itch.io

I know the feeling!

Super cute artstyle! Very colourful. I also enjoyed the fusion between tile puzzler elements and a more emergent, combat aspect. It could get pretty difficult at times trying to maneuveur through all those slimes!

I think it could do with a little more depth, especially as the levels go on. I didn’t feel there was any change in difficulty or complexity from one to the next, and although it looks like a puzzle game, there’s rarely a lot of actual puzzling besides charting an efficient path (which the random enemies often screw up for you). I feel like I eventually died not because the levels got harder, but because I just got a bunch of bad enemy spawns which ate up all my reserves. Some more mechanics/enemy types, a difficulty curve throughout a run, and a stronger puzzle aspect could help make the game a bit more satisfying and skill-based.

Nice work overall! It’s a very clean and polished concept & final product.

This is a great example of a simple-to-understand puzzle mechanic that has a lot of depth to it! It really makes you think about your movement rather than just what you’re pushing around/pressing like a lot of tile-based puzzlers. Also, excellent work using the theme to inspire a unique mechanic like this! Some of the puzzles were pretty tricky, but they always had some sort of clever solution that was a fun aha moment, and they never felt bogus or boring. Great progression through the game introducing mechanics too… I agree with others that it could use more levels (it reminds me of the original Portal in that way, which I do love, but the whole game feels like a tutorial) but that’s something for the future!

This is a small complaint, and just my opinion as a musician… but (and I know this is hard during a jam, but maybe post-jam) some music would really enhance the experience. The current royalty-free music is fine, but it gets a bit repetitive and doesn’t suit the meditative puzzling all that much. I truly believe everyone can make music with a little determination :)

I also think you could maybe do a better job of teaching some of the more complicated tiles - the itch page works for a jam, but it’s always nice to teach organically in the game itself. You do a decent job teaching them through level design, and I do like that you have to discover the nuances behind things like the picking up light sources (a super clever mechanic) yourself - although some of those details felt a little harder to grasp. For example, I’m not sure I ever got a full handle on how those two-sided tiles worked, or exactly how branching paths worked for those moveable sources. Just a nitpick, but I feel like after 10 levels I should’ve had a bit better grasp on some of the more complex mechanics!

Great work overall! Tile-based puzzlers are a dime-a-dozen in game jams, so it’s a breath of fresh air to play one that does something actually unique with the format.

Glad you had some fun! Yeah, in retrospect, hack-and-slash wasn’t the right word to use, but I couldn’t think of what else to call it xD It’s definitely a more deliberate, retro-style battler like you said.

There actually is both diagonal movement and attacking! It took a long time to animate lol. Maybe it wasn’t working for you?

There’s a lot of great polish here, some cool 3D work which is always impressive in a jam! I like how high-octane it is, with the fast-paced timed gameplay, and the sleek visuals & juice (screen effects, slashes, etc.) really help with that feeling. I like the spatial aspect of the combat too.

I did find it a little bit awkward to play? The way the character jumps around with the attacks feels odd, and means my camera won’t stay still to let me draw accurately. It also gets stuck in walls a lot. The timer is also really short right from the get-go, and if you don’t kill an enemy for literally a second (easy to do if the camera doesn’t behave) the run ends immediately. I wasn’t able to get far enough to see a lot of upgrades, unfortunately. In general I agree with some other commenters that I didn’t feel I had complete control over my character. Making the movement/camera more friendly to the player would really help redirect focus onto that cool positioning/shape-drawing aspect.

Still, I love the energy in this one! Nice work!

Love the gothic theme, and the back-and-forth flow is great! The reversal of power every time day and night switch gives the game really strong pacing. It was really satisfying when the sun finally set and I could turn the tables on all those villagers >:) Also, some really great piano work in that music!

I do think you could maybe tighten up the combat a bit. The character moves pretty slow by default, which wouldn’t be an issue if I could dash more than every 8 seconds or whatever the time was. As is it felt like I was moving through molasses, unable to catch up to villagers runnign away from me or get into the shade quickly during the day. I think reducing that cooldown, and maybe upping the movement speed a bit, would help the game-feel a lot, and bring in that frenetic slasher feel I think you were going for.

With some tighter movement, though, this would be an even more satisfying fighter! Some randomly spawning items or something might help mix it up in a post-jam? Just an idea!

