Surprisingly addictive game! I got 474.476 points. I feel like it might've been fun to have some different things underground, such as maybe rocks to avoid, or ant nests or something. I get that due to the short time window, that probably wasn't possible. Great job!

I enjoyed this. It's quite short, but it's interesting to see how many things play out differently or the same when you act differently. It also touches upon the interesting question of "even if we have free will, does it matter if we don't have free choice?".

Some more polish would've been nice though. Sound effects and music and perhaps some graphics would've been nice. I also noticed a few small grammatical errors or odd sentence structure ("before the real life problems begins") but it's nice for what it is. Good work!

An interactive thought experiment is definitely something that fits the theme. Neat idea!

It's rather unpolished for a VN. I understand the lack of character art, but some of the background arts don't seem to be working either. Some music would've gone a long way too, even if it were just simple stock music.

As for the story itself, I did find myself invested in it, although it ended very suddenly. It did make me think about what makes up "a person", which I suppose is related to the theme. Do you have plans to continue this? I am curious where you plan to take the story.

It's unfortunate that it doesn't seem to be working well, due to audio issues and a timing bug that was apparently introduced? I'm curious what you were going for, but it seems rather unplayable in its current state. Hope you'll keep working on it!

This is neat. I had some trouble figuring it out at first, especially before I realized what exactly the goals meant, but I had some fun trying to do everything possible to meet the goals, and then being confronted with what that actually meant for the citizens. Good interpretation of the theme.

I'm somewhat familiar with Nim, so I found that you make an interesting point about how if you try to win, you don't actually have any choice. My main complaint is how I found it a bit tedious to wait for the dialog to scroll when I had finished reading it, but I suppose it did give it a more slow, methodical feel. Good work, and definitely a good take on the theme.

I'll have to echo g_o here and say that I was able to figure it out pretty quickly, but that's probably cause of having played Yu-Gi-Oh on a GBA emulator before. Even the Z/X controls just felt intuitive... But I understand that for people that don't have that experience, it's  rather overwhelming.

A mass crossover debate with philosophers as a card game is a very interesting idea, but it seems like there were a lot of important corners that had to be cut during this week. It's a very polished entry, but in hindsight, it probably would've been better to develop the game more before doing so much polish. I understand that you unexpectedly got sick, so I can't really fault you too much here, but it is a shame that it turned out the way it did. Some important features like obtaining new cards, enemy AI using overlay/bench, and effect/spell/field/whatever cards didn't make it in, which means that the actual gameplay is reduced to "play philosopher combo that beats the enemy one and press End Turn a few times". The character sprites and dialog before matches are a cute addition.

It's hard to judge this as it is, because while it's functional, it's currently barely anything beyond that. I really hope you keep developing this, because it has a ton of potential. I wonder if you could get netplay working...

It's a neat idea, a CYOA game where you don't have a choice (or do you?) is an idea I considered as well. I did find an annoying technical issue where if I focused out of the window (alt-tab or whatever) it resized the window to an improper size and didn't let me control it anymore, so I had to restart it a few times. There were a few spelling/grammar mistakes as well, which is unfortunate in an entirely text-based game. But I enjoyed going through the minutiae of daily life and the slowly increasing feeling of something being wrong. Nice work!

This is a cool idea, and you clearly put in a ton of effort, but it seems quite unstable to me. I tried playing this game 3 times, but never could get much further than the first two trainers, since the game crashed or froze, usually after a fight with a wild Pokémon.

There's a lot of cool ideas here, but there's definitely some things that could be polished up. The first thing I noticed was that I couldn't figure out how to end my turn. I moved the unit who went first, told him to Wait, and then couldn't find an End button. I turned on Auto End Turn in the Config, and that seemed to fix it, but I don't know if that was intended. I believe you can set Config options to be on by default, so if that's intended, you may want to consider that.

The mechanics were definitely a bit overwhelming at first, especially due to the big info dumps in the menus, but once I got the hang of it, the characters were pretty fun, and some of the unique mechanics like the Sharpened Shadows were interesting to use with the turn order. The interactions in the writing were pretty cute as well, and the idea of individually moving units around and scouting for ambush spawns reminded me of XCOM, which is a neat place to take it, and it's definitely not Fire Emblem.

However, I found that I spent a lot of time just moving units around one by one, since the enemy pockets were pretty far apart. This was exacerbated by the issue that I didn't really know my objective. After getting the treasure room, I spent some time going sound, finding it was locked, and having to move all the way back, which took a good 3 or 4 turns (which is actually 24 turns). Then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I could interact with anything in the top left rooms, but couldn't find a way, even though those bones looked interactable. I then went to the middle room, got a prompt that I couldn't go there yet, so I had to move my units back AGAIN to the southern prison cells, where I fought off a bunch of undead. Figuring it was done, I slowly moved my units back to the middle for a second time, but found that I still couldn't get anything to happen, probably since I hadn't cleared out the skeleton/armors at the top left yet, since I couldn't find a way to trigger them? The tl;dr is that the combination of tedious unit movement + unclear goals that need some exploring/experimenting meant that the game felt more tedious to play than you probably anticipated. 

