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Having a fully voice acted story in a game jam is really impressive, but unfortunately I really did not enjoy said story. Leilana was incredibly obnoxious and I found myself skipping through every line of her dialogue - her snarky, overly modern dialogue did not fit the rest of the game's tone at all. The dialogue art was well done but I do have to wonder if the game might've been better without the dialogue sequences and with more dev focus on the game proper.

Visuals are fine but clearly unfinished - lot of undecorated rooms, janky animations and a complete lack of backgrounds. I do also just feel like I'm generally not a fan of this kind of high-res pixel art style - this kind of resolution is high enough that it makes pixellated artwork just look kind of crunchy and aliased since you can't easily make out individual pixels.

The platforming felt fine but unexceptional. I feel like I didn't get much of a chance to explore a lot of the abilities since they get thrown at you in big batches and there didn't seem to be many noteworthy platforming challenges. Combat felt really bad though - I can't really put my finger on some of the issues, but I did notice that the cooldown between attacks seemed weirdly inconsistent - I'd sometimes be able to do two attacks in a row, but I'd then have an awkwardly long cooldown before I could attack again, and then other times it would only let me attack once in a combo? It all felt really confusing - I think if there was meant to be some kind of proper combo or stamina system or whatever it was that was blocking me from attacking that clearly wasn't communicated at all.

Boss dying in three hits after being massively hyped up was a pretty big anticlimax. I take it there wasn't time for a proper bossfight?

Played some more now that I actually know how the air dash works:

- The air dash feels great, I wouldn't change how it works. It just needs to be better explained to the player.

- Enemies tended to be really annoying and not a lot of fun to fight. They were prone to getting right up in your face where you don't have time to respond to their attacks, and then kind of just... staying there, because they move as fast as the player even at full sprint.

- Game could really use an aiming crosshair. I felt like I was missing a lot of shots just due to struggling to tell where my gun was actually pointing.

Game was a lot more fun once I was able to experience more of the metroidvania elements, and I think the general idea of tying abilities to temporary pickups that later become permanent is really cool, it just lead to some frustration where I didn't see the ability prompts until long after they were useful. I did just completely miss the bit of tutorial text that said I could press tab to see that info though which would've really helped, though given someone else had the same issue I'm hesitant to say that's all on me.

I didn't see any description for the ability at all. Where was that supposed to be?

Like the other person I also got stuck after the spike room - I was able to figure out that having the orange element gave me an air dash of sorts (which felt odd - none of the other elements had extra abilities associated with them, and none of the tutorial text indicated this was possible), but using it would cause me to plummet to the ground pretty quickly so i wasn't able to use it to actually get past any of the roadblocks in my way, which both seemed to require some actual aerial movement. Because of this I was not able to get very far and only experienced minimal metroidvania elements.

The grapple/draining hook is really neat idea, but it felt clunky in it's current state - it was very prone to hitting the ground instead of an enemy right in front of my face, which for some reason would completely nullify its hitbox and cause it to phase straight through the thing. I think keeping its hitbox active when it "bounces" and only removing it when it returns to the player or hits a valid target would feel much more intuitive. I also disliked hitting F to grapple - I think binding either the grapple or drain to just right clicking a second time would work better, so only one extra key is needed for the other action.

Visuals are certainly unpolished but serviceable enough. Music was pretty solid and atmospheric, but the sound design was a bit odd in places - the sound for the base weapon was pretty awkward and there being a different player hurt sound for seemingly every damage source felt really inconsistent and made me confused about what was actually happening at first when a few of those sounds triggered.

yeah that's definitely a bug im not sure how i didn't catch that

fixed now, thank you

Oh, heavy lag's not good... was this the web build?

Thanks for playing!

Moving the detection for whether the slash goes up or down to the bottom sounds like a good idea, I'll try to implement that and see if it fixes some of the jank I've had with that... I initially used the player center for that purpose because having the player position at their base lead to some awkwardness with detecting whether the slash should be possible at all, but there's nothing that really requires those two things to use the same position, it'd just be a little more work to implement.