The upgrades system is such a brilliant addition to a rhythm game! I love how depending on your skill level, you can either make it easier for yourself or add challenges to reward skilled play.

Also, as a musician, I have to say the way those upgrades/additions affect the music is awesome. I absolutely love adaptive music - it’s a musical style only video games can do - and this is a great way to do it, affecting both the gameplay and the audio together. The song builds throughout the game too, culminating in that killer key solo at the end!

Speaking of that solo, though… I think the difficulty curve could be smoothed out. Most of the game is relatively simple - not in a bad way - but as soon as I added the solo, the game introduced two more lanes and drastically upped the complexity of the map. As a relative amateur at rhythm games, it was a little dispiriting to go from something I could reasonably sight-read to something I could barely parse. (Although I did get over 80% somehow?) I don’t mind the hard difficulty at all, but it might be nice to sprinkle it in earlier rather than backloading it. Doing that might also increase the feeling of a roguelike, because I didn’t actually find myself dying and having to go again, try different upgrades, etc. (Shame, because I didn’t get to add all the musical layers in in my run… I wanted to hear the guitar part!)

Great work overall! The music is an absolute bop :)

I love how in-depth the roguelike structure of this is! Random events, a minigame that can show up, choosing your path, it makes it feel like a much fuller experience. I also like the sense of progression you get from earning varied new creatures and upgrading your stats. Also, love the fuyn creature designs!

The actual gameplay didn’t quite click with me… I really like the idea of the shrinking platforms, knockback-focused combat, and also the idea of physically assembling your team on your platform. There’s a lot of variation between creatures that seems like it could lend to some deeper strategy. However, in the actual game it’s kind of impossible to arrange your creatures cleverly, since the platform is tiny and they all jitter against each other in a giant stack, even falling off during the setup phase. Because of this, I felt like I couldn’t strategise at all, and ended up winning by just spamming everything I had into a giant heap and watching them go. That wasn’t super satisfying, and I doubt it’s what you had in mind!

So yeah, great job making a complete-feeling roguelike like this in a jam! I just think that if you make that team-arranging, spatial aspect of the game easier to interact with, it would be more rewarding from a gameplay perspective.

Agreed with everyone that some sort of tutorial would be nice :) Those can be really hard to fit in during a jam, obviously, but just a list of rules on the itch page would be fine.

There seems like a lot of depth here, but I was only able to get fragments - like, all the creatures on both sides seem to have unique movement/attack patterns, and could both move and do “actions” (although those didn’t seem to have any effect?), and there seemed to be two separate phases, though I could do things in both? There’s a lot happening all at once, haha. I wasn’t really able to properly enjoy the game because I spent the whole time squinting at it.

That aside, the art is colourful and fun, and the vocal sound effects are really cute. And like I said, the gameplay does appear to have some interesting & strategic mechanics to it… I just don’t know how to engage with those mechanics unfortunately.

Nice work overall - would be interested to see a post-jam or even just play a version with a list of rules somewhere!

I really like the look of this game - a great watercolour-esque artstyle, an adorable player character, and some nice touches of polish. (The low-health zoom, the credits integrated into the level, etc.) It was a really clean experience and flowed well as a roguelike!

The use of the timer as both a health bar substitute and a reward for killing enemies also works well - it adds a great back-and-forth tension to combat, flipping between high and low time. It incentivises you to stay aggressive when damaged instead of running away, which makes the game more urgent.

I do think the actual combat could do with a bit more development. There’s only the one very basic enemy type (at least that I saw), so the only thing that changes from round to round is the amount of them. I didn’t feel super encouraged to keep grinding because it felt just a bit samey. I also think the attack range is maybe a little too short - you have to get right in close to hit enemies, and their attacks have no telegraphs, so you just tank damage. I think with some more depth in these gameplay areas, the strong aesthetics & structure could shine even more.

Great work!

Love the minimalist art and cozy vibes in this! It’s satisfying once you have a lot of workers tearing through the island. Very meditative.

I found the game a little bit slow, though, especially in the beginning. There’s nothing wrong with a slower game, especially for a cozy game like this, but the entirety of the gameplay is basically clicking on things and waiting… and your reward for getting further is just to not have to do that anymore. Some more interesting tasks for your peons to complete might be nice, rather than just clicking on rocks and trees really fast. Maybe some simple farming, or fishing, or building more of a town? Just enough to keep the player engaged.

Nice work!