I'd recommend either giving all units some kind of skill that gives them bonus movement outside of battle, or just making the player's objectives more clear. You really want to avoid backtracking with movement being the way it is.

That being said, I did enjoy the combat parts, and there's definitely a lot of potential here. Hope you'll keep working on this game!

It's amazing that you got this set up the way you did. I don't really know anything about Devil Survivor, but my SMT-savvier friend told me that this was quite an accurate recreation in several aspects. However, as someone who doesn't really understand the mechanics, it was quite overwhelming, especially due to having 6 different tamers who all had different attacks and party members. But I got the impression that this was more of a proof of concept of an engine and mechanics than a game. And as a recreation of Devil survivor, this is quite impressive. Hope you'll use this as a foundation for something, because it's a promising start.

Well, I'll say, this is definitely not Fire Emblem!

Nice job on getting this whole system set up. The court record menu was a little janky, but it was actually quite functional. I had some fun finding the contradictions, even if there were only two, but it was fun. If I had some feedback, other than some of the obvious feedback sprites, it would be to tone down the taunting and quips just a bit. The prosecutor being a jerk is an AA classic of course, but having four lines of back-and-forth before every interaction felt a bit excessive, especially when I really just wanted to get to the cross-examining. Oh, and at one point early in the game I tried to press right-click to see if it opened the Court Record, but it instead skipped the scene and jumped ahead a huge chunk. That's default SRPG Studio behaviour I think, but for a game like this, it'd probably be better to disable that functionality if you can.

Overall, great work, hope to see you develop this more.

Hey now, they told you not to make Fire Emblem, and you make a dating sim? That's just Fire Emblem!

I'm joking, haha, this is a cute idea. I like that you had multiple portraits for all the characters, did you edit them yourself? Or is there a pack somewhere with facial expressions? There were some cute bits of dialog, too, and I liked the themed names of the girls.

I was a bit surprised you could only talk to every character once. I'm not sure why you get so many turns since you only need 5 or 6 turns to talk to everyone. It'd be nice if you could talk to a character multiple times, or you had to do little side missions where a character asks you to talk to another character to progress their story... Of course, that'd be pretty ambitious to get working in a game jam SRPG project.

Nice job!

Yeah, I meant a third thing to mark. I tend to use them to draw lines to find the symmetry more easily. I just used X'es for it and removed them afterwards, which worked just fine.

It seems like you put a lot of effort into the worldbuilding, which is impressive, but it's hard to get that across in a gamejam game. I got the gist of it, at least the general relationships between characters, but had some trouble putting some lines into context. I hope you'll find use for it in the future for a larger project.

There's a lot of fun creative games in here, I've played most of them already and will try to check out the rest to comment as well. Everyone did a great job. I think Gun Game is probably my favourite so far, it's very novel and made me think about my moves in a fun puzzle-like way.

Ah, you're right, I didn't think to try out keyboard controls, and I see you even patched it, so mouse controls work fine now. That covers pretty much all the complaints I had, and there's even some funny descriptions in the unit/weapon descriptions. Amazing job!

I suppose that's true, they are solvable, but only by just trying something, you can't deduce the solution because you can get to a point where there's 2 possibilities and both are valid. That's why generally all sudoku have a unique solution. Still, I understand that that would be really hard to do and a big pain with such a limited engine. Good work nonetheless!

This was super fun! The writing cracked me up on multiple occasions ("DID I JUST FUCKING DIE?") and the core gameplay was really fun. Towards the end it really felt like a puzzle, and it was a lot of fun to time things so that everything lined up. It seemed pretty well-balanced too, although the Poison Lance was a big pain to get a kill with last minute. My only gripes are UI-related. I would've liked to see what level each weapon is, because I had trouble remembering, which threw me off sometimes. A unit inspect screen also would've helped, because sometimes I didn't know what weapons do when enemies had them, which meant things sometimes felt cheap. Overall, great job, really loved it. 

This was really impressive! It almost didn't feel like an SRPG Studio game except for the little unit on the Picross board, haha. The UI works quite well, the only criticism I have is that there's no "mark "option, but I made do. The puzzles were quite fun and surprisingly challenging. The story was a bit complex for such a short game though, and I had trouble remembering all the exposition, which made it a bit confusing. It seems like it'd be fun if it were a longer game though.

