I really like the art style, and the core idea is solid for a jam game. It has lots of nice little polish elements too, like the automap. It is very nearly an extremely solid submission.
However, you built a game where the core game loop is navigating a maze while avoiding a looming monster—and then implemented the core mechanic of such a game loop, movement, poorly.
This was quite fun, and the vibes were immaculate.
The speed of movement felt right, but I think turning could be a bit faster and a minimal action queue would help keep it merely pondering rather than annoying. The combat was decent, although it was a little hard to tell when I was in range to hit with the knife. Enemies clipping through objects also made it a little hard to line up with them, and I think one of the merfolk was stabbing me while facing other directions.
Figuring out what items do is something of a core concept of the game, so that's not something I plan to just tell the player directly. As far as scope... well, next time I won't need to build all the underlying basics!
Your assumption is correct - there's a good bit of complexity in the underlying systems... which is exceptionally hard to figure out from the bare-bones UI.
A solid game with a reasonable length for a jam game. The visuals are very nice (although the delayed lights feel a little odd), and the enemy sprites & combat FX are both pretty and (mostly) clear. I did struggle a tiny bit with depth perception on the mostly-transparent enemies and with ranged attack hitboxes, but nothing terribly impactful. Exploration felt rewarded, which was nice, and while I felt lost I was, as far as I can tell, never actually lost.
It's only really possible because player choice is so limited and enemy behavior is nice and simple. I just threw together a tiny JS fiddle that tested different scenarios and tracked statistics in a loop. I think 'Swipe' suffers heavily from the fact that taking an action other than attempting escape more than once is virtually always a terrible idea - and you need to do so to get escape chance to 100%
I redid the simulations, tracking extra statistics, and it seems that there are specific circumstances where 'guard' will give you somewhat better survival rates, though you still take more damage per fight on average. 'Pray' also seems to be basically the best option if you have immediate access to the autoheal after the fight and are okay sitting at 60 hp. 'Swipe' seems useful only against low-damage enemies like the Deer Reflections and the Eyes.
My analyses were based on average damage taken, to be clear - it is possible guard is worth doing in specific circumstances if taking standard deviations into account. And you might be underestimating just how strong "just try twice" is - if the chance is 50%, 'guard' will give you a 60% chance, but trying twice is a 75% chance. Plus, you have a chance to just not take any damage, and in a game with this many encounters attrition really matters.
The stylization of this game both looks good and really contributes to its atmosphere, as do its sound effects. The enemies are suitably imposing, although I think some sort of sound cure for them draining your health might be a nice addition. The small password puzzle was a good mix of exploration, environmental awareness, and a little bit of thinking.
I like the voice acting and the graphical aesthetics. Combat is simple but serviceable, and the things-change-when-not-looking-at-them trick is a classic I enjoy. The snap movement implementation does make it a bit hard to keep rack of where you are and which direction you are facing, but it's not too bad.
Here's my (short) playthrough - the locked gate to the sword unfortunately would not open despite me having the key:
The graphics and level design are nice, and the combat mechanics work pretty well. Searching out batteries to charge is a serviceable objective, and continuing it into the boss battle works pretty well. Obviously, it's lacking a lot of polish, but it's still a very playable core experience.
Short but by no means too short-the story/humor really carries this one, alongside the art. The level design is nice (although the dark areas might be just a bit too dark) and having all the 'monsters' clearly be people in costume is quite funny. Does feel a little weird how just fleeing from everything but the final boss is basically the best strategy though, given the scenario.
A quite enjoyable experience - carefully picking where and when to dip out of the light and navigating between objectives is a solid core loop. Adding occasional physical wandering monsters and chase scenes works well, thanks to the solid movement implementation. The bits of story are enjoyable too.
It would be great if you mentioned the inventory key somewhere, though, given how important it is. I also noticed that the stability flask is only healing 10 sanity, not 15, and I think the 'Defend' options aren't quite balanced - I did some Monte Carlo combat simulations and they appear to all be strictly worse on average than just repeatedly attempting to escape.
Decent core gameplay loop. Combat feels a little stiff but is entirely serviceable, and the crafting mechanic is decent - I think even if you just add more recipes and a reminder of the button it will feel much better. The art is decent and the ambient audio builds atmosphere quite well.
The card combat system has good, enjoyable core mechanics - definitely sufficient to build a game around. It is brought down by the incredibly slow movement system and the UI bugs though.
The aesthetics are pretty, and there are some neat ideas here.
However, basically every system could do with quite a bit of polish. Fishing seems like a strictly terrible idea, given its failure rate and the fact that chopping trees actually progresses your main objective and seems to drop food more often. The combo cook options are, as far as I can tell, entirely pointless since they just give the output of cooking the ingredients on their own. Combat is kinda disjointed to the rest of the game (although it seems you are already aware of that).
Nonetheless, I did do a full playthrough which you can watch here:
This is an extremely solid game for 3 days of work. The endless ring of ships felt good to explore - the occasional window facing outward especially, because that meant that you might catch sight of something you really want way over in another sector of the map and try to figure out how to get there. The combat feels pretty good too-even with only the pistol. It transitions well from careful ammo and spacing management in the early-game to staying aware of your surroundings so an eye doesn't get the drop on you.
The aesthetics and audio are very nice too - occasionally catching sight of the giant eye staring at you through a window is quite the feeling.
This is one I will probably return to if you expand it, but for now here's my playthrough:
Was not too long and rather enjoyable. I like the combat mechanic, although it needs a little work - there's a reason why parry mechanics generally have an obvious tell just before the parry window.