This is a really interesting strategy game! Being able to see your opponents’ cards means the game isn’t so much about trickery or cleverness as it is a straight-forward battle of wits, which I like.

I found that with multiple enemies, it could get a bit clunky, though. Your cards can only affect certain enemies which really affects your ability to strategise, and because there aren’t all that many cards, it often just turned into a battle of attrition - which I don’t think is what you were going for. A bit more freedom with how you play, as well as variety in available moves, could make the game a lot deeper!

(Also, it’s understandable because this is a jam game, but - some music would really help for a prolonged experience like this!)

Nice work!

Thanks for sticking it through!

I’m glad the music worked out! I’m curious what game it reminded you of…

Well, if she goes into the sound design business, make sure she charges for her services… artists need to get paid!

That’s a funny coincidence! I got 3-4 pieces in place the first time and they all seemed to still be there when I got it again. Guess I was just extremely lucky?

I like the aesthetics a lot - both the virus theme, which is a really unique setting, and the retro vibes. (I don’t mean retro just because it’s pixel art… something about the graphics and gameplay feel old-school to me.) I like the variety of weapons too1

I do think some more depth is needed to make the game hold the player’s attention for longer. Some different stage layouts would be nice, maybe, or some more enemy types. Right now they’re all the same basic fodder enemy, and because of that there isn’t a huge difference between weapons in terms of how hard the game actually is. The ranged ones are best because they drain your health up close, but it doesn’t matetr which you pick really. (If there are harder enemies, I guess I didn’t get that far.)

Overall, a fun little experience!

This is a really cute & fun little game! I love the framing of it - having to make money for taxes is a natural way to add some stakes and encourage good picture-taking. (Plus, it comes with an excellent cutscene.) The hand-drawn graphics are nice, as is the silly music!

The gameplay is also cool. From the description, I thought it would be one single gameplay loop, but it ended up being a bunch of little scenarios that are all totally different. The variety of playstyles and super-short length per level reminds me a lot of WarioWare. All of them were goofy in a fun way too - that goat kept running away with the money! - and I liked how intelligently they were scored, with superpositions and the like.

Some of the games seemed hard to do within the time limit (specifically that Where’s Waldo-style one), but you get better at them with time - and some like the puzzle even keep your progress between attempts, which is nice. The game could definitely do with a few more minigames, since there aren’t many right now, but that’s understandable during a jam. If I were you, I would definitely expand this post-jam! I could see it working well on mobile as well as PC.

By the way, shoutouts to Élise! Great use of foley for the SFX. And some fun voice acting :)

Managed to get a score of 575! Probably could have gone further but I started spacing out and lost focus… The two-arrow cards are the thing that catch me, because it’s easy to misread them, and also easy to accidentally press an extra arrow and flub the subsequent card.

The gameplay is really simple, and there’s not enough depth to really encourage me to play again. But for what it is it’s done well, with some clean & stylish graphics and some pretty slick lo-fi tunes! It can be satisfying when you get into that flow state. I had fun for what playtime I could get out of it.

I’m not sure how much room there is for expansion here, but some more interesting/involved cards that get introduced further into a run might help spice things up. Right now there isn’t really a difficulty progression within any given run, and since the gameplay is repetitive and not all that taxing, you basically only die when you lose concentration… like I did.

Very polished though, and I like the minimalism in general. Nice work!

Glad you enjoyed the music :) The player is a bit slow right now… dashing a lot (shift/right trigger) might help speed you up a bit.

Really cute and abstract little game! I like your use of physics - it allows for both a puzzle-y element and some frantic energy. The randomly selected drops kind of reminds me of Tetris, and just like Tetris poor decisions can screw you over later on. You have to manage the board carefully. I liked the strategy involved with the different shapes, too: both the materials and the spheres vs. cubes. Also, cats!

I found myself losing really quickly for some reason. The physics of the game just seemed to respond really slowly? Once the platform started leaning one way, and the cats all flooded that direction, I simply couldn’t get it to tilt back in time even with triple the blocks stacked on the other side. The green and yellow shapes also disappear quick and don’t have a strong enough effect to do very much good (same with spheres which roll off very quick). I just felt like all my actions were weak, and the cats are so slippery I can’t deal with them fast enough. Maybe I’m just playing it wrong, though, I don’t know exactly how your physics system works!

