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You can change the volume for sound effects (🔊) and music (🎵) separately in the main menu and pause menu, but with the lack of text on-screen, I can’t blame you for missing that one. And yeah, I definitely had to cut down on the amount of player freedom (a lot of truncation, very limited branching, etc) in order to keep everything palatable, which does hurt the “Metroidvania” of it all. Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for the feedback!

This is certainly a unique game. I enjoyed the addition of the walking table guys, but found that they often got in my way while I was trying to feed the big mouth, which ended up getting me killed. They probably should get lower target priority. Very novel and interesting take on a Metroidvania.

Unfortunate technical issue about the permanent pausing, which I didn’t see in the comments up front, so I lost a bit of progress, oops. I also noticed the game still is marked (DEBUG) in its release which is also not intended I imagine?

Cool concept though! You really committed to the aesthetic, even using square waves for the music. The shape abilities mostly felt pretty intuitive, although I didn’t even get the circle, but found Poly anyway. There’s definitely a few issues conveying new abilities, I liked the little bits of text written on the ground at the start, but it would’ve been nice to also add stuff like “Use left mouse button to grapple!” at the pentagon area, as I wasted some time wondering why I couldn’t attach myself to the ceiling by just jumping into it.

I also think the camera could’ve been zoomed out a bit more. Seeing so little of the screen at any point made it hard for me to really orient myself in the minimalist world. But I managed to get through it, so it wasn’t too big of an issue. Fun take!

What an incredibly strange and surreal game. Feels like the kind of thing I’d hear about through a Jacob Geller video or something, not just find in a MVM. Those are all compliments, by the way!

Is there an actual ending, or is the “thank you for playing” note about as far as you can get? If so, I got there, though I was missing a few collectables.

Technically, this is a marvel. This has great animation work for the size, with the dynamic way it adjusts to slopes and speed changes, and details like the character’s hand touching the walls, the smear frames on the dash. And 320 kB! I can’t even imagine how this was possible.

I did get stuck trying to find the first item (had to look at another comment where you explained it, haha) and then spent quite some time looking for progress once I got the dash on the roof. It can be very easy to miss things due to all the darkness, it is a very confusing little world, but in a way, that only adds to the strange dream-like atmosphere.

One of the most interesting applications of “minimalist” I’ve seen, very impressive!

I like the protagonist, very cute design. I echo a lot of the sentiments of other commenters though, I think it would’ve served you well to polish the core character controller some more, adding things like coyote time, jump buffers, and making the ledge grab work more consistently. When the jumps get tight, like in the final long jump gauntlet, these kind of things help a lot in terms of gamefeel.

I also think you could’ve given out the first upgrade a bit earlier, because to be honest, just jumping from platform to platform with no frills got old rather quickly. It feels a lot better late game, I had fun making big leaps over things once I got my full set. I also really liked the wall graffiti way of explaining powerups, that’s a cool way to “minimalistically” teach the player how to do stuff.

Congrats on making your first 3D game, it gets easier from here!

Yeah, with a bit more polish this would be a game I wouldn’t have minded paying for! Definitely give it a shot if you feel that ambition.

Wow, this is awesome! Shoutouts to Cammy, the Vault theme is gonna be in my head for a while. I love the retro aesthetic of it all, very convincing, really feels like a forgotten game from the late 90s, like an alternate universe DK64.

The marbles themselves feel really satisfying and tactile. The sound design and the subtly different physics for them are great. I love the wooden one especially, it feels super satisfying to just barrel it around.

The main thing I think could be improved is the overall structure of the world. There’s quite a few ways to softlock yourself (luckily none I found that couldn’t be fixed with a reload; the funniest one was dropping into a frozen part of cistern as Glass, causing a permanent loop of deaths), I found a ton of difficult to reach unlocks that didn’t seem to do anything (especially in the Cistern, lots of bars opening, checkpoints appearing, that I didn’t need at all to progress) that just obfuscated the real progress, which was at times hard to find. Finding out where to go for the 5th marble was a bit of a frustration point, but from there on out it was smooth sailing to the end.