Given that you're only ever fighting one enemy at a time, you can get away with not using it - but your animations need a clear 'impact' point that the player can read. In my case, most enemies did indeed have such animations - the only exception was the slime/goo creature, whose 'slowly push its hand at me' attack was very hard to visually identify when the 'impact' time was.
I think the balance of the breakable weapons needs a little bit of a tweak - if I'm giving up healing and/or a permanent armor upgrade, the temporary weapon should offer more than 2 extra points of damage. I don't feel like that would save me even a single turn in combat - and that is an important metric to keep in mind when balancing. It isn't the exact amount of damage the weapon deals that matters, but rather how many turns it will take to kill an enemy.
To be clear, though, I did enjoy the combat as-is - those are just some thoughts on how it might be polished. You can watch my full playthrough here:
This is a very solid core gameplay loop. The art is solid, and I love the puzzle-based combat system! The roguelike 'choose your path' feature was a neat addition too, even if it doesn't currently have many options.
What is here is fairly solid - the first level(s) are a decent tutorial, the art is nice, and the level design is fairly solid (I see that Door to Before!) It could definitely do with a couple more levels though, and a minimal tutorial for the checkpoints might be nice (alternatively, you could remove the need to interact with them at all and just have the player come back at the nearest one to where they died.)
Love the artstyle, the characters, the gameplay - just generally very fun. I like how even the UI is artfully stylized. The minimap is a great WoL thing too. If you add more, I shall return to play it.
I used CheatEngine to prevent Lop from gaining xp past level 4, so here's a full playthrough:
The leveling and combat feel decent, and while the grid squares are a little small that is mostly made up for by the speed of movement. The graphics are solid (although you should really be using the 'Nearest' texture filter for pixel art), and the lack of audio doesn't hurt too much. The menus feel a bit clunky - a decent chunk of the time I simply couldn't pull up the pause/item menu. Also, potions didn't seem to be doing anything?
I couldn't beat Cthulhu, but that felt about right.
The graphics and atmosphere are fairly solid, but there are a few places where you can peer into the void and some kind of graphic indicating the interaction locations of the asylum's inhabitants would significantly improve the experience. I'm also not entirely sure if I actually finished the game, but I couldn't find anything more to do, so...
A very aesthetically nice dungeon-crawling overworld for a number of well-balanced tactical combat encounters, tied together with a fun story. Everything felt quite good - about the only QoL change I might suggest would be to make the tactical menu 'sticky' & 'smart' - i.e. start at the first action you can actually take and remember the selected item so you can just spam through multiple attacks. All the pixel art was fun, and the audio was nice too.
Having half your party be the other half reflected through a mirror was a fun idea, and the weapon names were all quite amusing as well.
I don't do commentary, but you can watch my playthrough here:
I'll note that I have a fairly high-end machine as well — there are just some odd distinctions between drivers and hardware that can cause funky issues, and my system hasn't been the most stable lately so I didn't really include the crashes in my scoring.
This is a very art-first game, I think. The art style, the lose-features-with-characters mechanic, the guaranteed character losses, etc. I have to commend you on that. The music is also pretty good.
On the other hand, though, a game that becomes actively worse to play over time is, uhh...not super fun over time? It's not just challenging, but promises only a worse experience for pushing through the challenge. Just really not my cup of tea.
The game was unfortunately too unstable on my machine to finish, but what I could play seemed pretty good. The destructible-environment-based exploration was pretty fun, and the enemies worked well within that premise. The graphics were also pretty decent.
That might indeed be a good expansion to movement. I'll have to put some thought into how to integrate that with the movement queue in a way that feels good. As you noticed, I didn't manage to implement much feedback on the combat system - something to potentially improve on after the jam judging session.
Quite enjoyable. The rhythm battles worked pretty well (although I feel like the first combat song was just a smidge off-beat? It seemed like if I timed my button presses exactly to the beat they were a little late), and I really liked the second song - I can tell you put a little effort into the patterns.
The level design was quite good - coloring different sections different colors really helped with navigation, and I managed to find my way through without ever even needing a map!
I actually played through twice, because I forgot to hit the record button the first time, but here's my second playthrough for you to watch:
Could definitely use SFX and music, but everything else is very solid (especially considering that you didn't have a full preexisting engine to build upon). The art is very nice, and the only bug I encountered was purely visual (duplicated enemy death messages).
My playthrough was pretty short `cause I lucked out with finding the exit, but here it is:
Not terribly complex, but does well with what it has. The combo system is quite fun - I only really started figuring it out a good bit through my playthrough. The art is nice and just the right amount of strange. The only critique I have is that it could really use some navigation mechanic. It's pretty hard to keep track of where you are amongst the identical passageways.
I recorded my playthrough, if you would like to watch it here it is:
There's not much here, but there is the seed of an interesting core mechanic (even to someone not generally into rhythm games). Try building something more with it in the future!
You might say it barely qualifies as a game-but it does qualify! There's definitely some work to be done on the combat, but I enjoyed the actual-collision-shape system you have. It's not much, but its fun enough for what it is.
You managed to get lots of underlying systems in place here, and they serve the game well. Movement feels good, combat is nice, leveling/equipment adds depth, etc. One note I will add is that healing items and food seem to be either not available as regular loot or very rare, because I was just opening chest after chest of largely useless equipment. The environment textures really just need to be set to not use linear filtering, I think.
The minimap is incredibly helpful - nothing like knowing where you're going! The opening seeds of the story seem interesting as well.
A very quality self-contained little adventure. I enjoyed the humor, and the art/level design was very nice. It most definitely works as a teaser for future extensions.
Overall, feels like a solid minimum game - the monster art is pretty nice, although the combat and encounters are too challenging (as you are probably aware). I did manage to get to the end by spamming 'RUN' constantly, though, so there's that.