Great job! This is a super original experience. (By the way, thanks for the disclaimer. I was concerned the cats were really exploding…)

Really great use of the theme! Countdowns are central to the gameplay in an interesting way. It’s a space management game where you also have to consider time as a dimension (eg. not only where is this ship now, but where will it be when this bomb detonates in 10 seconds), which is super cool. Making the bombs unmoveable after being placed made it very deliberate.

The game got pretty overwhelming pretty quickly, though, which meant instead of strategising I mostly just panicked. There are way too many ships & bombs to play the game as intended, I think. Another issue is that ships can enter the screen out of nowhere, meaning even if you place a bomb in a 100% safe spot, a ship could just spawn there and kill you by no fault of your own. An indicator + timer of where ships will appear would be really helpful.

(By the way, just have to add somewhere - love the slide guitar in the soundtrack. Super summery.)

Great work overall!

I like the hand-drawn look a lot, and the rock music was a lot of fun (and something you don’t often see in a game jam!). The mapping was interesting too - I could tell you were trying to emulate four different musicians playing, rather than all one instrument, which made for some different rhythms than you often see in a game like this. (Although, halfway through all but one instrument dropped out lol)

I think the biggest issue is the controls. Usually games like this lay out the keys so they’re in a row matching their order in-game, and so that you can split the buttons between your two hands (look at something like Beatmania). Using the arrow keys both means that the buttons don’t line up with the tracks in-game, and also that you have to contort just one hand to press them all, which is very difficult. When all four tracks start playing completely different rhythms, I’m not even confident it would be possible with these controls - it’d be a hard map even normally! As is, it felt like getting tongue-tied in video game form, and I bounced off it pretty quick.

With some better controls, though, I think this could be a really charming little rhythm game! Making it about a band with characters could really add some life to the genre. I’d love to see what it’s like after you add the features you mentioned on your itch page, like story segments between songs and a more robust scoring system.

There was a cool moment halfway through when I looked up and saw what I thought was the sun was actually getting closer! It reminded me of the moon in Majora’s Mask.

Overall I was generally pretty confused by pretty much everything. The goal of the game isn’t really clear, and even after figuring out I had to collect those weird looking grey shapes from the houses, I don’t know why I was doing that. If there was some more interesting stuff you were trying to do before the meteor hits, it might be more engaging. Some direction for what the player is supposed to do would also really help - right now you’re going in blind. (Also, side note - the camera is super high sensitivity and made me feel a bit nauseous. Might be worth lowering that a bit!)

By the way - why is the cover image that?

Agreed that the character controls well! I really like thid approach to a platformer - it’s a little puzzly. You have a lot of very powerful abilities that should make the levels easy, but because you have to ration them the difficulty comes back in. I also like the way the different buttons can combine to create unique abilities.

Only thing is, I found it a bit unwieldy at times using so many buttons, especially pairs like B and X which are not very easy to press together. I often found myself mistakenly pressing the wrong button pair, or pressing them in the wrong order, and rocketing myself into spikes or something. A simplification of the control scheme (and maybe reducing the amount of -10 secs spikes…) might help refocus the game onto the puzzle aspect, which I think is the strongest part.

Nice work overall! Loved the storybook intro too.

Loving the colours in the art - the neon on top of the space BG is giving me Celeste Farewell vibes, if you’ve played that. The whole game has a great atmosphere for a classic arcade kind of experience!

I found myself wanting a bit more from the gameplay, though. The asteroid belts are a good start, but they never feel very difficult to dodge, meaning dooing it for 10 minutes gets a little dull. Plus, the socring seemed to rely on bullets shot randomly out from my player, so I didn’t have any control over how I actually did in the game. I think you need another layer or two of challenge/player agency to keep the game engaging.

Good work overall!

I really love the hand-drawn look of this, it’s super colourful and charming! I also found the way you build creatures in this interesting - the objects are all stretchy and physics-y, and it’s cool that when you attach them together they become one big object. It could be a little annoying trying to get the objects the right way round (especially because some are very tiny!) but it felt very much like buiilding underwater, which I liked.

It really needs some sort of game aspect, though. I know you said the timed aspect didn’t pan out, which is fair given how finicky some of the pieces can be… but this is still calling for some sort of puzzle element telling you what creatures to build. There’s not enough direction right now to keep me engaged very long. (Also, another note - the UI said I had almost 200 pieces available, but I didn’t see nearly that many. Did I have a DPI issue or something?)

