itch.io

Uh. What? No? I'm very concerned for your workflow if you have absolutely no idea what your game looks like until after its submitted.

Ingame descriptions for the gold and withered petals seem to be flipped :P

Fun game, gets a surprising amount of depth out of the core mechanic and narrative based games are always impressive as jam entries

darmicy!

the name and description implies the goal is to take down the count, but poisoning him leads to a game over. how curious

fed the count delicious plates of raw onions until the game just stopped responding to my mouse. game truly is broken, 10/10 for honest advertising

really fun little game, really enjoy the interactions for using the "wrong" tools, adds a nice bit of flavor and thinking to what's otherwise a pretty simple game

feel like the music needs to be a little louder compared to the sound effects, i was struggling to actually hear the songs i was supposed to be playing to the beat of. art is very cute, and the main mechanic makes for a really neat if brutally difficult rhythm game.

Pretty interesting concept! Found that it tended to be more efficient to just play as a scavenger rather than actually fight the other microbes though, which didn't make for particularly exciting gameplay :P

I reallly wanted to add an ominous ticking sound to the timer but I ran out of time :(  Might do a postjam update just to touch things up with some sound and a menu, maybe a couple extra minigame screens as well

very fun game! randomization could use some measures to prevent repeats - at one point I got the same painting three times in a row, and frequently got the same one twice in a row

Could use a forfeit button tbh. Several times where I ended up with no useful moves to make (often barely any legal moves even) and a ton of turns still on the clock.

If there is one thing I've learned from this, it's that I have absolutely no fucking idea how to play go

Control was a bit janky but a very cute game

Ahhhh, I was in fact trying to shoot after the sun stopped, that was probably it x). Maybe needs some more clarity as to when the window is, since I assumed high noon would be the earliest you could draw.

Pretty fun game! There was some glitchy behavior with the screen wraparound mechanic that got in the way a bit, but this was otherwise a very polished and creative entry with a fun gimmick

Cool concept and art, but it feels impossible to shoot faster than your opponent. Is there some part of the controls I'm missing other than selecting a shot and clicking, or is it just web build lag making the timing window impossible?

Making a hand drawn metroidvania in 4 days is impressive, but unfortunately the game ended up feeling pretty scuffed as a result. Wonder if scoping down a bit might've given a chance for it to get more polish on the movement and level design. I gave up after getting the dash ability as the platforming to get out of that room was just too finicky.

Really funny concept, game seems really poorly optimized for web though. Might've been worth adding a downloadable version even if fewer people play those.

Interesting concept, but it was really hard to keep track of what was actually happening behind the scenes. Some kind of indicator of what the current state of the game actually looks like would be really nice - as it stands, the only active feedback you seem to get is whether the team was happy, but just keeping them happy still got me what seems like a pretty mediocre ending (though at least it said they actually submitted something, so maybe that's a relatively good ending after all?)

nice little warioware like. that sure is a lot of floors, i wonder how feasible it is to actually fully complete this, i only got to around 70

damn, i was kind of hoping zima would actually just be a stock image of a snow leopard doing some wacky antics to get money. decent little idle game though

so very serious. pretty simple game but a really creative and funny interpretation of the theme!

This isn't a rhythm game? Just a timing one. The cards aren't timed to the music at all, so it's just a game of pressing a button when two icons line up with no musical component (a perfectly fine base, but not what's being advertised!)

The gameplay got tedious pretty quickly unfortunately - the cards move and appear really slow, and the angels other than the basic shy one have really excessive amounts of health, so the game quickly felt really slow paced and repetitive. Upgrades costing health is really interesting in concept, but they take so much of your healthbar for such lackluster upgrades that they just do not feel worth it - buying upgrades seemed like a death sentence every time I tried. The game also seems to have some really inexplicable and severe bugs - I had several occasions where the deck seemed to get stuck and keep repeating the same card over and over without counting down? Which in turn made the upgrades feel even more worthless, as I often wouldn't even be able to access the part of the deck where the cards I bought ended up.

On the other hand, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous. The character designs and stylization are so instantly iconic and appealing, it's such a cool aesthetic. Massive kudos for the artwork.