The player is just supposed to be a ghost and not a mermaid yeah :|  Their visuals need a lot more work in general, I had some ideas for some particle effects and additional animations that maybe would make them feel a little more ghostly.

Really funny to hear you say you found it non-euclidean because I actively tried to make that not the case for once >.<  I mapped out the entire game with screenshots as I was working on it and made sure that everything perfectly lined up, so all of the distances should be more or less exact. Kind of curious which rooms felt non-euclidean to you?

I... did not think about that gap in that room at all. I kind of just assumed it wouldn't be possible to get up there and didn't check whether it was possible with enough flight upgrades.

Also really funny that you found that one breakable wall, I really did not expect anyone to find that. I had some really overambitious plans for what was going to be behind it so when I cut those I decided to just brick the wall over rather than remove it completely so that it would still be there if I came back to the idea. So, there is no other side to it right now, unfortunately.

Thanks for playing!

The abyss area is very much meant to have no music, but I did intend on adding some kind of ambient sound to fill the silence that I ended up never getting around to before the deadline hit. As it stands it does feel kind of awkwardly silent there, yeah.

There's def still a lot of jank to work out in the exact behavior of the slash, yeah - making this has made me really appreciate some of the finer details of how it works in Specter of Torment. The direction picking is def still wonky - it doesn't take into account which direction you're actually facing when picking a target and the up/down distinction feels like it could maybe use a bit of tweaking as well. I'm a bit disappointed you found the i-frames too unreliable to actually use it for combat, I found slashing back and forth through enemies to be really satisfying (which does make me hesitant to go with Specter Knight's bounce as a solution to some of the jank, even though I'm definitely coming to realize that it does solve a lot of the problems I've been having). I def need to do a little more to prevent the player from being hit during a slash, I think it's mostly just that the i-frames are not really generous enough - I mentioned in another reply that they don't actually start immediately but they also cut off immediately when the slash's acceleration does which does sometimes leave you inside the enemy hitbox when they cut off, causing that "phasing in" phenomenon you're describing.

The extra height from the wall jump is something I noticed occasionally but could never quite place exactly what was triggering it - your description of it does sound correct though and I think I have an idea of what's causing it now. I'll def want to try to fix that as it does feel very weird and inconsistent with how the wall jump normally behaves. As for the hover thing I did actually properly notice that when testing and intentionally left it in since I thought it was a neat strat, but I didn't really test it enough to get a good gauge for exactly how powerful it is so it might need to be nerfed or removed.

feels like it was made in the full month, really good game. impeccable lighthopping, i have been put to shame. i do wish the different outfits were actual cosmetics you could swap between though, maybe in an extra slot on the wand building menu

Hmm, that is really weird. I hope that doesn't mean it was an unrelated issue the whole time.

Well, hopefully it's not, and the fix for the other issue will also prevent this from happening as well. Thanks for your help with this!

Well, that turned out to be pretty easy to recreate and also pretty easy to fix... it turns out i just, completely forgot to disable the ui during the little fade to black before loading your file, so when you were spamming enter it ended up loading up the game multiple times with multiple copies of everything, which lead to all the weirdness you're describing. Really embarrassing mistake, should be fixed for postjam though -.-

I still don't understand how this ended up bricking your file though - the game is supposed to just ignore corrupt files and plop you into a new save if one fails to load. Could you try opening the console and seeing what kind of error its putting out when you try to load it?

Thank you!

Yeah, the issue with only sometimes getting hit when slashing through an enemy is because there's a very short windup period before the i-frames from the slash kick in. The intent was to add a bit of risk to using the slash, but since there's not really a clear indication of when that period occurs it kind of just ended up making the slash feel confusingly inconsistent even for me. I ended up shortening that period as a last minute attempt to mitigate that but I think I probably need to go further and just completely remove or rework the mechanic entirely.

The issue with the black screen is definitely a really weird bug, could you give some more details about what the exact inputs you were trying to make when quickly quitting and reloading were? Also, I'm not sure what exactly you mean by the file refusing to load - did the game get stuck/freeze again when trying to load it, or something else? Does the issue persist if you try going back into the game now?