Nice work!

What a charming and beautiful game. The stage-prop style art is colourful and cozy, the music is great - a well-made, hopeful combination of electronic & orchestral sounds - and by the end I felt like my little paper plane had personality, even though it’s just paper… I was cheering for it when it made it out the window!

The mechanics are fun too. Drawing in order to move is creative & a great fit for the calming, scrapbook-y style. The paper plane also moves very realistically, so my knowledge of those from the real world helped me play. I have a feeling some people might be frustrated by the way obstacles pop up at you, but I didn’t mind it… the game is pretty short, and having to learn the level and plot a course through it was fun. The stage props popping in and out fit the theming very well too. I wasn’t 100% sure why I was drawing loops in particular - did the plane aim towards the center of the loop, perhaps? - but it seems to work fine, because the controls never frustrated me.

Great work, guys! This is a simple entry for sure, but the gameplay and aesthetics work together to create a charming and, somehow, moving little game. I had a really fun time.

(Note: As I said, I liked the music a lot, but since the game is pretty tricky, I took too long and the song finished playing. It felt kind of sad being without it, so I ended up reloading the page to hear it again. I would set the music to loop, so the player gets to enjoy it the whole time, even if they’re bad at the game…)

Glad you enjoyed! The baby Stardrops were inspired by Celeste’s strawberries, where you have to bring them back to a safe place to collect them.

This is a really cool setting/theming for a game. The backstage crew is really the most interesting part of a production, so a puzzle game involving that has a lot of potential. I like all the charm you’ve added, too - the actors’ personalities, commenting on the dodgy script, etc. It’s very fun. I like the music a lot, too - great medieval vibes, and the way the character cue instruments integrate into it is awesome.

I think the gameplay itself could be improved. The puzzles are never all that complex, and often boil down to the game telling you exactly what to do, or just kind of guessing. This isn’t the end of the world, since the game is mostly about the story and setting… but if you get something wrong, the game makes you do the entire thing again, which really takes me out of the immersion. (There’s also a bug of some kind where if you do everything too fast, the game gets confused and stops showing you the instructions… so you can’t even speed through it after a failure.) I would suggest making the puzzles a little more engaging - there’s a lot of material in this backstage crew setting - but if you’d prefer to keep it simple, at least don’t punish the player so much for turning on the wrong light one time.

Nice work overall, a very cozy entry!

Ludum Dare has “Mood” as one of its voting categories… I wish GMTK did, too, because the existing categories aren’t great at rating that aspect. The atmosphere in this game is very impressive. The combination of the colour choices for the city and that really evocative piano gives a hard-to-describe feeling. A little sad… a little foreboding … but a little hopeful, too.

The gameplay didn’t quite work for me, though. I quite like what you’re going for, particularly the use of loops in combat, but I had trouble controlling them. The dashes are fairly long and straight, so they’re hard to connect into a loop, especially a small one. Gravity is also high, and the dash trails don’t last long at all, so actually creating a loop where you want requires some pretty quick reflexes and doesn’t feel all that natural. Especially when the game wanted me to fight enemies, I simply couldn’t make accurate loops fast enough, and I kept dying over and over. (I ended up stopping when one death caused the game to freeze up for some reason.) A different control scheme could make the difference here - maybe dashes are not the best way to go about this. It needs a smoother form of control - maybe you draw the loops or something?

The atmosphere is great, though, and I like the mechanics in theory. Good work overall!

Note: I was going to play this on controller, but even after some experimenting, it wouldn’t work for me. On the web build, even with a controller paired, the mouse cursor is still active and you always dash towards it. Make sure that you’re detecting the type of player input and adjusting the controls accordingly.

This is a really creative entry! There are a lot of rhythm-based puzzlers this jam, but yours stands out a lot in terms of mechanics. The amount of player agency in how to construct rhythms and solve puzzles is cool, and as a musician myself, I love how you actually get to create music in the process. (The music is great, by the way, and an excellent example of adaptive sound in a game.) The sort of surreal, minimalist visuals and sound create an excellent atmosphere around the puzzles, as well.

