itch.io

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.

Really good modeling work, looks really good, and the corridor loops nicely!
As others have stated, the camera shake is a bit over-exaggerated. Also some of the screenshots on the page look hilarious, especially the one with the dude sitting on a barrel. I don't know if it's intentional, but it's funny :)

Yes, that's exactly what happened on my first run. I mean, the screen blacked out and I went back to the beginning.

Thank you for playing! I'm glad if the game gives off impressions of the older survival horror titles - they were obviously the main source of inspiration.

It was very hard to walk past the dude that's standing on the wall. But overall this game definitely gave me the creeps. 

Thank you for the tips on use action delay and visibility of interactable objects. I'll definitely take a note.
And thank you for playing!

Thank you for playing! I'll have to resolve camera-related issues post-jam, there's a lot of them.

This game has some striking visuals, very effective and even tasteful jumpscares, and at the same time some of the most unhinged shitposting I've seen.
Absolutely remarkable.

Hey, albeit short, this game feels very polished thanks to very nice UI design and some really nice voice acting.
One minor gripe for me was the overly extensive use of depth of field - it's really hard to see anything in the distance, and particles from the torch really obstruct the view sometimes.
Another thing - Synty assets look amazing, they're super cool to use in a jam and help to save lots of time. But I would've been glad to see you use them in your own way, without using a pre-assembled piece of map that comes with the assets as a demo. I believe the example map is mainly there to show you, as a developer, how to apply these assets, and make something your own with it.
But still, this is a very ambitious project and I had fun playing your game!

Unfortunately not as polished as it should be - there's a ton of issues with the camera, and I had to scrap, like, almost all secondary gameplay features I had planned because I overscoped with the scale of the environment. But I'm glad you enjoyed the game as it is!
Thank you for playing!

Yes! Somebody actually likes tank controls too!
Thank you so much for playing!

Camera trigger issues are certainly something I should've taken care of when doing bugfixing.

Right now it so happens that if two camera triggers are close by, the player can enter area B while still being in area A, then leave area B. This way, the OnEnter event for area A doesn't fire up, and the camera stays active for the second trigger, and you lose track of your character.
And the fix is somewhat simple - I only needed to add an additional event for when player leaves the trigger area.
That's probably the first thing I'll fix when jam ends.
Thank you so much for playing and for leaving feedback!

I'm thoroughly impressed with this title. It really feels like you've managed to create a true branching narrative with meaningful role-playing elements that actually affect what's happening. That's not something common, and I'm sure it took some serious planning to make.
I've played through twice, and both times reached a different outcome. First time I blacked out when climbing the hill and the game ended - I assume this was a game over? And the second time I reached the clearing on top and was shot (at least I believe that's what happened?), with parasite leaving the body. I assume there are more possible outcomes?
Anyway, it's great. Really impressed.

Sorry about the loud sfx!
The map layout might be a little confusing, especially with chosen camera angles. Basically, you need to enter this large hall:

and proceed to its far end, where there's two ladders on each side leading to the second floor. Don't ascend the ladders, proceed further to the end of the hall, there would be a room and a music cue would play. From there on you should be able to proceed further.

Hope this helps, and thank you for such positive feedback!

I will be sure to play The Sands of Betrayal.

Hey what the hell - there's like, a chicken with a knife? And it's not even a live chicken, but a frozen chicken?

I loved every second of this. I can absolutely see the inspiration by David Lynch here, your game hits some of the notes - the heavy industrial visuals, the subtlety in conveying the meaning. Amazing work.

It's fixed in 4.5, but not for the web builds, unfortunately. Web builds suffer from shader stutters the most.

This is indeed a really interesting concept. Trying to hide from something in a bathroom stall is the stuff of nightmares, and you've executed this really well. Creature design is really unsettling.
I figured out how to short out the hand drier, and then I moved to the air duct near the leftmost stall, used it, and after that the game closed. Is this the end of the game?

Yeah, I tried to at least have it play similar to PS1 survival horror classics. I'm glad if I was able to achieve some of that feel.
Thank you for playing!