itch.io

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!

I wish there were more levels! There’s a lot of potential here for interesting puzzle design, and the game felt like it was just ramping up. I understand that’s tricky in a game jam, though.

I liked the visuals as well, they’re very Monument Valley. The geometry-based puzzles remind me a bit of those games, too. One critique is that the controls are assigned a bit weirdly - W moves you forwards from the characters’ perspectives, which makes sense, but that happens to be much closer to right/left from the player’s perspective. I died several times because of this. I also found it a bit tedious swapping back and forth constantly to compare tiles, but that’s mostly just a consequence of the main mechanic.

Overall, a nice mini puzzle game. Well done!

Really awesome visuals, I love the low-poly 3D look. It’s colourful and inviting. Interesting idea with the one-button racing, too.

The controls didn’t quite work for me, though. You move very fast even without speed increases, and I never found a consistent way to get around corners without kind of fluttering the turn button, which I don’t think is the intended strategy. Bumping is frequent, and because of the way it knocks you back, it really disrupts the flow of gameplay. I know I’m probably just bad at the game, and I like (and make!) hard games, so that’s fine. However, it’d be nice if even when you fail, you at least got to still have a good time. (A bit of a longer track might help with the repetition/frustration too!)

Side note about the controls: there’s a reason most racing games let you turn both directions. If you turn too far left in this game, you have no way of correcting, and at one point I ended up bumping infinitely against a wall until I managed to do a full 360. Being unable to fine-tune my movement probably contributed to my difficulties with the gameplay. For me at least, the controls were maybe a bit too simple. I’m sure there’s a way to design around this while keeping the controls that make your game unique, though.

Overall, this is really impressive and polished work for a game jam! With some tweaking to the controls, you could have a simple and addictive racing game on your hands. (I bet this would do really well on mobile!)

I love the aesthetic of this game! The cats are adorable, the music theming is well done, the colours pop, and the computer/room environment are detailed and lively. The cat is so full of personality too!

Unfortunately, I didn’t end up getting too far - I found the gameplay really confusing. The controls page lists over a dozen buttons and button combinations, so I was already overwhelmed going in. The cat has two separate movement schemes, both of which are pretty slippery and frustrating. At the same time, I had to remember the key shortcuts to select and move platforms, which I had to stop playing and remember to do (I couldn’t seem to get that working for me fsr). Then I had to pet the cat sometimes, which required two entirely separate key combinations.

I was constantly trying to remember which CTRL key did what, whether shift or CTRL launched me forward, how the selecting system worked, etc., to the point where I wasn’t really focusing on the actual gameplay and theming. And during all this, if you fall once, you have to do the whole thing over - which is easy to do because of how slippy the player is.

There’s a cool idea in here about platforming on the MIDI blocks (I think they were making music when I stood on them, but I couldn’t pay much attention), but to make that shine, I think you have to pare down a large chunk of the mechanics. Give the cat simpler movement, make it more intuitive to move platforms, and maybe just nix the petting mechanic. Simpler is often better. (I also suggest limiting key combinations. Having to press two or three keys for every move is really confusing for the player.)

Overall, a really cute and stylish platformer! I think with some pruning, it could be a fun take on the genre.

Really fun combination of genres! The mix of card game elements into a racing game is clever. It turns a usually high-action genre into something more strategic. I also love the 3D art; it’s nice and colourful, and impressive for a jam.

I would’ve liked some more strategic elements with the cards. Maybe some deck-builder ideas? At the moment, I felt like I was being given pretty good cards every turn, so they might as well have just been buttons. Not sure on that, though! I did like using the different moves to try to out-maneuver my opponents, although this one snail seemed to have infinite dash cards… I only just beat him :/ But, another layer of strategy would make the game more replayable.

For something more tangible, the camera angles often made it hard to click on the space I wanted, and I made several wrong moves by accident. (It’s also hard to tell where the board effects are sometimes.) Another good addition would be some music to add to the race atmosphere.