This is a neat idea! You really like Dragon Quest huh? I really like that you put in the effort to make custom portraits for everyone, although for some (specifically the Dullahan) it was a bit jarring that it didn't match her sprites. It was fun to toy around with the abilities, and sometimes I really had to think about the best way to use my moves, especially at the bottom left corner when the monsters all arrived at once. Sadly everything after that felt a bit unfinished? It took like 6 turns to get through the forest, and then neither of the bosses seemed to move, even when I was in range. Speaking of which, was the hydra meant to move? I never interacted with it because it just stayed at the spawn, and the mission ended after I beat the boss. The writing was pretty cute too. Nice work!

This is neat! Felt like a little puzzle game. It's a bit trial-end-error though, I would've liked to know more about the waves before they spawn, but I guess that might be hard without scripting. Good work!

I had fun playing this! I really liked the super serious opening scene with the Fire Emblem style drama followed by all the enemies just being stickmen, made me laugh. Thinking about unit placement and such felt pretty engaging, and I liked the item and unit descriptions. The boss spawn removing all the existing units felt a bit weird, since there were dozens of enemies on-screen, and archers feel pretty inferior to axemen, especially since it's so hard to make them promote. I feel like it would've been fine to give them 3 or 4 movement before promotion, just so you had more ways to deal with mages other than rushing them down all at once.

Paige is best girl.

Wow, great work! The controls work well for a game like reversi where you can only do one type of action, and the AI was challenging enough to make it fun to toy with. I even managed to beat it once by putting it in a situation where I had no valid moves so I won.

Impressively made! I think the generating algorithm isn't working quite right though. On one occasion I ran into a sudoku with a non-unique solution (I checked it with an online solver), which meant that I couldn't deduce the answer. It plays well though, nice work.

It's impressive that you got this working! It's definitely Minesweeper all right, but it's rather tedious to play due to the SRPG mechanics. If it had actual Minesweeper controls, it would've been really excellent

For some reason it kept freezing when I move next to a door? Couldn't really manage to get far because of that.

Is this missing a download link?

Yep, that seemed to fix it, managed to get all 4 endings. I'm not sure if the judges/MarkyJoe will manage to figure it all out within the timeframe though. Good thing the first ending isn't too hard

Thanks for the feedback! 

The Fey Spirit thing is definitely an oversight, haha. I set the duration to infinite now, so you should be able to use it to get 2 extra turns (as intended) but no more than that.

I don't really plan to revamp the draw mechanic - the monsters being mostly disposable is definitely intended so you don't completely snowball. Skeletons especially are meant to be reliable (high hit rate) but not worth using buffs on. Assassins, Dark Mages, or Chickens you can keep alive for the majority of the map due to higher weapon durability and scaling well with buffs for one reason another. I did actually experiment with infinite weapon durability in earlier builds, but it made the game too swingy, since if you played carefully, you could keep most of your units alive and get a massive army in the second half.

But I definitely have gotten some other feedback about the RNG being too punishing, so I'll push some small changes (slightly increasing player hit rates and some durabilities) to make it more forgiving if your draws aren't great. I don't think I've seen an impossible "draw seed" yet (it's slightly rigged so you'll never be completely monster starved), but some unlucky misses at the start can really screw you, so I'll try to reduce that.

Really fun idea! I did encounter some bugs, notably that if you try to make a building, don't have enough resources, and then try to make a different building, it still won't let you because it checks the resource cost of the first building. This resulted sometimes in me making a different building than I intended. I also found that, after you get set up, the map is a little easy/turtle-heavy because the zombies seem to be the only thing that actively threatens you, so a lot of the high level upgrades didn't seem needed. I did have a lot of fun though, I found myself thinking of where to place my next buildings as if I were playing Civilization or something. Great work!

This is impressively done! The UI works well,  I liked that you could even easily see which squares are forbidden for the (enemy) king. The AI, while far from great, wasn't totally stupid either, which is already quite impressive within the confines of SRPG Studio. Great work.

Well, that got me a little farther. I got the gun and ammo, but it seems like they don't change the ending at all. Is it buggy or is there something else I still need to do? I don't think I have any clues left. It's pretty obtuse.

Cool idea! Had fun with it, but I encountered a crash when Titedius used Desperation when under 75%. He attacked first, missed, then on his next action, I could only select Wait. I selected Wait, but he attacked anyway (before the enemy), killed it, and then caused a crash.

So I'm pretty sure you're supposed to open the corrupted salvation image in notepad, but it doesn't actually seem to give any results. You checked if it still works after uploading?

I think the game is bugged, it said "click here to win" and I clicked and I didn't win

(great stuff tho)

Haha, the music is license free, it was not composed for the game. Thanks for your feedback!

Oops! I think it crashes when it tries to drain the blood of a skeleton, haha. Thanks for mentioning it!

Exploring an uncharted island is a cool hook, but I was a bit confused by the mechanic of drawing lines to explore, since it seems like drawing the line fast lets you move faster? Neat idea!

I really like the artstyle you went for. The newspaper headlines were pretty interesting, although they start to loop pretty quickly. I won with 85 days left, praise Cthulhu!