Still, this was a super satisfying entry that I enjoyed a lot. Impressive amount of content for a jam game too! Really great work.

This is so dang stylish! Lots of little touches that went above and beyond, like the seagulls scattering, the cool-ass skybox, the animated billboards. No notes presentation-wise.

I sometimes found the movement a bit janky, especially when half-pipes were involved, but once I got the jump things started to flow a lot better. The final section was very satisfying. Definitely a lot of potential here, great work!

This is a very pretty little game. I like the main character’s unbothered way of sliding everywhere. I thought the parry on the shield enemy was a bit awkward. The first time I got the parry, I immediately went there to parry it (I’ve played Nine Sols) but it didn’t seem to work, so I thought I had to look elsewhere. Perhaps that enemy in particular needs a longer wind-up.

Overall, pretty cool, I enjoyed the final boss especially. Very cute graphics!

If I had a nickel for every game in this jam where I had to fight a chochin-obake, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

There’s potential here for sure! I see you’ve already done a lot of self-reflection about things you could’ve done better, and your thoughts actually align with mine pretty well. It’s good to think about what kind of game you want this to be, if you do want to keep working on it.

One thing I noticed at some point in the game, was that there’s very little point to actually fighting enemies. They are quite slow, and the rooms are huge, so it’s easy to run past them, and there’s no reward for fighting them. It might be good to have HP drop from enemies (and at save points?) instead of regenerating, or maybe just having some locked arena rooms to force the player to engage with them. I also got lost a bit at the start, as I mentioned in the Discord, because there’s quite a few immediately interesting places (the rocks, the cave, the spider web, the path back) put onto the player’s mental stack before you get to interact with them, making the only actual intended progress path (the well) easy to miss.

Very stylish and cohesive game for sure though, could be something special with more polish and content!

What a polished game, I’m impressed! The game is gorgeous, and the idea of the world being filled in as you get more colours is inspired. I like the idea of the colours being used as indicators for where you can use your new abilities, though sometimes perhaps done a bit too blatantly.

The healing system is simple but effective, I like it, it works quite well at rewarding consistency. It did make the platforming sections feel a lot harder than the enemy sections, but perhaps that’s intended. I found the room with the moving horizontal pillars the hardest section of the game, but not in a frustrating way, it was a fun challenge to learn to overcome.

If I were to deliver some criticism, I’d say that aside from the stellar presentation, the game itself is good, but a bit standard. I’d have liked to see a more novel upgrade rather than the standard dash, wall cling, double jump, maybe something tying into the colour theme? But perhaps that’s needlessly lofty. Overall, you both did an excellent job, great work!

Congrats on your first game. It gets easier from here!

I echo the sentiments of some other commenters that it’s better to keep your scope small, and polish that scope as much as you can. But on the other hand, I also get the appeal of being a new dev and just wanting to keep adding stuff as you get ideas.

Hope this was educational, and that you find a flow that works for you!

I like the boss design, they both felt pretty fair yet appropriately challenging, and it was fun to try to optimize their damage windows, like by running ahead of them and holding up. I also appreciate that you can hold the attack button, no mashing required!

It’s a bit lacking in polish (stuff like no HP bar and lack of feedback, like other comments have pointed out) and with the lack of actual character upgrades, it’s not much of a Metroidvania, but it’s a solid action platformer.

Neat little game! It’s very cleanly scoped, which is quite a challenge for a gamejam, especially when you’re new. I quite enjoyed the final boss, and the way the level developed to get there. Hope making this was an educational experience for you!

This was a delightful little treat! What a unique concept, and extremely polished to boot. The character is so silly, I love him, and all the animations add so much charm.