Overall, this is a stylish and creative twist on a racing game. Great work!

Fun combo of a puzzle game and 3D platformer! It reminds me a lot of the Mortol games from UFO 50. I like the variety of abilities, and the fact that you have to physically go collect them adds a neat dimension.

I unfortunately think I got stuck halfway - I used the explosion to kill a bunch of wolves that fell down on me, but without them I had no way to die and spawn a jump platform to progress. In general, there were a lot of places where weird things like that could happen - the physics were glitchy, you could skip sections by jumping on the walls, you could get stuck on geometry, etc. It might be worth going the game over with a comb to tighten up these things and make a more consistent experience.

Overall, a clever little entry - nice work!

I like the off-kilter feeling of this game. The music is intense and off-putting in a good way, and the screen effects and weird, liminal vibe to the environment lend everything a vaguely ominous air, like you’re not supposed to be there. I like the effect of being thrown back through all the rooms, too.

I did feel the gameplay was a bit lacking, though. It’s pretty basic and easy combat, and the levels loop forever and never really evolve at all. I kept feeling like there was something more I was missing, because of the mysterious atmosphere, but I never found anything. I think what this game needs is something to properly engage the player - maybe some sort of mystery/secrets based gameplay to match the aesthetic.

Good work overall, especially for a solo project!

Fun to see another space-themed game! This is one of my favourite so far for sure. The gameplay is simple but refined, and you teach it well from stage to stage. The art is cool too - very textural - and the music is a real groove, especially when those trashy drums come in. (Parts of it reminded me of Portal 2’s soundtrack… I think it’s the arpeggios.)

I liked the gameplay in general. The space dragons particularly were a great puzzle-y addition - the grid of planets with two of those was my favourite by far. I thought a little too much of the challenge came from tight timing windows, though. That last level with the little orbiting planets is nothing but a series of extremely specific space bar timings. I think you could do with a few more mechanics like the dragons that provide challenge in more interesting ways.

Great work, guys! This is a game I can see working well as something longer - it felt like I’d only just finished the tutorial.

This is a really simple game, but it makes clever use of the theme. The moving barriers creating mini-loops all over the place is a nice way of getting more out of a small map, and keeping the player on their toes.

The chaotic driving is fun too, though bumping into stuff slows you down enough to really break the flow for me. I also felt like the gameplay lacked a little bit of depth. I would’ve liked some extra layer of strategy, or a more interesting map, to encourage me to try for a better score.

Nice work!

Great take on the theme, and I like the exploration angle a lot. Super cute aesthetic as well. The cat stitch is adorable!

I found the gameplay a little confusing/frustrating though. Since you use your mouse to move and also to aim, you have to aim and shoot really fast to keep from running off the table. The collision is also a bit janky, so I was often dying even though I wasn’t on the carpet. I also couldn’t get the stitch to fill in for me… the red heart worked fine, but any other colour I tried didn’t do anything.

Nice work overall!

I didn’t notice the difficulty setting - nor did I realize you don’t have to click later on. Maybe I’ll give that a try sometime.

I actually did manage to figure that out my second playthrough. I got stuck again right afterwards, though, and I couldn’t get it to work a second time :(

I’ve never played Chants of Sennaar, but it sounds like something I might like.

The presentation of this game is really good. The art is super stylish, of course, but everything around it is so creative and detailed as well. The Greek gods in chat, Sisyphus’s little flips, and just the idea of him being a streamer is hilarious.

I found the gameplay chaotic, but kind of awkward. It’s not super interesting to begin with - it’s just quick time events, really - but it was made more frustrating by the controls. Pressing arrow keys (on the right side of the keyboard) with your left hand while using a mouse is really uncomfortable. When I started having to pick out words with one hand while spamming left click with my other, it became both tedious and hurt my wrist. At the very least, I would make sure the controls are less physically strenuous, and maybe update gameplay in general to be more in-theme and engaging.