I agree with your sentiment re: tutorials - too many games dampen the sense of discovery by front-loading controls and explanations. However, I think you could have taught the mechanics better in the level design early on. It took me a few minutes before I figured out I was supposed to copy another pillar, and several puzzles after that to realize I got to choose my own rhythms at all. The puzzles became really interesting from there, but I wish I had gotten to experience that fun from the very start. That doesn’t mean a “tutorial”, of course - clever level design and visual telegraphing can often do a much better job - but with a complicated mechanic like those rhythm towers, you want to make sure the player gets it as quick as possible, so they can enjoy the puzzles!

(Side note - I believe movement was locked to 16th notes, which makes sense. I was having about a 16th of input lag, though, which meant it was hard to get into the rhythmic flow. That could just be my computer, but it’s something to keep in mind.)

Overall, one of the most unique games I’ve played this jam by far. You’ve found some unexplored ground here, I think. Well done!

This is a surprisingly precise platformer! It’s all about careful timing and aiming. There’s also a nice puzzle element to it - when you take away the ability to jump, it means you’re constantly looking for different ways to gain height. The sound design was another highlight for me; the SFX all fit well and sound great. I liked the music too, but I took too long on one level and it stopped looping for me…

On the gameplay side, I wish the game was a little less slippery in general, particularly in the air. You don’t have a lot of air friction, and you fall fast, so you have limited ability to correct yourself mid-air. This is a problem when the game is all about precise mid-air movement. I suggest slowing down gravity a bit and making you able to turn quicker in the air, in order to match the precise level design. (Side note - I also suggest fine-tuning those enemies… they launch you at different speeds/directions based on where you hit them, and with sprites that small which you’re aiming for across a screen-loop, it felt kind of random.)

Nice work, I had a lot of fun!

I really like the variety and colour of the track, and the looping mechanic is really creative. It’s a neat way of creating obstacles and seeing your past performances, but I particularly liked that they could bump into each other. It got really crazy right at the beginning of the track, where a dozen cars were crashing into each other and exploding… I just hung back for a few seconds before starting, lol.

I found the controls pretty unwieldy. You turn really sharply, to the point that if you do anything but tap lightly you will hit a wall for sure. I saw that there’s a drifting mechanic in the game, but I can’t imagine how that could possibly be useful when the turning is already so sharp. I also think the speed cap for crashing on contact with walls is maybe a little low - in general it’s slightly too easy to spin out of clip a wall and explode. (On a similar note, the collision is kind of janky, and a few times I got flung into the air for no clear reason.) It got a little frustrating, especially because dying actually makes the game harder because of the copies.

Nice work overall!

That reset button will help a lot I think, thanks. I may give this another play post-jam once the kinks are ironed out.

While you’re fixing bugs, another one I noticed was that the tutorial prompts are sometimes a little off. The “pick up tools” one won’t go away if you pick them up before it appears (you can fix this by setting them down and picking them up again), and the altar sacrifice prompt just never went away. Might be worth a failsafe in case the game somehow skips the trigger to progress those.

Alright, I made it to a million points and gave up, because I think it was going to go for a while, haha.

I really like the art and music in this, especially that gorgeous title screen. The alien theming is neat as well. You’ve got a great take on the “loop” theme - the gameplay and challenge is built around the concept of a loop, so you really have to engage with the theme to do well.

I think maybe the game is too easy? The hazards are slow and non-threatening, and unless you’re really sloppy at platforming, the planet tends to grow evenly without too many hazards. Later on I did start getting tall pillars that echoed the places I jumped a lot, but I just kept building them up. Once in a while I would fall down into a pit, but it’s pretty quick to climb back out - and actually overhangs can be useful for avoiding the hazards, lol. I eventually quit because I think the only way I would die is losing focus. The game could really do with some more hazards to make your planet’s shape matter more, and maybe some more evolution as the game goes on. I would’ve played for longer if some new hazards or mechanics started showing up, or if my bumpy planet began to be a real challenge!

Overall, this is a really concise and focused take on the theme (and another space game, which is fun to see!). Great work!

I absolutely love the concept of this game - I’ve played several music-based block puzzles this jam, but yours is the first one that makes the player actually engage with the music itself. As a musician myself, it’s really to have actual musical gameplay in a jam game.

