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I got to level 5 or 6 when my run was ended by phasing through a wall and falling into the void. Tons of fun though. The spells looked really cool and were interesting to use. It is a bit easy to cheese things by moving back and forth until your spell recovers, but that would be easy to fix with an enemy that is ranged or if enemies start to regenerate after not being hit a certain number of turns in a row. 

The opening cutscene was super neat and I loved the premise. The whole vibe was great. I liked the background looking like a pixelated Balatro style thing haha. Gave a very ethereal feeling to everything.

This one is so fun. It has the "just one more level" morishness that really hooks me. I don't know that the rogue dungeon part of it is doing it too many favors, but the puzzle part of it is SOOO good. I could see this being in a sort of slay the spire ish run system.You'd fight in different arenas that force more interesting movement from the player. There could be resting spots where the player is allowed to move a couple of their pieces around and shops where you buy new pieces and stuff. So many ways it could go!

All of that is to say that I really enjoyed the game. Probably my favorite of the Jam and competition is tough.

The aesthetics and music were top notch for a jam game. Loved the smooth movement and the direction plus button press to allow for diagonal movement was a good way to handle a tricky problem. I think my biggest issue is the menuing felt clumsy which made engaging in the combat clumsy, especially when you are required to use abilities to get through the opening. Adding a hotbar with the abilities available to the player would have helped a bunch or some other way to quick cast abilities. Alternatively I think the menuing might feel a bit better with 3 changes:

• Allow for selection wrap. If I press down when I'm at the bottom of the menu, move the selector back up to the top.
• Selection memory. Remember the last index of the menu the last time I was in that menu. For things like abilities it really helps when the ability I use 80% of the time is the one already highlighted.
• Cancel button to exit. This is a bug I think as you do have the button to cancel on the right but it doesn't actually close the menu. This would allow missed inputs to be corrected much faster by the user.

These 3 changes should make using the menus feel a lot better to the player.
One other thing, is that I played with a controller on my second pass through and the movement felt really good on the controller. I suspect you played on controller? 

Great job and have fun out there!

This was a fun little push your luck game! I definitely am too greedy for my own good. I made it ~483 gold on level 9 during my best run but got triple pincered and summarily executed. Very neat little puzzle that has room to grow if you want it to. Have fun out there!

Tried to see how far I could make it before I "died" by my health reaching 0. Got to floor 26 haha. Fun stuff! 

Managed to get down to level 9 and defeated the enemies there, but Rodney's Amulet wasn't there and my adventurer will forever be trapped = P. I really liked the music,  the combination of synths along with the very small levels made me feel like I was on a spaceship (Ascii art tends to have that effect) Great job!

Super funny entry! At first I was a little disappointed cause it seemed like a pacman-adjacent game, but then I realized what was happening. Katamari Dadungeon. It could have used some traps or other mechanics to make it a bit tougher but from your other comments it seems like you learned a lot already and that is great! Keep having fun out there!

I really love the concept and the aesthetics you got on this one. Everything feels super polished! 

I think there is either a bug or an odd design decision I don't get in the mining. I don't really understand the point of making the player wait in real time for the mining to finish. You also penalize the player for being impatient in that if they press the button to move again while mining it eats a turn and gives no benefit. Especially confusing is that initiating the initial hit on a stone doesn't take a turn at all so you can mine one block into a wall, step in the crevice for one turn, and mine all 3 adjacent blocks for 0 turns. As far as I can tell there isn't anything else in the game that is real time, so it was very frustrating to have to wait for the mining portion. 

My only other nitpick is with the terminal. It would be really nice to have the players commands be a different color than the rest of the messages to help break up the wall of text and make it more readable. Both of these things are suuuper easy to tweak so I will be rating as if they were implemented or there was a setting to enable them.

The rest of the game is super neat! The combination of traditional roguelike and tower defense I haven't seen done much before, and has a lot of meat to it. The amount you managed to get done in just a week is astonishing. Definitely up there for one of the most interesting games of the jam! Have fun out there!