Fun game with some solid theming! My big criticism would be that a lot of card pairs just don't feel worth it to get - why would I ever add more difficult monsters or attacks for dealing with them to my deck just results in getting less of the ritual power I actually need to win? I ended up just avoiding any card pairs that included anything other than basic ritual/knowledge gains for the positive and raw damage/time loss or basic husk summons for the negative on my successful run, which felt like I was avoiding a lot of the more theoretically interesting mechanics because they were just too risky with basically zero reward - I could always just put my knowledge into upgrades that were strictly more useful anyway if there weren't any viable card pairs on offer, after all.

was expecting a joke entry from the name but this is a genuinely clever little game. really fun concept

Maybe it would've been worth looking into a bag randomizer or even just a manual check to prevent the same permutation from showing up twice in a row - would've ensured a bit more variety without needing to implement another ability. Though adding a couple more abilities would've fixed the issue pretty quickly too, yeah.

cute dog, fun art. found that the orange and watermelon sodas seemed to be just worse than the base one which felt odd and a bit disappointing. the game also consistently froze for a few seconds at every scene transition, which was annoying especially as the game doesn't seem complex or resource intensive enough to be demanding significant loading times. game definitely needs some optimization work. 

core gameplay is pretty fun though, learn to fly clones are a solid formula. i liked the upgrade descriptions changing with each level, made the exponential price scaling feel earned much more than just a numeric upgrade would. though i ended up finishing the game before getting a chance to buy the last couple of them

Pretty neat. The randomized upgrades are a cool idea, though I ended up getting the same roll twice in a row including on my successful run (which I suppose with only 6 possible arrangements that's bound to happen every so often if it isn't specifically prevented, but it put a damper on the variety the mechanic otherwise would've added). Level design is pretty clever to accommodate the randomization and keep things just barely doable within the time limit. Otherwise not a lot to be said about this.

Very fun concept! Would've appreciated some kind of inventory to be able to see what letters and items I currently have, but I otherwise can't think of any way I'd change the main gameplay loop - the typed commands are really satisfying and play well off the time limit, and collecting letters is a cool thematic way to gate progress.

Pretty solid little prototype, you have a good base here. The grapple mechanic is really cool and could easily be the center of a really satisfying moveset if you decide to expand on this.

Few pointers:
- The game's visuals were really small on my screen and it made it hard to make out what was happening. For a pixel art game you generally want to turn on viewport stretching, so that the game gets scaled up cleanly when the window is resized instead of staying at the same scale and just getting a wider fov.
- The art could use a little reworking for clarity - I ran into some spikes at the start because I couldn't tell what they were at all, they looked like background objects. The enemies also blended into the background a little.
- Really appreciate that you took the time to add a few sound effects, they really help with making a small prototype like this feel like something more of an actual game. I think the landing sound effect could maybe use some work though, it does just sound like a kick drum right now :P

I also notice that you don't seem to have actually picked one of the themes...? At least, you didn't say which one you picked in your explanation, which makes it kind of impossible to rate on it.

Really cool. Incredibly atmospheric, and the ever increasing rate of toxicity made things feel really tense even though I never actually got anywhere close to dying. The whole concept of being forced to interact with a terminal on a time limit is extremely clever, incredibly creative entry.

Not much here to rate with just a prototype but the art's cute and you at least gave your prototype a definitive ending and a nice bit of humor about being unfinished :P  Scoping a jam project appropriately's a lesson a lot of us have to learn the hard way, but you did a good job salvaging what you managed to make within the time.

Not a whole lot here to review, it's a functional enough prototype I suppose. Hard to critique a lot of it since it's clearly just a result of being a bit of a last minute prototype submission. I did find the base movement speed to be too high to feel controllable with the asteroids style controls, which made the laser's slowdown feel actively preferable to the base movement - combined with the laser attack being vastly more powerful and easy to use than the kind of awkward base shots and it felt like a massive upgrade that I never had any desire to turn off.

In general I found the downsides of the abilities to be a bit uninteresting - they feel kind of tacked on, and never really tied into how the upgrade actually works. Considering the laser's able to be held down, maybe it should've been the one to get the lower turn speed so that you can't sweep it around as easily?

Alright, went back and actually beat the game. Ignoring what I said about softlocks that turned out to just be me not getting the controls, all my other gripes with the room rearranging mechanic still apply I think - I'd also sometimes have rooms just, refuse to be placed in certain positions? I thought maybe it's because there wasn't a valid entrance to connect them to at the position I was trying, but since I can't actually see where the valid entrances are it's really hard to tell.

The roc boss wasn't very fun honestly - its fast movement and large arena meant it spent a lot of time offscreen where I couldn't really see what it was doing, and its claws moving really quickly with little telegraph made them really irritating to avoid. The claws hovering around it also made the bite feel unfeasible, so I tried to use the beam attack, which also felt really difficult to use... then it turns out that in one of its resting positions you can just get above it and spam bite anyway, which lead to a very anticlimactic ending to the fight from doing that. Though, I'm realizing after saying all of this that I completely forgot the parrying shield existed, so it probably would've been more fun if I'd actually remembered to use that to block attacks :|. Once again maybe it's just on me this time.

I will say the base movement felt even better once I found the dash, you did a good job there.

Oh I looked at another comment and saw that you can sprint -.-  I probably wasn't softlocked after all and just needed to do that. I think that needs to be mentioned in the controls on the page somewhere as I had no idea I could do that - it's been a while since I played any old kirby games so double tap sprint wasn't intuitive to me either!