This isn’t really criticism per se, more of an idea, but I think this could’ve been even more interesting if the powerups weren’t obvious from the start, but you had to learn about them from the world somehow. I hit the point of “oh, okay, so that’s what I have to do” fairly quickly once I got my first powerup, and the game does become a bit more of a transparent checklist after that. Could’ve been interesting to leave the player wondering for a while. Doing that definitely would’ve made it harder to implement and test everything properly in the jam period though, so maybe it’s for the best you kept your ambitions realistic, haha.

Aside from theorizing about things that could’ve been, I have very little to complain about in this game, great work!

Haha, yeah, it’s very understandable, fine-tuning is difficult and time consuming, so it’s easy to get it wrong on a jam. I didn’t know the double jump was optional, that’s interesting. Bonus minimalist points there!

Oh also, now that you mention it, minor gripe: I thought I was supposed to beat the mimic boss by baiting it into jumping the spikes, and I was a bit disappointed when it didn’t work.

This is a cute little Metroidvania. It’s definitely a bit rough around the edges in terms of physics and lack of UI, but I made it to the end. Props for avoiding the standard suite of powerups (i.e. double jump, wall jump) and going with something more unique. One thing that stood out to me was that the controller movement seemed to have little (or no?) deadzone, so I’d often end up slightly sliding when my stick wasn’t completely idle. The music was very catchy, although the arena music was so much louder than the overworld music, which was a bit jarring. Nice work overall!

Checked this out while it was in progress, and I liked it, and yeah, playing it again during the rating period, still like it! Doing a lot with a little for sure. I really enjoyed moving around with the full kit, I felt very powerful, with the notable exception of the ceiling run, which I mostly found finicky. You managed to squeeze a very expressive movement system out of those 3 buttons. I only wish I was tested a bit more once I had all that power, because it feels like the lategame isn’t really equipped to deal with how powerful the player becomes, making the difficulty curve a bit odd, I felt the early-game was harder than the lategame. I respect the commitment of sticking to every enemy having 1 HP, even (kind of) Daimyo Dracula, which, by the way, is an extremely funny name for a villain.

Overall, very neat take on minimalism, impressive work by you two!

I’m not a big precision platformer guy, but I made it to the top anyway, woohoo! Pretty neat concept, and I quite like the low res pixel art style.

The spike hitboxes definitely feel a bit off. It was noticeable that sometimes when you’re falling down right besides a wall, with a spike on the bottom, that spike ends up killing you, which just feels wrong.

I also didn’t really understand the… vignette mechanic? Dying of cold maybe? It felt really inconsistent, and idk why going to the next room, which looks equally cold, would help anything? I’m not sure if it was bugged or if I just didn’t get it.

Aside from that and some little level design nitpicks (i.e. falling into a new room and immediately dying) this is quite well-crafted, the core mechanics feel good. Nice work!

Bald kids are the scariest force in the universe

What a cute main character! But I found this one really hard to control and get around. Due to how small you are, and how much time you spend crawling through little shafts, everything looks very samey. That combined with the wall jump making you frequently change direction made me constantly get turned around and confused, so I didn’t end up getting very far. Being a tiny rat in a vampire’s castle is a really fun idea, but you set quite a challenge for yourselves making it work.

A nicely-themed little game. The world design is solid, packing a small Metroidvania into a pleasant underwater package without ever leaving the player feeling lost at sea. It’s a bit lacking in polish, however. There’s some graphical jitter (tiles don’t align right), the artstyle, while very cute, is inconsistent at times, and the character controller doesn’t feel super satisfying. But being such a cute little crab makes up for a lot. Good work, all of you!

This is neat! An autorunner Metroidvania is a cool idea. It was a bit annoying at first, but getting the wall bounce helps a lot, which is a nice feeling of progression. It helped a lot in subverting my Metroidvania expectations and keeping things feeling fresh, especially with the high upgrade density. There is a bit of jank (sometimes sliding can get you stuck in walls, walljumping off of one-ways feels a bit odd, overall kind of a lack of polish) but the core concept is solid, and I had fun getting all 7 enlightenments. Feeling more zen already…

Nice work!

