Great fun! My keyboard is a little worse for wear. 😂

Feels very polished for a 48h gamejam, excellent combo of visuals and audio!

Ahh this is definitely not intended! Thanks for the tip!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for playing! Glad you enjoyed it! :)

Woah the story is pretty deep. Must have been an interesting experience for you guys writing/making it! :) Graphics are just beautiful as others have mentioned. Some parts of the story did drag on a bit but that's probably just my impatience -- I watched the videos to see the other endings! Excellent submission overall, hard to fault, congrats.

Thank you! Yes getting level progression right is so tough without enough testers, should be easy to change after the jam though.

Very cool. I always like games with multiple endings! Some of the pixel art looked like it was at different scales? Otherwise it's very appropriate graphically for this kind of game. :) Audio immersion was good too. I also looked up spoilers to see the other endings, haha.

I enjoyed this one, simple mechanic which I understood immediately, and not too difficult that I was able to make progress. Like others have suggested, making it a bit more "juicy" would immerse the player and get them playing longer I reckon. :)

Well done on your first submission! 👍

I was not able to run with very high settings, so I also watched the gameplay video and it looks amazing. Still got to experience the atmosphere through the sound and thought it was great! Excellent use of the Kenney assets as well! Very impressive in many regards, well done. :)

I like the presentation of everything.. beginning right from the menu! Music is great  The physics seemed solid but like others have commented I was a bit lost when it came to purpose. Seems like a terrific framework to build a bigger game out of. :)

Thanks for the feedback. :) And thank you very much for sharing with our people, I know there are plenty of word puzzle loving people out there, just gotta find them haha.

It was intentional, but I didn't pay enough attention to the fact that FLAG was also possible -- I should have gone with HOVER instead of FLOAT and it would have at least forced the player to think about it rather than be frustrated that the previous solution didn't work. Yet another lesson learned. :)

Simple, well put together, fun, visually nice.. ideal gamejam game! Well done!

I think other people have covered the only issues I have too, so I'll leave it at that. :)

I'm glad I read the comments about how to use the weapons, at first it wasn't obvious and wasn't much fun. But after understanding it that terms out to be the main (for me) feature of the game!

It was satisfying get a stack of them and taking out waves of enemies almost instantly. :) But then it because monotonous and I didn't see what my next goal was. I let the enemies attack me and the crystal for a while but nothing much happened?

Great start to a game though, especially the attacking stuff. Well done!

Pretty fun game and well put together. I was enjoying progressing through but got stuck at level 3 (as I see others have too) -- I would be curious to know if it's something I just couldn't work out, or a mechanic I missed.

The glowing transition is great too, very satisfying when you know it's about to come and you've passed the level. :)

Beautiful graphics as others have said. And it's all really well put together, very polished look!

Similar to others though I found it very hard. For me it was having to control multiple things (movement, dash, and jump) all on the left hand, and still have to attack with the mouse. Since I'm not great at platformers I usually try to play movement on the right hand and attack etc. on the left and I can get by -- but in this case I was going to need the mouse to attack effectively!  😂

I think the tasks themselves were not out of my reach if the controls in my favour.. well that's what I'm telling myself anyway!

I liked the characters and audio too. Nice submission. :)

Haha I know the feeling. You end up getting so good at your own game it's very hard to judge what is actually hard!

Likewise, the GWJs have been such a fun and educational experience. I'll keep an eye out for what everyone continues to create next year. :) Good luck!

Very pretty and well put together game. Died very quickly on my first few attempts as I didn't time the attack well, but eventually got the hang if it. I kept wishing that the movement would be WASD in an absolute sense, rather than a "driving" style which it currently has.. perhaps an option for that? Impressive amount of content too and overall great submission imho! :)

Wow very impressive, I really love the visual style. I have a lot to learn from you guys! 

I found it quite hard like others, and the highly sensitive mouse didn't help. Easy to add a sensitivity setting I'm sure. :)

Amazing first GWJ, congrats!

