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Super fun to play. Like others have noted, the idea with gradually playing against your past selves is incredibly dope and worth pursuing more!

Super cool! Really liked the boss fight! It's cool to see one of those SNES/GENESIS-era segmented bosses. Stage graphics are amazing, and I absolutely love how obscenely overpowered the bomb feels, lol.

Thank you so much!
Nah, I was more referencing Noriko from Gunbuster :)

Absolutely adorable art style! Story artwork is especially cool. And It's great how everything fits the theme with balloons/sharp things :)
The game plays and controls exceptionally well.

Thanks!
No, I just used SDL with SDL_Renderer this time. Although raylib is cool.

It was novel to see a game where enemies shrink instead :) Makes them that much harder to hit, obviously. Very nice "juice" feel in this game, with screen shake, visual effects blasting everywhere - good stuff. Also special thanks for including a Linux build!

I don't know if this was intentional, but I really liked how my shots were in sync with the music at the last level. I picked "Diagnosis" at the 2nd stage, and it was kinda weird playing with such slow moving projectiles. Almost felt like a reverse bullet hell. Really cool!

Very neat presentation! Sprites look very consistent and spaceship designs are dope. Would love to have a couple more stages to play though, but I know how it is with with jams.

Character designs are pretty fun. The bow enemies were somewhat annoying before I figured out you could turn camera at 90-degree increments. Bullets being spent and needing to be picked up caught me by surprise, but I guess I should've read the description first :) Overall gameplay felt somewhat akin to classic Zelda or Binding of Isaac, with isolated rectangular rooms you have to clear one by one. This could be really fun as a fully-featured game.

Hella satisfying bullet time! Probably the most satisfying since I first played Max Payne :) Only wish the field of view was a little bit wider: combined with sprite sizes and bullet run distance, most of the time I'm dodging projectiles fired off-screen and firing blindly. But other than that it's really fun!

Thank you for the feedback!
Yeah, adding inertia for movement was a very bad call, I don't know what I was thinking. Stages, enemy placement and behavior definitely needed a lot more time and thought than what I could afford.

Thank you for trying it out! Next time I'll definitely make something better.

Thank you for good suggestions!
Actual game design is a really complicated task for me for some reason, so any feedback on that front is very important to me.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it.

Thank you for the kind words!
Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to spend on level layout and enemies as much as I wanted. Probably half a day out of all 10, the rest I was struggling with making something work at all :)

Really cool game,  and I found the boss to be incredibly challenging, with the amount of HP she has!
Not being able to deflect white bullets makes this stage especially nerve-wracking, lol.
Really like kaleidoscopic background shader effect you have. UI design and music really give this game such a good vibe, it becomes kind of relaxing, despite the difficulity :)

The character controller was surprisingly nice to play with!
I actually defeated that doctor Shrink after, like 10 tries. At the end I remembered about the dash move and it made his fight much more manageable :)
Art is simplistic but cool, very reminiscent of stuff like "I wanna be the guy" and such.
I really enjoyed the game!

That was a surprisingly challenging game despite its appearance. I gotta practice some more and beat the chicken already :)
Patterns are very interesting to dodge, some of them, like the bubbles, are very hard to micro-dodge even with shrinking, died several times to those until I figured out that you had to move with the flow.
Art style is incredibly charming, and inclusion of leaderboards was a huge incentive for me to keep playing.

Hey, I reached a free state of mind while playing this game!

Thematic parallels run so deep it made me think maybe I can apply some of that in my own life. Like, when I find myself in a dark place and become very low on self esteem, I only need to find somebody else's brain and eat it to recover.

Jokes aside, it feels unique with the way you need to dodge your own projectiles, and the way the field shrinks is done in a very cool way. I enjoyed a lot playing through this!

Fantastic bullet hell game!

Your idea of theme interpretation with enemy projectiles shrinking under fire is neat, it's kinda like those flaming suns in the second stage of Gradius V lol.

The 3D transitions in the background look really cool.

I liked this a lot, feels very polished!

This is wacky in the best possible way :) Really like how the buzzsaw patterns change between tries!

Hey, I played your game from the previous shmup jam, Reverie Breaker, and enjoyed it a lot. Eden's Exalt is a bit shorter, but at the same time feels somehow more fleshed out.

The game is pure joy to play through, and soundtrack is nothing short of amazing. Great work as always!

Hey, the bullet patterns for the bosses are so nice and varied, I think the hardest one for me was the castle, I lost 3/4 of my lives thinking I could maybe find a safe spot between the lines :)

Art style and animations are top notch.

Some of the abilities you get like the 360-spread and homing rockets make me wish there were stages with regular smaller enemies between the bosses, but boss rush is cool as well.