Thank you! I do need to test out those riding sequences a little more, they were a last minute addition so I'm not surprised there's a bug or two I missed. Several people have reported that other bug too, seems related to screen transitions but is really hard to reproduce, I'm not sure what's causing it exactly.

Thank you! Glad to see that someone appreciated the more deliberate movement, at least :p

The gimmick of this seems really cool, but I very quickly ended up softlocked - the blue room has several jumps that seem to only be possible when going left, so after entering that room with what ended up being a dead end past it, I could not get back to the start room to change the layout, and had to alt+f4 the game (which, shouldn't be necessary, if you're going to put your game in fullscreen by default you need at least a basic pause menu). In general the fact that you can only rearrange the rooms at the start room and inability to easily reset to that room seem like a perfect recipe for rampant softlocks - I'm honestly more surprised that other players seem to have actually been able to beat the game without issue, I guess most of the levels must be better designed about making sure you can actually backtrack through them without upgrades.

Even disregarding the softlock the rearranging felt a little finnicky? The interface for doing so wasn't immediately intuitive, and not being able to see any information about the actual internals of the rooms (even really basic info like which directions they actually connect in!) made the process of actually finding the right rooms to progress feel like tedious trial and error. I think other game's I've played with similar gimmicks show you at least a vague outline of what the room looks like as you're rearranging, which helps make it feel more like an actual puzzle and not something you have to brute force until you've memorized the layouts of each room.

While I didn't get very far the actual main gameplay seemed pretty solid - the controls have just enough retro stiffness to match the NES aesthetic while still feeling smooth and responsive enough to be comfortable, the visuals and music are appealing and cute (even if the status bar maybe feels a bit too directly lifted from kirby :P), and the zoomed out view is fun, even if doesn't serve much of a practical purpose. It's just the central gimmick that feels a bit half baked to me, which is understandable as it's a pretty ambitious gimmick to implement while also trying to make a competent metroidvania in the time limit, but it did leave me a little disappointed.

Pretty fun game. The teleportation gimmick is really cool, and utilized pretty well. What doesn't feel well utilized is the theme - the cooldown mechanic never really comes into play in an interesting way as the side effects are extremely punishing and there's never a lot of urgency to using the teleport, so it's always best to just, wait out the cooldown, which is boring. The game only starts to do things where the cooldown would get in the way... after it hands you an upgrade that gets rid of the cooldown entirely. In general I found that to be a bit of an issue with the game's structure, at least as far as the expectations for this jam go - it doesn't feel very metroidvania-y, since you always gain the required abilities for a room before ever actually reaching it, so there's no real ability gates in the game. The one gate you can actually reach before it's opened is an arbitrary one that only opens after collecting all the shards.

Visually the game is quite nice, I like the use of darkness and the moody color scheme. I think the game's sounds might've been broken for me? I see a lot of sound effects credited on the page but the only thing in the actual game that made noise was jumping. Though, I've had sound issues with a couple of other browser games at this point (including my own), so I'm starting to wonder if this is just an issue on my end somehow.

Another expected Zahran banger :P I'm struggling to sort through all my thoughts on this game honestly, its incredibly impressive as a jam entry. Were it just a little longer this feels like something I'd be paying for.

I tried to go for 100% completion, but I filled out the entire map without finding health upgrades II and V. I guess maybe I entered their rooms earlier, but couldn't complete them?  I didn't have any memory of unfinished rooms though, and didn't want to comb over the whole map for them, so I guess I'm leaving this off at 87%.

I had only a couple nitpicks with the game - the first was that it took me a while to get used to recognizing the tiles that you can't grapple to. I wonder if giving the actual cursor some kind of indicator as to whether you can grapple and not just the grapple point itself might make it a little more obvious when you're pointing at something ungrapplable? That'd also be really helpful once getting the upgrade that lets you grapple things offscreen, as right now it can be a bit hard to tell where to aim for those grapples. It also took me a while to realize that some fish were friendly and could be talked to - since plenty of hostile fish stand still I started assuming pretty much everything would kill me if I touched it, so I missed a lot of fish dialogue on my first pass through the early areas (though I think I saw it all by the end). 

I didn't find the map until really late in the game, which lead to a lot of frustrating running in circles. I like the map being optional, but I wonder if a little more could be done to nudge the player in its direction - granted, it seems like there *were* several clues to it that I just, missed, so maybe it's just a bit of a skill issue x)  (It also seems like the NPC who grants it was a reference to something, but I couldn't tell what...)