Unsurprisingly top notch entry from a ridiculously stacked team. The magical girl theming is on point - the transformation sequence was great (gave me a bit of a laugh with how sudden it felt) and the respawn animation is incredibly cute, its just perfect. Sound design also complements the vibe quite well, both the nice springly robot sounds for platforming and the cutsey voice when attacking - although the sawblade having only one sound effect was very noticeable next to the normal attack having multiple, and made it feel a bit grating to use repeatedly. The game controls great, and I really liked the drill ability bouncing off walls - nice way to put a bit of a spin on a typical stomp ability, and the level design was def well done to accommodate it with some really satisfying big chains of breakable floors to bounce through.

As far as issues, having no way to heal outside of dying or health upgrades was annoying - I ended up entering the boss with only two health and dying even though it very much felt like something I should've been able to manage first try.

The controls were also a little odd? I don't think I've seen O and P for primary actions in any game before. It worked fine enough but I would've very much liked the ability to rebind controls. I understand that tends to be a low priority for jam games (I def ran out of time to add it to my game), but I was a bit disappointed to not see the option in such a generally polished entry from a team of experienced devs.

Having a map screen at all is always bonus points in this jam but I found it to be a bit too small as is - I had a hard time making out anything on it. An ability to zoom would be much appreciated, and maybe cutting out some of the finer details of the map so that it's a little easier to parse.

I did have one bug where the button prompts in the text when picking up an ability wouldn't get properly substituted? The initial tutorials and wall jump worked fine, but for the other abilities it would show things like <prompt:Attack> instead of properly substituting the key icon. Obviously not a major issue since the controls are on the game page but did stand out as the only outright bug I noticed.

Overall, very good game, very much enjoyed my time with it. Good job to everyone involved, will be interested to see where this team heads next.

It's not about the length of the window after moving away from the wall, it's the fact that I have to be already holding the direction when I press jump for the wall jump to execute. Most wall jumps work by just pressing jump once you are in a wall jump state without any need for a directional input, so my muscle memory has me pressing the jump button before pressing the opposite arrow, which in this control scheme results in nothing happening.

Thanks for playing!

The witch is a character from a previous game of mine that never came to fruition, hence the "reused" part. That game is a bit of an in-joke, so I guess the bit doesn't really work as well out of that context. Oh well.

The slash move is most directly inspired by Specter Knight from Shovel Knight - in general the mechanics of this game are meant to pretty much just be "what if Specter of Torment was a metroidvania". I can see how it's kind of similar in functionality to Ori's bash though, so coming at it from that context I can get why you'd expect it to have a seperate bind. I haven't played the Messenger though so I dunno what the similar move there is.

The hair effect is actually really easy to create! It's just a sequence of circles that get moved around by some simple forces - mainly gravity and a drag force opposite to player motion - that then get clamped to be within a certain distance of the previous node in the chain. It gives a really nice effect without any complicated math or manual animation work at all. 

Really solid metroidvania. I did get stuck for a while early on because I didn't realize you could shoot up :p I will say that it felt like the platforming abilities were fairly underutilized? There was very little that actually used the walljump (which was maybe for the best since the controls for it could be kind of awkward - needing to make sure im holding the direction *before* pressing jump while also having to switch from the opposite direction was finicky, and I mostly cheesed it where possible by just holding down both directions at once), and I don't think I found anything that used the glide. The higher level attack draining your health is a cool idea, but it felt like my health was so high compared to the damage dealt and health drops from enemies were so frequent that there was basically zero risk to using it, which felt like it kind of defeated the point.

The boss also felt quite half-baked, its movements felt way too erratic to dodge consistently and health drops from its projectiles were once again overly generous so it felt like it devolved into mostly facetanking the chase phase and then healing up from the projectiles, which required no more thought than randomly jumping around and spamming the basic attack.

What the game does really excel on are the secrets - it's always a good sign when a metroidvania has a little secret room off to the left of the starting screen I think, and there was definitely a really solid quantity of goodies scattered around the map.