This one was super fun. The modern setting is something you rarely see in the traditional roguelike genre ( and usually if you do it is after some sort of catastrophe where you have to fight zombies or the like ). Obviously nailed Rogue's particular aesthetics with the ASCii art and menus. The setting and focus on stealth remind me a lot of the roguelike sections of the game Liberal Crime Squad! Your lighting was super clean and the wide hallways and glass rooms really made the vision a center piece. Went through a couple times and this was the fastest time/turn count I got: 

Edit: Huh it only shows the screenshot to me when I edit but imagine a screenshot that says "Game complete\n Time: 1 5 : 0 7"

This feels almost like a riff on Crypt of the Necrodancer, but without the rhythm aspect. Identifying enemy patterns and moving in a way to escape while collecting dosh. Ran into a few crashes, but otherwise had a blast. Great job!

Really big fan of the mechanic here. Kinda like a Crokinole rogue. There has gotta be a portmanteau in there somewhere like Croguinole or something, but that sounds a bit gross =P. The song really helps to bring out a good vibe for the game. I found a few secret rooms and got up nearly 1000 juice. 

Really great job learning stuff. The roguelike genre has such a depth of things to learn from, from dungeon generation, to inventory management, to enemy AI, to UI design and a ton more. Hope you had a good time with your first jam and have fun out there!

Thanks for the feedback!

There are a few small tweaks I do need to make to smooth out the experience once the jam freeze is over. Currently the orderly will investigate near where he last saw/heard you and then goes back to patrolling, which is fine except that he continues his patrols from the closest patrol point which can feel like he is camping you and leads to a lot of frustration. So in the post jam version I'm going to change him to go to the furthest patrol point.

I'm also going to up his footstep sounds a bit so he isn't so much of a ninja. I think right now his footsteps are at 4m and I think doubling it 8 or more meters will be good but I'll need add in some logic to shut off those sounds when he is on a different floor which is another minor tweak. 

Thanks! Many of the props and furniture are from the PSX asset packs, though I've done a few as well. Specifically every room, the garden gates, the door, fridge, oven, hammer, and gate key were things I made. I created all the music and voices as well. This Phlip fellow did forget to put my name in the credits though, so I need to have a talk with that person and get my lawyers on him =P.

I was really impressed by the main menu cinematic. The restrained use of color makes the bits you want the player to notice really pop. I will say that navigating the world felt difficult as the main bit feels like 75% hallways that aren't differentiated. I feel like that is probably intended, especially later with the hedge-maze section, but it can be a bit frustrating for those who can't navigate 3D spaces well. 

I actually managed to get very lucky the first time I played and didn't run into the monster at all until after having done the entire hedge-maze, cutting off the chains, and flipping the switch. It wasn't til I went to get the purple key that they made their first appearance, haha. Not saying there is anything wrong with that, just mentioning that it happened. Managed to get out the next day.

I did go back and wander around some more as well so I could see what happened when I failed the 5 days. Overall it was great!

100%. Going with the easier route is always good. You can always add in the harder AI as a different difficulty levels. I think random patrol points is good, but if you are looking to make changes later, you could have it so that unlocking the door aggros the guy no matter where he is, so you force the player to interact with the hit and hide mechanic. 

I think I succeeded? though I did brute force the code (I think?) I put in the code, chop chopped the chains and used the key to leave, so I'm gonna count that. The biggest issue I had was that items were white on white which led me to wandering around for longer than I should have trying to locate the items. Some quick textures on those should solve that issue though. Really liked the janitor. He actually kinda looks like a friend of mine so it was funny to get got by him. The red glow around him both acting as a menacing bit of design, but also as a convenient indicator for the player looking for him was a good choice. Great Job!

Managed to win by day 3! Really loved the design of the attendant, and the general vibe of the home. That computer terminal seems like it probably took a lot of work. I will say that your game is the first one this Jam that really got me with a jump scare. You know which one I'm sure. I went back and got captured by the attendant a bunch as well to see the game over screen. Really nice extra touch there.

Awesome! The atmosphere was great and the enemy was proper scary. I did manage to get through the first time without even seeing them, but went back cause I wanted to see how they worked. The FOV on the camera being extra high gives it a real surreal feel. The texture work with the eyes in the wall and the little tendrils and even just simple things like the way the bottles look all sticky is fantastic. The sound effects were very good. I really did like that brick sound effect, so visceral.

Since you were asking for an honest review I'm going to includes scores and pretend I was a judge haha!

Definitely some cool ideas here. Being totally surrounded by darkness, and absorbing darkness juice to use as a resource is very neat. Having combat with anything other than the most basic of enemies being brutal is also something that brings out the horror aspects a lot here.