Well, what could be more minimalist than this…? I like the concept art.

Boy, this is a game I have very complicated feelings about. I played for about 3 hours, and was not able to beat it.

I have a bunch of good things to say. I love the unique control scheme, it actually feels really fun to master. The graphics and music are quite nicely minimalist. The character is so cute with her little faces, and the double halo when she dies, it’s adorable. The game is very polished, everything works nicely and nothing really stands out as unfinished or rough around the edges. And there’s a ton of content in this game. I don’t even know how much, because I clearly couldn’t beat it.

But it’s SO hard. Even by gamejam standards. Like obscenely, insanely, “how did this ever get playtested hard”. To the point where part of me feels like I’m missing something, because surely this can’t be intentional? For some context, I’m level 22, 66 offense, 58 defense, 182 HP. That’s 3 hours of play, finding a ton of secrets, health upgrades, etc. But all the enemies where I haven’t explored yet still kill me in no time flat. All the attacks are so fast, and constant, which, combined with your own somewhat sluggish controls makes fighting a clean fight almost impossible. And if you fail, you have to walk back from the start again and walk past those fuckin randomly moving flies that hide in walls. This can easily take like 5 minutes.

So this makes it really tempting to cheese things by going AFK and letting your drones do the work… Which is often really easy, and so, so, so boring. Sure, it’s slow, but it’s still faster than dying and walking all the way back. Why take the risk when you could sit in a dead zone corner and let your drones sloooowwly snipe that dragon that’s gotten stuck in a loop? I beat several of the eyeball rooms by just finding a safe spot, throwing on a YouTube video, and not touching my keyboard for 10 (!!) minutes. The enemies are so tanky that doing it any other way feels completely unreasonable, especially before getting the charge attack, which admittedly does help a lot.

Currently the only unexplored points I’ve found are 3 knight guys with shockwave attacks (whom I’ve never even been able to get close to, and who no doubt would take me several minutes of attacking to beat while they can kill me in 5 seconds) and an arena with several of the trident guys, diagonals bouncing, and timed laser beams. I spent 15 minutes AFK do my drones would kill the bouncers, but there was no blind spot for the trident guys, so I tried fighting them straight on, and died quickly. That’s another 5 minute runback + 15 minutes of AFK. This surely can’t be the way this game is intended to be played…

Despite it all, I felt compelled to play through this game for probably longer than any other game this jam, and lord knows I’ve given actually beating it a fair shake, but I just… can’t? I am very curious to see a dev playthrough of this, because I’m not sure if this game is really just incredibly hard, or if I’m completely missing some kind of core mechanic that’d turn the game on its head.

I love slide canceling!!

This is a neat game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. You managed to pack quite a lot of content into this, with a story, some very nice pixel art, several zones and bosses, which is impressive. While I initially found the character’s movement kind of frustrating due to its low acceleration, learning the slide jumps was actually very fun. That being said, moving her in the air still feels pretty frustrating, especially combined with the very finicky hair grappling.

Overall I’d say my main gripe with this game is a lack of polish, which, for what it’s worth, is very understandable for a gamejam game. For example, the first time I got to the black void area with the piranha plant that ambushes you at the crown (?) symbol, I died and I had assumed that the crown symbol was a fake anglerfish lure kinda deal, so I spent some time at the end looking for the final symbol, only to realize that, oh, no, that was a real symbol, I’d just already collected it. For being the main collectible you need to win the game, they’re collectable without any real fanfare, no particles or distinct sound effect or anything, which would’ve been quite helpful. I had a similar experience with the heart boss, where at first I wasn’t sure if I was even damaging it, due to a lack of hit feedback.