There was only one thing that definitively felt like an issue or bug, which is that one of the rooms in the shallows didn't get flooded after lowering the superstructure. What made it so odd was that the room next to it *did* get flooded, so there was just, an inexplicable vertical wall of water across the room transition which felt really jank. Considering the room in question is on the required path out of the shallows after opening the blast doors, it feels really odd that this wouldn't have been caught before release, but it'd feel even stranger for it to be intended just due to how janky it feels, so I'm not really sure what happened here.

That's enough on the issues though, onto the good stuff: I kind of love how underpowered the player feels for so much of the start. The grapple is such a good solution to the initial slow movement and feels so fluid and fun to use, and having to unlock the HUD as an upgrade is brilliantly devious. That initial underpowered state also does a nice job of selling the "defective" part of the theme, and makes the final moveset feel that much more powerful by comparison. The world design also felt really good and had a lot of really clever ability gates, as well as some really fun and atmospheric execution of the overall "inside a giant robotic structure" theming. The whole game does such an excellent job of perfectly capturing the classic metroidvania ethos with a very non standard controller (and achieving it under such a short time limit too, though that's perhaps a little less surprising coming from the same duo that made Moonlit :P)

Visually the game is absolutely gorgeous - I love the swaying kelp in the Wound area (which, also, is just such a cool name for an area). All the objects are super clear, each of the areas feel nice and distinct, it's all super well polished. Sound design and music are similarly well polished, everything felt like a perfectly natural fit for its context. I also liked the writing quite a bit, though I feel like I'm missing just enough to not really be able to piece together what actually happened to this place (it doesn't seem like anything particularly points to what actually damaged the structure and caused it to sink, though maybe I just missed something?)

Not sure what else to talk about, honestly. All of the weapons feel really nice to use, and it's neat how the upgrades all feel like full variations rather than strict linear upgrades (though I think the second sword level ended up feeling like a downgrade because of it, the delay on its swing makes it less useful as a shield which was the main purpose i used that weapon for)

Really good game, kudos.

Boss seems waaaay too tanky. I slipped off the platform when it was at about half health and don't really want to try it again as it already took what felt like forever to get to that point. Dunno if I'll come back to this to finish it out properly, I'd like to see the other weapons but I don't really want to do that boss.

Up until that point I was having fun, though - this is a pretty solid little fps. The movement and shooting were simple but all felt plenty fluid and engaging. I did experience a bit of stuttering but that might just be typical web build lag. I do agree with the comment on the page that moving the platforms around would probably make more sense to be bound to WASD, since you can't move the player while doing that anyway - would save having to move my hand over to the arrow keys. I also thought the glitch effect as a damage indicator was neat in concept, but in practice I found it really hard to distinguish how much health I had, and even harder to tell when I'd just gotten hurt - I think some extra indicator at the moment you're hit might help.

I don't have a lot to say about the visuals, they're alright. Polished enough that they caught my eye from the submissions page. The sound design is really good, the shooting sounds are nice and satisfying. Music is a bit of an unusual choice but it did end up working! Good job making that fit.

Dunno how I feel about the theming, interpretation is a tad trite and from the one upgrade I got it didn't seem like the side effects had much of anything to do with the ability itself. I guess it's possible they get more interesting from there, but I wasn't especially feeling the "absurd" part from that one :P  I'm giving the benefit of the doubt for my rating in that category for now though, since there's clearly a meaningful effort to incorporate the theme.

Could not get anywhere in this game. I genuinely cannot tell what exactly is going wrong with the combat, all I can tell is that it's incredibly broken. I have absolutely no idea what's even damaging me half the time - it sometimes feels like I just suddenly start taking damage anytime an enemy is so much as on screen. Interaction prompts also regularly break and require me to leave and reenter the interaction region to work, which was extremely frustrating - it seems like the idea is they're supposed to deactivate if you're facing the wrong way, which would probably be fine on its own - but they don't seem to reactivate when you turn around, only when reentering the are entirely, which makes it obnoxiously finnicky to actually interact with anything. Might be best to just ignore facing direction entirely like someone else suggested, would easily fix that bug.

Camera lagging behind the player was a bit annoying. Generally you want to do the opposite so you can actually see where you're going. Screen transitions seem to awkwardly flash the last image before entering the transition around the screen a few times - I don't know if this was an intentional effect, but it really just looked like a bug. I think it needs more refinement if it's intentional.

Core moveset feels vaguely interesting, I really would've liked control rebinding though. The existence of a seperate dash action when your attack already seems to be a sort of dash felt awkward and made me think the attack button was broken for a second as it looked like it was just doing the dash move again. I like the varied uses of the orbs in theory, but they felt a little awkward to use with the current control scheme (and then with the enemies being as busted as they are I couldn't really use them effectively in combat anyway)

I did at the very least really like the art. It's a really appealing style, it reminds me of old flash games a bit. It's very appealing and well refined. Good work there, I just wish the mechanics had a similar degree of polish.