are walking was a neat touch.
3. The animated title screen was creative and unexpected.

Three things I did not like:

1. It's too short and basic
2. Dialog is stilted
3. There isn't much music, and what is there isn't great

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The music is an absolute blast
2. The character art is just as great as it was in Milk Quest
3. Sharing experience across all party members meant I didn't need to grind a ton to bring everyone's levels up

Three things I did not like:

1. There is an RTP mace that appears whenever a party member uses their default "Fight" animation
2. Faith Healing weapon says it replaces the default attack with a heal AoE, but it actually replaces it with Direct
3. Teaching Banish appears to be broken. I trained Therese, but then couldn't train anyone else.

Overall a very strong entry! I'm just sad that I couldn't get to the end due to the Banish training bug.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. Simple gameplay
2. Making the clues and items look like real objects is a cool attention to detail
3. Voice acting is always a nice extra detail

Three things I didn't like about the game:

1. The exposition is so wordy that it's hard to understand what the point of the message is.
2. The BGM and voice acting is very quiet compared to the sound effects, so I either have to choose to go deaf from the menu interactions or miss out on the audio experience.
3. There isn't much to this game. Like, the plot just seems to happen without much buildup, and there aren't any unique gameplay mechanics to make up for it.

I was able to navigate back by clicking on the tour guide - was that not working for you in your playthrough?

Three things I liked about this game:

1. Pretty good art, especially for 1 month's work. The characters are clear and the interactive elements are (for the most part) identifiable against the backgrounds.
2. You don't just read the story and click the occasional choice, you actually have to solve a mystery! If you pay attention it's pretty obvious what the answer is, but I appreciate that you built that in all the same. It's also good that it's obvious, rather than too hard to figure out.
3. You didn't go crazy trying to cram too much content or too many things to do in the scenes. Dialog lasts long enough to do what it needs to and moves on.

Three things I did not like:

1. It's not clear who you are at first (I didn't realize I was a vet until talking to one of the archaeologists) or why it is so important that you find Harold. A little intro cutscene showing the fire and some dialog between characters explaining why they need a veterinarian would help with establishing the story's context and stakes.
2. Entrance interactive elements persist on the screen after interacting with the painting.
3. No music. Having some background music, and even some sound effects, would really elevate the experience.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The auto battle is snappy and eliminates the need to learn how each character's skill set works so I can focus on the animations and broader strategy.
2. There is a fair bit of strategy present in spite of it being an auto battler. You have to pay attention to who is struggling and who is doing well and swapping as needed. On the broader scale, you have to push your team's limits and make sure everyone has appropriate gear if you want to spend your time efficiently.
3. There is a lot to do. With a little more fleshing out I could see myself sinking several hours into a game like this.

Three things I did not like:

1. Player guidance is lacking. I ended up going to the wildlife preserve before I was informed that my main objective was the mine. While there are characters and information points that do explain all of the objectives and what you need to do, it still requires the player actively interacting with them (making them missable) and even when the player does it's still a lot to take in all at once. More railroading would have helped with this.
2. Despite the auto battle nature of the game, I still felt pretty overwhelmed by the game. The game starts by dropping me into an already full team, there are multiple shops, and multiple objectives to attend to. It took me a few in-game days before I had a grasp on what I needed to do and what the significance of each shop had
3. Niamh and Samira are a funny pair, but aside from Samira's annoyance at Niamh playing the game I didn't really feel like it was going anywhere or added anything to the experience. A couple of ways that this could have been stronger is if we were learning the game alongside Niamh, or our performance in the game somehow had an effect on Niamh and Samira's relationship.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. This is probably the best-looking 3D RPG Maker game I have ever played. The movement is smooth and snappy, and the Etrian Odyssey-like gameplay fits the format well. Also, the pause menu animation is amazing.
2. 6 party members was a surprise, and I probably should have taken advantage of it more. It's clearly balanced for that, too; I tried going in alone and died. I had a party of 4 for my playthrough and did fine until the very end.
3. I like that the basic enemy can split after it takes enough damage. It keeps the battle interesting.

Three things I did not like:

1. There's something about how the maps are made that it feels like I'm always standing off to the side, like I'm not quite centered. It's offputting and made moving a little tricky.
2. There is only 1 enemy type that roams around the dungeon, and one different one in a specific area. The lack of enemy variety bored me. I know this is an early version, but it is something that should be addressed in future versions.
3. It's apparent from the writing that English is not your first language, and the characters are pretty flat. Characters that grow as the story progresses, as well as someone checking the spelling and grammar, would be a huge upgrade here.

Be sure to always consider what a player can do at any given time, not just what they should do. If they are not supposed to run into the cave alone, make sure to either prevent it or warn them that they are doing something unwise.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. Once you get into it, you can just vibe and grind.
2. The portraits do a decent job of portraying emotion.
3. The random elements are a nice touch

Three things I did not like:

1. It's a bit too easy for a player to unwittingly shoot themself in the foot. I accidentally went to the main grinding area before collecting my teammates and got wrecked.
2. The story is forgettable and wafer-thin.
3. The overall design is lacking. I run through large expanses of nothing, eventually have a same-y battle or two, and repeat without much changing in a meaningful way.

There is way too  much padding in this game. I could not finish it in time. Try tightening things up next time: instead of relying on filler interactions to fill out the play time, strip things down to just what is meaningful and polish them to perfection.

Three things I liked about this game:

1. The music is outstanding! Someone has been learning from the greats of the GBC era. 😉
2. The game is pretty straightforward; nothing is too hard to do or figure out.
3. Fun references to past jam games.

Three things I did not like:

1. The platforming section was a bit rough. I wasn't sure whether or not I could jump on enemies, the acceleration/deceleration made movement feel a little slippery, and having an object that you can stand on and also walk past is a bit iffy.
2. A minor quibble, but if you can't leave an area without completing the objective first, why give the player the option to leave at all? Similarly, why give the player the option to say "no" when there clearly is no reason to stay? And why let a player return to an area that has been completed?
3. The game is so short and there's no game over areas, so having a save menu seemed a bit redundant; I would have preferred to have a run button.

Also, I'm not sure if there's anything you could have done about this, but the fact that the text UI refreshes each time you change a letter on a character's name was a little annoying. It still was a neat touch for name reveals.

Yes, the entire soundtrack was done by me! I'm glad you liked my work overall, and I will continue to improve my process.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll be sure to address all those issues when I come back to this game.

I’m glad you’re enjoying my games! I do try to make everything playable in browser since that seems to be more convenient for everyone.