Going fast in this game feels very fun, but I died a few times from sliding into a new room and immediately falling into a hazard on the new screen that was a bit of a bummer. I also sometimes found myself skipping save points because you need to go through the save animation every time. While it is a cool animation, I kind of wish the saves would just automatically trigger when you pass them by, lest I need to interrupt my constant string of slide jumps.

I had quite a few things to critique there, but I don’t mean to make this review sound too negative, because I did really enjoy this game, I just had a lot of tiny things to nitpick, haha. I think your level design is very solid, aside from my little mishap with the black void zone I never really felt lost, which is impressive considering the scale. Really good job overall!

What a cool aesthetic, definitely a highlight here! It feels fun to control too, the idea of a crash test dummy Metroidvania is very inspired, and the music feels very fitting. I especially loved the way it leaves tire marks everywhere, chronicling my tragic last moments on the ice testing area again…

My main gripe is that the way to get the keys feels a bit out of place in the game. I spent quite some time looking for walls to break, assuming that the extreme areas were just places I couldn’t get to yet. When I did eventually figure it out, it didn’t feel very satisfying, because the game hadn’t really put me in a puzzly mindset.

The combat and the little driving challenges were great though, I enjoyed the boss fight as well. Very well done and extremely polished little Metroidvania, good work all of you!

The secrets aren’t saved (sorry about that!), so you might have to visit the secret room again in the same play session.

Thanks for the compliments! What do you mean by a lack of WASD? WASD, arrow keys, dpad, control stick should all work, but you’re not the first person to comment about WASD, so I’m pretty curious what that implies…

I definitely agree on the midgame puzzles being a part where many people got stuck. I’ve tried to patch it up a bit by making the progression paths more obvious in the terrain compared to earlier builds, but I probably should’ve committed to reworking the midgame entirely at some point during development, but oh well! Congrats on finishing it despite the difficulty spike.

The pixel art on this is gorgeous, especially the animation in the ending, very cool! I also really like the concept of everything being on one screen, and the fact that you unlock the “normal” zoom mode later, instead of unlocking the map view later, that’s fun. The “press Tab to zoom in” message never went away until I got my next upgrade, which I assume was a bug.

There’s a lot of cool ideas in this game, but I feel like they get in each other’s way a bit. The parry-absorb thing is interesting, but when you only really have to do it outside of combat, and there’s no penalty for messing it up, does it serve much of a purpose? In sections like the puzzle at the end, I don’t think the game would’ve been that different if the power toggle was just on a button. On the other side of the spectrum, the single screen sort of puzzly item application stuff was really fun, but the fairly simple spammy combat against enemies mostly got in the way of that.

It almost feels like you had two really good ideas, and tried to implement both, when I personally think it would’ve been better to commit to either one and keep things appropriately minimalist.

That being said, I did still enjoy this game, the little puzzlebox was fun to navigate through, and the NPC dialog made me chuckle some times, especially the guy complaining about Godot (that’s me, I’m that guy). Also, I have no idea what some of the items do (what’s the purpose of the camera? why’d I have like two fish?)

Overall, a really interesting game with a very unique vibe and very impressive graphics for how low resolution the sprites are. Nice work!

Mixels specifically is when the pixel sizes are (noticeably) inconsistent. Some people don’t mind it as much, and I think it can be done well, but when the differences are too obvious, I find it rather jarring.

Ah, now that you mention it, I do recall a shade gate in the mine area I neglected to backtrack to. Oops!

What a cute little game! I read some comments about lag, so I played the download version and experienced no issues with that, so it probably is a web issue.

Really like this artstyle with the little low res sprites in the low poly 3D world. Chowder’s spin jump is extremely cute, especially, and the menu art as well.

My main criticism is that the difficulty curve is a bit all over the place. By far the hardest part of the game is getting the gold key with the disappearing platforms, but then the rest of the game is quite easy, since you can get so much HP, the rapid fire is crazy strong, and double jump makes platforming way easier. Also a bit of a shame that there’s only partial controller support (had to use mouse for menus sometimes) but alas, gamejams.

