Played a couple of one shots this past month, everyone seemed hopeful to get more opportunities to play it, and two of the people I regularly play with who joined those one shots pretty much demanded I add it to the list of game pitches for future campaigns for that group, which I had zero issues doing, so there's a decent chance I'll have the opportunity to play this in a campaign format later this year.
Good luck on the physical version Kickstarter next month.
An absolutely fantastic production, which I found thanks to Curious Archive's coverage of it. I wasn't sure what I was expecting when I heard 'VN stylized as a nature documentary about an alien whale' but that description piqued my curiosity and the VN absolutely delivered more than I could have possibly hoped.
Multiple solutions to the problem of how do you do pinball without flippers (Breakout being the most fun), and it's a fairly solid implementation of the concept. Unfortunately, I've weirdly seen this concept before? Even ignoring the first decade and a half or so of Pinball existed before the innovation of flippers came along, the PS2's Flipnic's fourth world was pinball with breakout paddles rather than flippers, which dilutes it's effectiveness for the jam for me. Saying that, it's a great game, and I hope you polish this up while adding more tables after the jam.
Third level is brutally hard - could use a few more levels for a better difficulty curve, and maybe more zoomed out camera, but this is on point for the jam for me. Removes a fundamental mechanic from the genre it's in (Direct movement) and builds around that in a way that creates a really enjoyable game premise while not feeling like anything I've seen before. Love it.
Winds up being an interesting (if probably solvable - In most draws I think Player 2 can force a win if Player 1 doesn't play for stalemate and I'm not certain about the one draw me and my husband had where Player 1 won) take on the four in a row genre of abstract strategies. I've seen similar tabletop games to this, but never with a shared hand in a game with a deck.
Really enjoyable concept, and it's easy to see how it could be expanded into a full game beyond the jam with more applications. Weirdly reminiscent of Lemmings in places, and gets somewhat difficult towards the end with a smooth difficulty curve. Love how you used the theme to inform the secondary mechanic you added on some levels with the limited RAM, too. Just wish there was a fast forward button for when waiting for the file to cycle back to where I wanted it for starting the process.