I loved everything around the gameplay, though. I think with some changes there, the Sisyphus streamer concept could make for a really neat game!

Thanks for playing! You should be able to press Alt+Enter to fullscreen the game. I’ll add a note about that to the itch page now.

I love the high level of polish, and there’s a great strategy in learning the board, then planning ahead the next loop (sell valuables to preserve their value for the taxmen, keep a few hammers and mattresses in case of travellers, etc.). I like the inventory management too, although I wish I could rearrange it myself. Since it relied entirely on auto-placement, the game often told me I couldn’t carry something when it could clealry fit with some re-jigging.

Another critique is that it’s pretty easy to get stuck. The flower drains your stamina fast, and if the game doesn’t give you enough food you’re basically screwed. I also noticed what is probably a bug - my first attempt, I made it to the taxmen without enough money or items to pay them off… and the game just never let me leave the screen. I had to restart the game. Personally, I would make failures like these something more interesting than an instant death, but if you prefer this way, at least make a proper death screen so it doesn’t feel like a softlock :)

Overall, a solid strategy game with some great theming!

Allllmost beat this… I got softlocked two times on the eye tunnel puzzle and gave up. I felt like I was close to a solution, but I don’t have the patience to play the whole thing a third time.

This is a really, really clever puzzle game. I love games about deciphering languages (if you’ve played Tunic, that game has a really fun language to decode), and tying it to in-game Sokoban mechanics is genius. When I realized you could combine bit of spells you’ve already learned, everything turned up a notch.

There’s a lot of depth to the types of spells, too. The system of making things cast by proxy opens up so many possibilities - a lot of these puzzles probably have multiple solutions. The puzzle at the end stumped me completely, though… I think I was missing some capability of that system. (Also, I feel like the looping and summoning-yourself spells were bound to cause issues. Maybe rethink those ones a bit…)

Another suggestion would be to make the full spell-book available from the start. GOing back to Tunic, that game is all about deciphering a game manual to learn mechanics and secrets… but, if you’ve played it before, you can do all that stuff from the start and skip huge swaths of the game. I think if, instead of artificially giving you spell components, this game just gave you the hint papers, it would make progression purely based on player knowledge, which I think is more interesting. (Also, it would’ve made backtracking after that softlock a lot less painful!)

Overall, one of the most creative puzzle games I’ve played in a while. Well done!

I can’t speak myself on the implementation, but I’m really glad you enjoyed! There are a lot of Stardrops in the game, so it’s okay to not get them all.

What an interesting take on the theme. And, a surprisingly good recreation of OCD.

Only two of the chores actually worked for me (the cat and the book), and the list of chores confused me a bit - I wasn’t sure if it was ordered or not. I think the effect would be better if all of the chores were technically doable, so you could actually feel like you’re fulfilling compulsions.

That said, I like how chaotic and hopeless it feels when you can’t possibly do everything the game wants you to do before running out of time. It’s a clever way of communicating the feeling of OCD through video game mechanics. When I figured out the solution was just to ignore it all and leave, it was really satisfying.

So, not much gameplay in this one, and it’s a tiny little thing. But I thought it did a great job at evoking a certain feeling. Nice work :)

I didn’t catch that, actually - I thought it was an arcade-style thing where it restarted every crime scene, so I only played a couple. Maybe I’ll give it another try sometime and try to find the ending.

The presentation of this game is awesome. The detailed 3D world & creatures, music, and polish are very impressive for a game jam. The western vibe was top notch too! I also liked the gameplay concept - it’s a little like Pokemon Snap, searching for cool creatures in the wild.

Unfortunately I found the gameplay itself really janky. I understood the lasso mechanic in concept (and I even watched your guys’ demo video to make sure) but I could only make it work one in ten tries at best. It also seemed a little buggy - the rope physics were all over the place, and every lasso I missed stayed in place forever, so I had a dozen flailing ropes stuck to my character… On top of creatures swarming around me, and failing to pick any of them up, it got a bit frustrating.

