itch.io

As Milia mentioned, I handled all the arranges. The dungeon arrange in particular was inspired by "Water Prison" from Ys Origin and "Crystal Teardrops" from Symphony of the Night. Thank you for the kind words! :)

A very unexpected genre of game to come out in a Jam, but a welcome one.

Conceptually, I really liked the idea of this game. The instrumental version of Non-Fiction was very fitting and actually kept me going when I was struggling.

Unfortunately I couldn't beat the game due to a few reasons:

1. The mouse controls felt very sensitive when moving slowly and even when moving fast it felt very touchy. This might have been my mouse and a DPI/mouse sensitivity setting would have helped out.
2. The AI felt incredibly difficult. I've only played the first stage of Ace Combat 7 which I felt was very manageable for someone who hasn't played any piloting games before. The AI here was almost always out of sight and it felt like luck rather than skill to even get the enemies on my screen. Shiori in particular deleted me in about a minute and I never saw her once.
3. No checkpoints made me immediately quit as the struggle to the boss felt overwhelmingly tough for too long.

That said, I did like the vibe this game was going for. I wish that the environment was more detailed and visible as it's fun to see the ground below while flying, the world in ENreco could look really neat from above.

If the controls felt better and the AI wasn't so difficult, I'd be interested in giving this another go.

Visually, everything worked together really well. You can distinguish objects easily and the UI is also simple and functional. The only exceptions were the objective and how to heal, which were both found out by coincidence.

Moving via the mouse was a little painful as I couldn't easily stop my character or turn quickly, it worked smoothly and without bugs but I'd personally prefer the control of WASD while pointing attacks with the mouse. The time slow mechanic was neat but freezing the camera in place felt bad.

Enemies and projectiles functioned well except some attacks would travel from far off screen. Having enemies disable when they're a certain distance away would work well here.

The banter on the side of the screen was nice and overall the game had a very comfy and wholesome vibe to it.

Really chill, with a clear vision delivered through a cohesive narrative and gameplay.

The visuals gave off this old school Newgrounds flash game aesthetic, which worked really well with the point and click elements. The music had a mid 2000s visual novel feel to it, evocative of VNs by Minori in particular. Considering both areas are often very lackluster in indie VNs released today, it was a lovely surprise to see and hear something with so much character.

As a sucker for elements of friendship and community, it was nice to see other holoEN members participate in the story but Advent felt a little underplayed for who I'd imagine to be an important person to them. On the other hand this keeps the focus between Gigi and CC, and I understand that time constraints would require compromising the well done visuals to feature more characters.

Gameplay wise the puzzles were neat and the final ones were particularly fun gimmick-wise. However, moving the inventory items into the arrows felt a bit awkward and arrows detaching from blocks, or the entry points turning black/disappearing was common (I was playing the web browser version so this may not have been an exe/app issue). Scrolling down the inventory with a trackpad also made it freak out.

Sometimes I'd accidentally click too many times and skip an important bit of dialogue about what I was supposed to be doing next, seeing past text or a little objective description would have helped. Arrow keys or WASD for the puzzle parts would have been nice.

Overall it was really pleasant and I'd love to see the team tackle a similar game with either one long narrative, or multiple scenarios beyond the sole theme of love and angst.