Thank you, this was helpful, I was able to reproduce the bug now! It seems like its specific to the browser version which is why I didn't catch it - theres some kind of crash related to playing the enemy's sound effects, seems like it's caused by trying to unpause their animation at a specific point. Will see if I can fix this for a postjam update.

Thank you!

Yeah I haven't seen any of those kinds of graphical issues so maybe it was some kind of weird browser issue. As far as the platforms go there's definitely some inconsistency. I think over the course of development I decided on having the ones that slide into gaps stopping at the end of their path, but I left a few earlier ones with the bouncing behavior, so they end up inconsistent.. And then, as far as the rotating platforms, they're just straight up buggy and have some things that need to be fixed. I think most janky behavior I've seen should be a simple fix (it's a change I already applied to other objects but forgot to apply to the rotating platforms as well), so that should hopefully be mostly gone in a postjam update.

The core movement works really well, but a few of the abilities could be inconsistent to activate - the period where you're considered "rolling" after a dodge really needs to be a bit longer as the timing for both of the abilities that chain out of that felt awkwardly tight, and the wall run seemed to just... randomly refuse to work at times. It felt really good when it was working, but some walls just refused to work with it for reasons that I could not for the life of me figure out.

Ranged combat generally felt pretty good, especially after getting the time slow ability, but the dodge roll honestly felt kind of useless as one - the fact that it couldn't dodge melee attacks (and even seemed to instantly trigger them when I tried!) meant that getting into melee range or getting backed into a corner basically felt like suicide, so I ended up resorting to pure run and gun tactics and jumping over shots, which was fun enough most of the time but left the melee attack and stun system feeling totally worthless.

Exploration wise there were many many times where I could not for the life of me figure out where I needed to go to progress and ended up wandering around in circles. The signs pointing you towards new abilities help with this at first but after gaining a few of them the ones for the abilities you already have start to just confuse things. The samey architecture all throughout the game often makes it hard to tell exactly where you are or where you haven't already been. A map screen also would've been really helpful for figuring out where I hadn't already been, but I think critical paths also just need to be a little more prominent, as often it felt like most of the prominent blocked paths I actually remembered only led to small optional upgrades. I was not able to complete the game due to these issues - I got quite a few abilities but could not find anywhere to use the wall run to progress.

Aesthetically the game looks great - the environment really sells the gritty and drab atmosphere and the player is very well designed and animated. I also really liked the sound design in this - I have no idea what the person who said the jump sounds like jet booster was talking about, it reads like a metallic spring type of effect to me and suits the general vibe of the player really well, although I think it could stand to be a bit deeper to fit better with the player's other sounds. In general though I think the heavy metallic sound effects on the player really added some personality and helped add a lot to the player's design - it gives the sense of them being heavily armored or perhaps some sort of robot, which isn't easy to sell from the visuals alone.

I did have one very odd issue which is that the game window seemed to force itself onto the top layer by default? It meant I had to minimize the game every time I wanted to tab out or it would keep displaying on top of the other window. I don't think I've had a game do that before, I'm not sure what would be causing it.

Overall this game was a lot of fun when it was at its best, and I think I put more time into it than any other game this jam - it's just a shame how much of that time was spent running in circles through the same few rooms unable to progress.

Wandered around for a while but I couldn't find any abilities, or much of any way to progress at all. The core movement mostly felt fine, but the wall run hardly felt like a wall run and mostly just launched me off into the distance whenever I tried to use it. There was one bit in the forest that looked like it was built around a normal wall run that would actually cling to the wall properly which I was not able to complete, and the thing at the end of the sequence looked fairly important, so maybe that was the key to progression I was missing? I wasn't able to find anywhere to properly enter the brown or blue areas, but I might've just not searched around enough. The map kind of felt way too large to search effectively and had a lot of empty dead space, especially at ground level - I feel like a smaller, more densely populated map would've been a better way to go, as it feels like there probably wasn't enough time to fully populate or refine the current map.

