I thought this would be a less grim counterpart to Libellus Lunae. Quite the opposite. Turns out the sun wants life and gold molten in its name and is a jealous master.
Feels so witchy. The imagery it conjures is very primal and visceral.
It's refreshing in that it doesn't focus on how the spells empower the mage, but how they bind them to the sky and make them weirder. The Lunomancer is not a moon-power exploiter. They're a servant to the moon. The hand of a powerful sky being.
I don't know if I'll ever get to play with it, but just reading it I felt very inspired.
I didn't really get it at first, but the example set it up perfectly for me. This seems very elegant and exciting. Looking forward to using this approach in future micro-RPGs.
Refreshing approach to resolution. Would have liked to see the narrative effects of each conjunction narrowed down, so choosing which to spend and which to spare would be more of a tactical choice.
Oh I didn't play yet, but I've bookmarked it to present it this weekend to a game dev community to familiarize them with the weird design moves that are being done by so many awesome designers (such as yourself)
I've actually designed tutorial levels for each enemy which we'll be implementing soon and we're working on more distinguishable visuals too. Feel free to check back in over the weekend.
I don't get what the developer wanted this game to feel like. The mechanics are well implemented and the game looks and sounds good, but there's no sense of agency, The player does nothing, other than spam z/x, and maybe turn if they can see where they teleported before they're shot. Enemies don't telegraph and there's no way to predict teleportation so luck greatly outweighs any player action.
Perhaps a bit too great for a jam game, in terms of scale. With all those resources and mechanics to keep track of... I'm curious as to what all these nice-looking systems could look like with some playtesting and balancing, maybe keeping the effect of luck in check. I ran out of bullets and ran into a few combat encounters and died of running away within 4 encounters of starting.
The sights and the sounds are absolutely on point though.
Hey, do you like grid-based puzzles that involve enemies that can detect you, with annoying boxes you can move only one way which may end up blocking your path? Then check out "He Detec!"
Jokes aside, this was brilliant and fun to play. We accidentally made cousin games. Now our fates are bound for all eternity
This is an amazing drift-racing toy that takes up the perfect amount of time each time you play with it. For me, finding the right strat to get my initial ~80% up to 95% was fun, even though I had the pedal to the metal at each incredibly wide turn so I did not improbe in terms of driving skills. This game leaves you room to grow even after the third playthrough. Kudos.
Also, from one punslinger to another, great game name. Which one came first, the idea or the design?
I designed the levels to make sure the players can grasp the basic instructions before moving on to more complex levels. We might expand the levels to add more challenging ones though, so stay tuned. Thanks for the comment.
As soon as we settled on the concept of "old-timey mystery novel detective" I thought "HARPSICHORD!", and I'm not even sure it's era appropriate. Just that its old-timey, snobby Europeanness would work in this setting. As a team, we're impressed with Kardelen's audio work as much as the audience is. There's a link to her itch page on the game page, so maybe check out her other work?
We have heard a lot of feedback when it comes to distinguishing sprites and objects and the character and we're working on it, so feel free to check back in soon. Thanks for the comment!
Thank you for the insightful comment! We haven't stopped working om the game, so feel free to check back in next week.
The resolution limit was a challenge in terms of text, so we put the instructions on the game page.
The reason we limited Sokoban retries was adding flavor to the challenge. You don't need a perfect solution to get a clue, and trying to figure the "whodunnit" part with clues of lesser "quality" is part of that zest. I'm glad it made you feel differently about approaching the puzzles, and hope you didn't find it frustrating.
But the clues, suspect info and which suspect is the killer changes each time, so playing it a few times until you figure out the puzzles is always an option. Maybe we could communicate that better going forward.
I think I have a sense with what might feel wrong. This is a precision-heavy platformer, so it's very important that (i) I can trust the info on the screen and (ii) the character completely stops moving when there's no input. At the 2nd level after the tutorial where there are singular blocks to dash over, the character slid down from the corner of a block several times. Spike hitboxes felt bigger than spikes looked, while borders of the blocks felt smaller than they looke.
I loved that there was octolateral aiming at this low resolution. I wasn't a fan of the frantic pace, the second level frustrated me very early on. I felt stuck between killing each enemy and just escaping, but either too many enemies spawn at a moment to deal with any of them and, escaping them jsut means they'll catch up exactly when you come across a whole wall of hitboxes.
The art is cool, but is this game about a zombie apocalypse that's accidentally caused by a female scientist trying to find a cure for... men existing? Why was that context necessary? Also, there's next to no reason to do anything but hold down L, shoot zombies until you're out of bullets, then hit them as they come.
So glad you've noticed the clues switching around! There's a neat little trick under the hood that I'm particularly proud of. And I'm also impressed by how Kardelen worked wonders with the audio with such limited time and references.