For theme, you definitely got the shadows part down, but I think "absorbing shadows to transmute them into upgrades and abilities" is a bit of a stretch for alchemy. The shadows part is done well enough though that I think I would give you a 3/5

For Artistic Style I think all the backgrounds and sprites look pretty good for whats there (keeping in mind this is supposed to be a prototype of a game). I think it falls a little with some of the UI. The extra bit of line work and filigree you've added to all the boxes in the UI don't feel like they mesh with the spooky aspect of the game. Specifically the extra bit of detail around the health bar meant I didn't grok that is was a health bar until I got a health pickup. 4/5

For Cleverness I am only rating on mechanics, not on story as I didn't complete the game (we'll get to that in a second). Mechanically this is a pretty bare bones traditional roguelike/sokoban-esque deal. I got to the point where I had two abilities, place darkness and shadow strike. Place Darkness is definitely interesting and there is a lot of design space you can probably (and maybe already did). 3/5

For Playability I think there are a couple of issues. Firstly there is a lack of checkpointing. Getting killed by the big giant enemy is very easy to accidentally do. The exact tiles that will kill you aren't immediately obvious on first playthrough and there is no prompt to the player that forces them to consider what they are doing. That would be fine if it didn't make the player spend 80+ turns (I counted) going back through that first section again, picking up everything (including the secret) just to get back there. A simple checkpoint after escaping the first Hand Eye Coordination monster would prevent this, and while it would mean it would lessen the fear of death to some extent, having to repeat moves in a more puzzley game like this is extremely frustrating. This is the reason I didn't play the game to completion.

The second issue has to do with memory. Having to memorize a maze is not particularly exciting for me to have to do as a player. Implementing a fog of war that is permanently lifted would make this not be an issue. You could still have the darkness by making tiles not in line of sight very dark, but being able to see where you've been is more annoying than anything else. Playability 2/5 with the caveat that it would be very easy to fix these issues and bring that score way up.

Unsolicited Ideas Time. Playing around with fog of war is super interesting. Instead of having Darkness Juice™ just lying around, you could have exploring the fog of war directly fill the darkness meter. This would make the player more careful about moving super quickly because they wouldn't want to "waste" the darkness. If the player has collected all the darkness but have actually wasted enough of it that they can't advance, then a checkpoint could reset the fog of war in an area. If you were to implement the more permanent fog of war I mentioned, you could even have set sequences where returning to a place you've already explored is now suddenly different which would add a very spooky section. 

This is probably way more review than you wanted, but hopefully it isn't terrible. I think your game is fun with some frustrating points that could easily be ironed out. Have fun out there!

Had fun with this one, though I did run into a bug. 

If you are holding a direction when you talk to Big Doug you just keep walking in whatever direction you were holding. If you are going left this no big deal as you run into a wall, but going right you actually can walk right out of the scene uncontrollably and the game doesn't seem to recover from that. 

I found the default keybinds a little cumbersome as well. I feel like the toggle light and burst light buttons should be adjacent to each other. I accidentally recalled all my light buddies in the last room when trying to do the burst light because I flubbed my keys.

This is a tiny nitpick though on an otherwise great jam game. The art was charming (especially the ghosty-like light sprites) and the music was fun.

To play you drag and drop ingredients from the top to the chutes on the sides. I added these instructions to the description and will be sure to include them in some way once I'm able to update after the Jam.

Attention: If you are on the randomizer page for the game jam, Godot projects seem to have issues with playing from there. If it says it has a sharedBufferArray issue please go to the itch page directly. For the author I recommend putting a notice of this in the description.

Attention: If you are on the randomizer page for the game jam, Godot projects seem to have issues with playing from there. If it says it has a sharedBufferArray issue please go to the itch page directly. For the author I recommend putting a notice of this in the description.

Attention: If you are on the randomizer page for the game jam, Godot projects seem to have issues with playing from there. If it says it has a sharedBufferArray issue please go to the itch page directly. For the author I recommend putting a notice of this in the description.

You'll need the SharedArrayBuffer option turned on in the itch.io settings in order to for it to run in the browser. It will only run in chromium browsers, not firefox.

EDIT: It looks like running the game from the randomizer page makes it not work for some reason. I was able to play it after opening the game's itch.io page directly

You'll need the shared buffer array option selected in the itch options otherwise it won't run in the bowser. Let me know when its fixed so I can play!