The overall world structure and exploration is solid though. I especially enjoyed how one of the crystals was in the final water area, leading to a satisfying little connect the dots moments about where I’d find the other ones. Nice and dense structure to it all.

Good work overall, I enjoyed this!

Ambitious game you got here! I can tell Hollow Knight was a big inspiration, and I think you’ve definitely captured some of the same feel. First of all, thank you for allowing me to hold a button to keep attacking, as an old man I appreciate it. The little Simlish voice acting was a lot of fun too.

I’d say my main critique is that the levels meander a bit. They’re quite large, but a lot of the times, there’s not that much to them. Sometimes the camera also had trouble keeping up, especially in areas where you go down. I felt like I had to make a few blind jumps, which isn’t ideal.

I quite enjoyed both boss fights and the arena! The healing mechanic makes for a fun push and pull, and rewards playing aggressively using your generous spear iframes. The spear is a fun mechanic, though I wish there was a more platforming-based area where I really was pushed to use it beyond just throwing it into a perilous area. I also only found one blessing, but having to choose which one to use is a neat concept. Kudos for making a mechanic that could so easily be janky, but having it work rather intuitively, I never managed to get stuck in a wall or anything.

I’m not a huge fan of all the mixels going on, and the occasional lack of contrast (dark enemies on dark backgrounds) but I do quite like the look of all the NPCs. Very charming little setting you’ve conjured up here.

Overall, good work, straight up shbugging it out of 10

Oh, you can enable “Prefer Markdown when available” in your profile to get some more settings. Very helpful.

Also don’t think I didn’t catch that Loss reference in the library…

The answer to that puzzle is the same as the answer to every other puzzle in that dark brown catacomb area. You just have to be a bit specific about it. :)

Glad you enjoyed the game!

You’re not done until the credits roll, but you’ve found all the blocks there are to find out there. Now how would one go about filling that last slot…?

Was nice to play this again and see the changes. I beat it in 58601 frames! The idea of changing the vines back and forth in the final dungeon was cool, making things feel more puzzle gamey. And what a twist ending! Main criticism I have is that the main character control doesn’t feel great, but the game seems to be more about the narrative and the ideas, so it’s not a huge deal. Fun game, very unique vibe.

This splash art goes hard! And for a first attempt at game jam, this is a very cool prototype. It’s a shame you didn’t get more done, but I hope it was educational for you, and you’ll do more in the future. The mouse attacking is a bit awkward, but maybe it’d work better with double control sticks. There’s potential here!

What a fun concept! I’m a Mondriaan fan (🇳🇱), so this was a nice little treat. The enemies are quite intuitive, it took me a bit to figure out how to defeat the square ones, but once you understand it, it’s not too bad to do it consistently. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of having to redo the whole game any time you get hit, but well, I can’t deny it’s minimalist. The ending was super satisfying, seeing everything come together like that. Nice work!

I’m enjoying this game, but I’m finding it very laggy in both Firefox and Chrome. Every time I shoot my gun, it seems to cause a lagspike, which, as you might expect, can cause some issues. Is there a downloadable build as well? It might be a WebGL-related issue.

EDIT: I beat the game despite the lag. Which should tell you that I liked it! It was difficult to manage lag on the walljump boss, since often I would just teleport into the laser, but I found a way to manage it, haha, a unique skill to have to learn.

Cool concept! Aside from the afore-mentioned technical issues (the music also didn’t load) my main gripe would be the level design. It’s rather linear, and the final level was mostly just trial and error. The presentation is really solid though, and it’s cool that you got 3 unique boss fights and unique level gimmicks into this. Definitely very minimalist, nice work! Hope you’ll add the final 3 floors, very curious what will you do for a boss fight where you don’t even have a gun.

(P.S. please don’t show a “Continue?” screen after every death, just automatically continue, pretty as your fade-in effect is, it got rather frustrating, haha)