The game plays really nice and upgrades feel rewarding. There's some really good design with abilities, and it's really amazing that characters have very distinct feel of play. You've managed to make the progression system really rewarding. Also, I didn't realize at first that rerolling gives you all three cards again, I was running with a surplus of crystals at first :)

My only issue is It may be just me, but isometric perspective makes it a bit harder to judge jump distances.

The game really does look a lot like Star Fox, which I really enjoy! I really dig the designs for the spaceships. Also, texture work is really nice, given your self-imposed limitations on resolution and polygon count. It all looks very N64-authentic.

For some reason controller mapping for movement for me was mapped to SZQD instead of WASD. A bit weird, but I quickly got used to it.

Thanks! I'd argue that your code for Zombi looks much more readable and competent than my mess of spaghetti, lol.

Beat it in 09:41!  

Really enjoyed neat details like pausing the game while showing Morgans life gauge refilled. Didn't really like Rapid Fire at first but then I noticed it disassembles Morgan like crazy. But I could only beat the Ancient Guardian with a Shotgun because it's the only way I can actually concentrate on micro-dodging and still deal some damage :)

As for the dash cursor, it would've been great if it was rendered in-game. Would make it a bit more intuitive, and my black mouse pointer won't be blending with the blackness of space as much.

I also took a peek at your source code. I found some stuff really neat, like the procedural drawing for projectiles, and the wavy background shader. And the way you do your state management and transitions with timers seems like something healthier than what I attempted with function pointers and coroutines in my project, lol.

Also, the music totally slaps. All the tracks are such bangers.

Thank you very much for playing!

Salamander/Life Force  was on top of my mind when I thought of the theme for some reason. Even if there's not much shrinking going on :)

Thank you very much for playing!

I totally agree, pacing and level design really needed a lot more work.

Hey, thanks a lot for playing!

Really sorry about the crash, I think I was doing something really dumb with concurrency because I started getting those crashes at the very end of development when I was implementing animation effects with stackful coroutines, and they're really difficult to debug.

Hey, thanks so much for playing the game! I had so much more in mind for this mechanic, but I had to scrap everything due to time constraints. I'd really want to return to it in the future and this time flesh it out a little bit more.

Tank controls do lend themselves a little bit better to fixed camera angles, I believe. I always found Silent Hill 4 more difficult to control than three previous games, for example.
Regarding absence of story in the game - I totally agree, in a better world where Scream Jam lasts two months or more, I would've crammed the game full of cutscenes and readable notes :)
Thanks for playing!

Figuring out good camera placement was indeed one of the difficult parts. I've played your submission, Left/Over, it explores some of the similar mechanics, but your implementation is so vastly different, it was kind of enlightening to see how you tackled some of the problems I struggled with.

Thank you for the feedback!

I'm glad you had fun with the game! Thank you for the feedback!

I'll look into a way of making interactable objects more visible the future version. Thanks for the feedback!

Hey, first of all I want to say that your past games were a huge source of inspiration. Some of your games actually feel and play like authentic console games of the era, and this entry is just like that. Platforming mechanics are super smooth and floaty just in the right way. The visuals are spot on.

Incredible work as usual.

Really liked the tongue-in-cheek humor in this, it's a little bit like Evil Dead movies in that regard.

Amazing work on post-processing effects, and I really like the way the lurker looks. Really unsettling. The main mechanic is really neat too - I had way more fun with the "shout to recharge" mechanic then I should have, lol.

Only got as far as level 3, but the game is legit horrifying and stress-inducing.

Really impressive how much you've managed to do! Especially the cutscenes - you pulled them off really well, I loved the camera work.
Environments are very nicely modeled and dense with detail.
There were a few camera hiccups here and there - but nothing game-breaking.
I kind of wish there was a little bit more to the stealth mechanic - as it is, I was able to just hold space and walk past all the enemies on the level. Would be cool if you would add some clutter on the floor that would make noise and alert nearby enemies - that might make the encounters a bit more tense, I believe.

Also, those scenes with 2D illustrations - super well done, and voice acting, even if a bit amateurish, still sets the right mood. Amazing work!

I really liked the whole audiovisual presentation - the voice mimicking sounds in the dialogue, the ambient noises, the door sounds. I also really liked the weird space-warping effects in some of the hallways, like the one with the candelabra in the middle - maybe they have something to do with changing elevation, but it looks surreal. Also the way levels change when you backtrack.
Being crushed in a crawlspace was legit unsettling. That scene was straight out of Junji Ito manga.
And I didn't even know you could do 3D environments like that in RPG Maker MZ.

By the way, what's with that VHS tape? I couldn't figure it out yet.