Came back to this one and got a lot further, got to see the shop and trading mechanism more. I only stopped because of the dead ends in the mazes. This felt just to brutal to me! I was close to finishing and didn't realise the part I left was a dead end and the ghost was right on my tail! 😂 Still good fun though, I'd just removed that.

Nice puzzle game! Glad I stuck with it, after reading the game page and tutorial I thought I knew exactly what to do, but then I really had trouble seeing the gaps between the tiles on the very first level. I wonder if a lot of other people got stuck at that point and moved on. :/

Music is catchy, and puzzles are good. Just a few quality-of-life changes like making the gaps obvious at the start, and allowing all mouse control would help this game a lot imho! Great submission though. :)

This is great feedback. I wanted to have both full keyboard control, and full mouse control (particularly because it could then be a mobile game) but I just didn't have time to work out a nice way to do it, or even implement it.

Good point about the extra letter, need to find a nicer way to introduce that concept (other than a tutorial / explanation).

Thanks for playing. :)

I actually built one mega level with all the words and mechanics in it, then split it up!

Regarding level 8 - this is intended FLAG was used earlier so I used a different word this time (also 4 letters) but I think it doesn't work well because FLAG is also creatable from those letters and just confuses players. :(

Thanks heaps for playing!

Thanks for playing and passing it on to others, hopefully that enjoy it! :)

If you have suggestions how to make the learning curve nicer, or more accessible to more players I'd love to hear.

Great work getting to the end, last level is a bit of filler but I thought it was nice too. :)

Agree about the music, I never played long enough it testing to notice that it was annoying (especially the start of the song). 

Haha yeh I realised going in that words games can be quite polarising.. thanks for sticking at it to level 6 anyway!

I'm not giving up on gamedev, just not doing any gamejams for a while (did 11 wild jams this year).  Look forward to seeing what you guys create in the future too. :) Cheers.

Haha yes, they are such a similar idea and the image is quite close too. I'm thinking to put mine on godotshaders.com because I was actually surprised there wasn't something already like that there.

Enjoy your holidays and good luck with 2023 gamedev! 💪

Thanks for playing and for the feedback.

I had toyed with having two boards: One for verbs, and one for nouns, but it didn't eventuate.

Regarding multiple answers - I really like this too, I think some clever puzzles are possible where you have to perhaps use both words at different stages - just need to think of the correct setup. :)

Thanks for playing, and thanks for helping out Elidef! Hope it allowed you to play more of the levels.

Thank you! I really wanted to go the "friendly ghost" approach because I was sure there would be plenty of games which go the other way, haha.

Oh that's generous comment, thanks for playing . :)

Thanks for playing! :) I tried to get as many ghostly abilities into the puzzles but ran out of ideas, haha.

Great first GWJ entry! I enjoyed playing to the end and was quite surprised with little cutscene.

Level 5 was definitely the best, amazing how quick we forget what we just learned. Add some audio, and some more levels/mechanics and you've got a complete game. :)

Really enjoying this so far, another great entry! I have found a bug though, when playing level 2 and the ghost caught me just as we were turning a corner. Now everything has frozen.

I'll definitely come back to play further through this one. I really like the bright (and I think safe) overworld contrasting with the fast and dark levels.

Great screen transition too! :)

Impressive amount of detail in the opening imagery and story! I found the ghost/monsters which attack you genuinely creepy, but I didn't manage to progress too far though - I'm not too familiar with this genre which is probably why. Great submission in any case. :)

This was really fun.. sorry I took so long to get around to playing it!

My story was "spork" heavy for names, objects, and animals haha, but I still enjoyed the resulting story.  Some audio, and an easier way to navigate (maybe just w/a/s/d + enter to move?) would have made it even more enjoyable.

Nice work on refreshing this old genre! :)

Hey thanks for playing through to the end! I left that stuff there as a bit of teaser, you can't (as far as I know) access it. And if you did the NPC would ask you how you got here. :)

Thank you very much. :)

Thanks for playing!

I can't take credit for the art, just had to put together the excellent work from -> https://analogstudios.itch.io/

Thanks for playing and the feedback. :) Can always expand these types of games in lots of ways!

Haha you are too kind! Thanks for playing!