I had a lot of trouble with the gameplay itself, though. I often felt like I was guessing at the parts of the song I couldn’t hear - since all the songs changed drastically from measure to measure, I had no pattern to go off of, and no reason to expect a big drop on measure 2 when I only heard #4, for example. I’m sure the idea is that you’re able to piece that together with a combination of knowing what sections go in the given measure + block puzzling, but I’m not great at puzzles like this in general, and it felt like despite enjoying the music part of it, the blocks part was getting in the way. I kept thinking, I’ve solved the music already… but the game won’t let me move on because I’m rotating the blocks wrong or something. It doesn’t help that when you get something wrong on a measure you’ve never heard, the game just throws up a red X with no further info.

(Side note - I still don’t really know how the rotating blocks work. I thought maybe each quadrant stayed the same, and they would play along with whichever ones they were stacked atop, but at least one seemed to change beat completely on rotation. That didn’t help with the guesswork thing. I also did find it a bit tedious having to listen through the 10-second loops over and over to hear the part at the end I wanted - a scrub feature of some kind might be nice.)

In general, I adore the idea of a music-based puzzler like this. I think it could just be a little more player-friendly - although I’m sure some of my difficulties were just due to me being solid at music but terrible at block puzzles :D

I think the amount of levels was great for a jam, actually! It was long enough to be engaging without getting tedious.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an RPG Maker game in a game jam before… That distinctive style makes this stand out a lot. I also was expecting a lot more timeloop mysteries in this jam, but yours was the first I played, so I enjoyed it! I like the large cast of interesting characters, and the variety of cars. the train felt full of life and fun to explore.

My main critique is I thought the mystery/puzzles themselves were a little flat. The appeal of a train mystery is usually that you’re trapped in a small space with a bunch of people, so you know all the narrative players and have to figure out what each of them know. It ups the tension because you know that someone you’ve met on this train is the culprit/is hiding something, and you’re all stuck together trying to figure it out.

In this game, the solution to the mystery was just that there’s a demon, which isn’t all that satisfying. Plus, some guy just told me that flat out. I didn’t get to figure out anything myself, and no one on the train had any interesting information to deduce. I also thought the puzzles themselves involved a bit of busywork - take item A here, get item B there, etc. That kind of basic adventure game-style puzzle would be fine if the mystery itself were more engaging, but I would suggest integrating some mechanics directly related to deduction as well.

Side note - the looping mechanic was a fun tie-in to the plot, but I wish it did more gameplay wise. As-is, it was kind of just a nuisance which teleported me to the start every five minutes. Most characters didn’t even reset their dialogue. I bet there are ways you could use the ability to loop to give the detectives unique opportunities to gain information. (Just as one suggestion, maybe certain characters follow the same patterns each loop… so you can apply your knowledge from previous loops to figure out what they’re up to.)

Overall - this was a really charming time! Good work!

This is a fun bite-sized puzzler! There’s always a few of these tile-based puzzle games per jam, and I’m always a fan as long as they’re designed well. You did a good job taking a very simple mechanic (even when you added things, like boxes or walk-through tiles, they were still simple) and exploring it fully. Each level upped the difficulty a little bit, and by the end I no longer felt like I was trying random directions like at the start. That means the game teaches the player well!

If this were to be a longer game, I think you probably would need some extra mechanics and graphics to keep it fresh. As-is, though, it works as a small project. My biggest critique is that I would really appreciate an undo button. It would make it easier to try out different moves, especially in the larger levels - and you wouldn’t have to store all that much in a game like this.

Overall, nice work!

I’ve only played a couple days, but I’m really enjoying this game! I would play more, but it’s much too long to do in one sitting, and there’s no save function. This seems like something that really needs that to be playable beyond the first little bit. The Cthulhu theming is hilarious and super creative, and the game world is gorgeous and brimming with personality. I appreciate the depth behind all the different mechanics and upgrades, as well.

I found that there was a lot of busywork in the gameplay. The lasso makes you wait ages for it to retract until you can use it again, and running all the way to the sheep across the field became tiring, especially because I could only hold 1 wool at a time. (Side note - I was only able to shear sheep when they weren’t in my pen. Judging by the game’s design, his feels like a bug?) In general, the game involves a lot of back-and-forth that becomes tedious. It’s possible some of this gets automated later on, or alleviated with some of the fun machines you build, but I didn’t get that far, so it was mostly slow lassoing and slow wool-carrying.

You’ve done a great job creating a fun game - the world is colourful and inviting, full of little things to poke at. With a saving feature, and a bit of that tedium in the gameplay ironed out, this could be a great cozy game to wind down with once in a while. Nice work!