Visually I had similar issues to Dreamnoid,  the protagonist model was pleasant enough but the fog banding was often really disorienting. Audially most of the sound effects were fine enough but the glide sound effect seemed a bit oddly delayed - the big poof felt like it was playing about half a second after the parachute had already been pulled out, I think the sound needs to be moved up a bit. The music was kind of a mixed bag, it all sounded pleasant enough at first and I think the initial track stayed that way mostly, but the forest theme got really really grating after a while.

Was disappointed the game just seems to softlock after beating the boss, I wanted to go back and find the last few upgrades :(

Most of the things I felt were missing are fairly minor polish additions that I don't necessarily expect to see in a jam game like control rebinding (mouse3 for the morph ball is an... odd choice and I would've probably liked to change it, though it wasn't a huge issue and I was still able to play through comfortably) or a map screen. I will say that having to check the jam page each time I got an ability was annoying and there should be control prompts in-game - I saw you said you ran out of time to do so "properly" but I don't think it would actually take as much time as you think - just a bit of text that pops up when you get the ability would've been sufficient.

Otherwise this is a very solid entry! It's nothing special to look at but it was a lot of fun to play - it feels really fun to control, very well done. It's also decently large and while I was worried the lack of map might make that a problem, the world was really well designed and I never found myself feeling lost - even with the very minimal visuals you did a good job of making each zone clearly distinct and guiding the player through the map effectively. Also really appreciated the amount of secrets and optional upgrades, it does a lot to cement the metroidvania feel and is something a lot of other jam entries fall a bit flat on.

I'm glad you liked the direction I went with the theme, but... I don't think the distinction you're seeing between minimalist and minimalistic actually exists? Minimalist as an adjective is a perfectly valid word, and I think what you're thinking of as "minimalistic" a lot of people (including the jam host, most likely!) would just describe as "minimalist". The word doesn't necessarily imply a person that is a minimalist.

Thank you!

Yeah there's a few points that do just end up forcing you to wait around a bit. I think a little bit of that helps reinforce the minimalist tone, but some of them could probably be sped up a bit.

Thank you!

I think I responded to most of the jank and conveyance issues during your stream so I won't repeat that here. As for the metroidvania point, I def agree that it's a bit lacking in exploration - I def feel like I largely designed this as a more linear game where you happen to gain abilities as you progress, so I don't think it's too surprising it came out lacking that sense of exploration, though I did also have to cut a couple branching paths for time which might've helped bump it up a little more if they made it in.

Thank you!

Yeah, most of the game is very barebones visually. The very first room gives a bit of a sense of the visual style I originally envisioned, but I didn't have time to decorate any other rooms - just making the game actually playable got me down to the wire. I already have a few changes lined up for a post-jam patch so ideally I'd try to do a visuals pass and add some proper decorations alongside that, but its been hard to muster the effort for it.

The movement on this feels alright at first, but the jump feels a bit small and stiff, and the wall jump in particular kind of just... sucks. It takes painfully long to actually climb anything with it, and I nearly gave up on the level built around it because of how tediously long it took to get anywhere and how awkward dodging the enemies on the walls was with such low maneuverability (in the occasions where it even felt like they could be dodged, which seemed annoyingly inconsistent).

In general the levels feel way too large compared to the player and camera - there's a lot of big open empty spaces that are kind of boring to traverse and blind falls off massive cliffs that really didn't need to be blind. This isn't a huge issue at first when you have lots of movement abilities to make getting through the rooms faster and more interesting, but as you lose abilities it grows increasingly tedious to get through each area.

I think being totally linear and having each area focused around the ability you're about to lose kind of weakens the "reverse metroidvania" feel. There's no sense of exploration, and I don't feel like I'm being meaningfully restricted by the abilities I'm losing since each area is clearly themed around one and only one of the abilities - so it feels like a disjointed sequence of platforming challenges rather than an inverted metroidvania map.

Visually the game looks nice enough and is fitting to the theme. I did have one visual glitch where the screen would flash black very briefly during each screen transition, which was quite jarring. The music is pleasant and didn't wear too thin even with there only being one loop, so good job there.