Everything else is great, though, and I bet with some tweaking (and maybe some fixes to stop it from crashing), the gameplay could shine as well. Nice work on this one!

The atmosphere in this game is really cool - the minimal greyscale environments and stark music make it all feel mysterious and dangerous. I like the ambition of randomly-generated narratives as well.

Unfortunately the gameplay didn’t quite click with me. The mysteries never seemed very interesting, and the solutions weren’t very satisfying. Oftentimes I wasn’t really sure what conclusion the game expected me to make. In general, the aesthetics of the game make me feel like a detective, but the gameplay didn’t, if that makes sense.

Super unique entry!

This is remarkably well-made for a game jam, congrats! Everything looks and plays clean, and it feels like a professional product. As someone else pointed out, the road drawing mechanics feel a lot like Mini Motorways, and the graphics & pop SFX are also reminiscent of that game.

I’m also impressed at the number of puzzles you fit into the game. I did up to Level 4, but there are loads more I haven’t done yet. Even completed puzzles have replay value, I think - I did a pair of roundabouts for that last puzzle, but the cars are really slow at merging, so I bet I could make it more efficient.

Awesome job with this one! I really got lost in the zone.

First off, great work making such a polished 3D game in a game jam!

This is a great take on the “timeloop” concept. I’ve always liked games where the main form of progression is your knowledge of the game world, rather than artificial locks and keys. (I’ve heard Outer Wilds does this, and is a timeloop just like your game - although I haven’t played it myself. Tunic is a similar knowledge-gated game that I really enjoyed.) It’s a satisfying form of progression because it really empowers the player themselves.

This is just by nature of this type of game, but I did find it a little tedious. Once you solve a puzzle and remember it, you have to do it every single time, and in this game that involved walking a long way without doing much. The parkour section at the end was pretty tricky, but because it took a while to get there after dying, it felt pretty frustrating. I’m not sure how to solve this problem in general - maybe make the puzzles quicker to complete after you solve them? One thing you could do to help, though, is shorten that clock ticking animation at the start of each run. Little timers like that add up.

Overall, this was a nice change of pace!

Note: This isn’t your fault, but the parkour section was made even more time-consuming because the death pit is broken. Instead of killing you, you fall into the void while waiting for the timer to run out, which often added another 30 seconds per death…

Oh! I thought that would kill me…

I’m impressed you managed to get random generation working in a game jam! I like the physics-based gameplay too, although the physics system you’re using is a little janky and hard to predict. The geometry of the coaster is also kind of jagged, which can fling you off in weird directions.

When the physics work, I liked using them to try to make it around the loops - although I don’t think those platforms needed to be there! The loops are the interesting part. If they’re too difficult, maybe try to make them fairer without just letting the player skip them. More segments would also help spice up the level design.

Overall, a nice tricky platformer!

I didn’t notice any horizontal air friction. So you move slow at first, but if you hold a direction for a few seconds and build up to max speed, then you’ll stay going super fast until you hold the opposite direction. That might be why people are going so fast - it’s kind of hard to stop, lol.

Managed to get it running! The looping level is pretty cool - I like how while you stay in the same space, it gets more challenging as you progress while staying familiar. It’s also fun looping back around to enemies you missed the first time.

I think the game is maybe a bit too fast. I know the challenge is to avoid the walls, which wouldn’t work if you were too slow, but you move so fast that I can’t really see anything. The enemies are tiny and are only on the screen for a split second, and the bullets are so fast that you can’t react to them. There also aren’t very many landmarks in the map to judge distance by, and the distance markers are impossible to read at such high speeds. I suggest finding a middle ground where movement is still challenging, but where the player can keep track of what’s going on.

Overall, a fun high-action entry :)