Really cool aesthetic and some neat ideas with the changeable shot speed and recoil based platforming, but I found the game just too finicky to get very far. A lot of it was just how damage was handled, having no feedback or iframes on hit often left me low on health from enemies without even realizing what had happened and the spikes working by just trapping you inside them while they slowly ate at your health was not fun. I also felt like the single screen idea was more detrimental than anything with the current implementation, it made it extra hard to tell what was going on since everything was so small on the screen and it never really gave me the feeling of "playing on the map" that you say you were going for. I feel like the game would've been much more playable zoomed in a little since I'd be able to get a lot more precision in my positioning just from being able to see a little clearer.

Thank you!

Yeah the visuals for the abilities are very much unfinished. My original idea for the aura visuals was a sort of plasma ball effect, but I very much did not have time to spend on any complex visual effects so I ended up with this very very basic version of the concept. Maybe it would've been best to just leave it as a simple circle compared to its current state though... And then of course the click has no visuals at all, I'll probably add a little indication of where you've clicked in a postjam update to make it a little nicer to use

I am curious what you mean by thinking there were alternate routes, I'd hoped all the ability gates were clear enough to indicate you couldn't go through them until later and funnel you into that first puzzle, were there any that had particular issues?

Thank you!

I did actually originally have those platforms just stop when they hit the player, but the way I initially implemented it lead to lots of issues with them stopping when they weren't supposed to in the big climb room with them, so I ended up just throwing out the mechanic and replacing it with killing the player when they get squished. Maybe I'll go back to that mechanic and see if I can get it to work a little more properly at some point.

The slow methodical movement here is really cool, but I gave up very quickly after getting the attack ability solely due to the platforming following it having no respawn points in it and constantly sending me all the way back to the bell to do the by then trivial but still tediously slow walk back to the actual challenge. Learning the right positioning to get through a sequence the first time is fun, going through the same motions again and again quickly turns it into a painful slog that I'm not willing to push through, and it seems like there's no way to get back out of that area without successfully completing that platforming, so I'm kind of forced to leave it there.

The game does look and sound really good, and again I do really like the core mechanics of this game, its just the levels need to be chopped up a little smaller to be palatable I think.

Decent game. I really really liked how the abilities play - the charge was really fun in particular, but the base movement was a little slippery for my taste. I feel like the death barrier could've been significantly higher too, it felt very tedious waiting to fall all the way down every time I fell off.

Pretty cool game. The timing on the jumps felt a bit too tight though, I think it could've used a little more airtime to give a little more leeway in the timing.

Hmm... Yeah, I've tried messing around for a bit to see if I could figure out what might cause that, but I'm not getting anything. I've ended up shrinking the platform hitbox slightly though, so if things somehow do manage to get misaligned they should be a little less likely to get stuck because of it.

Thank you!

Although, I'm unsure what puzzle you were forgetting the mouse click for... you don't get the mouse click until nearly the end of the game, after all the puzzles with the balancing platforms. Using it to make the climb up those easier the second time around is def intended, but I don't think you were forgetting anything the first time around, you didn't have the ability at that point :p

Thank you!

Yeah, there's def a few places the game could use a few more sound effects, and the ability pickups are def a big one - even the one sound they do have is a placeholder, that jingle was originally meant to just be for the clock shrines but I ran out of time to make another one for abilities. The creature chase was very nearly another awkwardly silent moment, I didn't add the sound effects for that until the last hour before the deadline.

Thank you!

Imma be real, I wrote that review right before going to bed and was really tired and not thinking the clearest, thinking back more clearly I don't think the fog really contributed to the depth perception issue at all. I mentioned it because I was mostly trying to think in terms of the background being a very flat gray a lot of the time, but most of my issues with depth perception happened at more close to mid range where the fog wasn't really in effect.

actually going back into the game for a sec I think a big missing thing that would've helped way more with the depth issues is object shadows. A lot of my issues were more with telling where objects were laterally in a room, so I'd regularly undershoot bombs or have a hard time judging where exactly to place my antigrav beams.