itch.io

That was super satisfying.

I love the concept here.  I'll say that the connections seemed tenuous in many cases.  A compass has four primary directions, but the image is indicating "northeast" in particular.  "eye" is 2 because humans have two eyes, but "heart" is 4 even though humans only have one heart.  A spade by itself doesn't really indicate the ace of spades, just...a spade.  ("E is 3 in leetspeak" is particularly vague!  It's also the fifth letter!  Or...a lot of other things.

(One thing that was particularly unclear is that each symbol represents a number itself, rather than the set of symbols representing a set of numbers--for this set, count the sides; for this set, count something else; etc.)

...oh.  *Oh*.  When it said "House of Knox" I assumed it was, well, *his*.  It didn't occur to me to try to put anyone else into it.  (Might just be me.)

Is there a solvent for the glue, BTW?  While I was still understanding what the glue brush did, I accidentally glued down one of the gnomes.  And one of the homes.  If I hadn't planned properly, I would have locked myself out of winning because he couldn't be moved to the house and vice versa.

Yeah, same problem here.  I solved 7, and then pushed sheep 7 into one of the black dots, and then went into 8 and then 9; now, "reset" takes me to the point before I went into 8, i.e. with sheep 7 and the leftmost black dot already missing.

So I'm enjoying it, I admit, but also I'm at a point where I have...twelve gnomes, all but two of them satisfied (I'm missing a computer and a gaming console), but also only four houses.  I can't figure out if there's something I'm supposed to do to specifically get a house to grow; they just seemed to show up early on.  At this point it's just rocks and food and slot machines and nothing new is showing up, really...

EDIT: ok, 12/12, I didn't realize you could plant that, but still only four houses.  How do you grow houses?

<3

I'll grant that it's a very interesting concept.  Having "died" in the middle of the second page, I'll offer a few thoughts--

• Once you've found the words in the letter, or you've clearly missed everything because what's left is just "but" and "was" and "that", it would be nice to be able to fast-forward through everything else fading away.
• While the concept is solid, it's frustrating to be able to "lose" a puzzle game--a game shouldn't be trivial, but also having had the game end on the second page, I'm not feeling excited about having to go through it all again.
• It's kind of a guessing game.  A lot of things that looked like they ought to be important words, like people's names, or "angry", weren't.  The life system is a good way to keep people from just clicking everything as fast as possible, but it also discourages experimenting (and because there's also a timer, there's an impossible balance between "I don't want to click a wrong word" and "I don't have time to read all the words and think about which ones are important").

I get the mechanic, but I feel like there should be a mechanism other than "losing and running out of life".

Masters' programs are hard.  Take a break. :-)

None of that is particularly "drop everything and fix"; just figured I'd throw out a few thoughts, in case they help.  Good luck! 

Feels like it could use a better map than the very vague one it has.

The other thing that kept tripping me up is a problem very common among metroidvanias and other platformers: it's sometimes difficult to distinguish interactable features from the background.  At the start, I almost gave up because I went down the ramp and to the right was a bright vertical pillar that I took to be a wall, so I turned around and went back...  Crates are obstacles; nets are climbable; seaweed is scenery; but there's nothing to really set them apart.  (Probably limited by the color palette, since you don't have a lot of room to make things "brighter" or "dimmer".  Just something to think about.)

What are my takes on this.  Let's see.

As someone who does a lot of word puzzles, and has for decades, I found the daily puzzle and the first couple of levels pretty basic.  A lot of words like "ARO_ND" where there was only one option; a handful where there was more than one and it just needed to wait to see what letters got eliminated.

I didn't keep playing after the first two; I was curious to see what harder levels looked like, but not curious enough to play through potentially a lot o easy levels.

The main problem I noticed was that a given letter and a filled-in letter looked identical, so when I did have to go back and change something (I'd mistyped the "U" in the above word for an "O", as it happens), it was hard to see which letters I'd added and thus which ones I could change or remove.

Basically, you need the key and you're not getting it where it is.  It's going to take some pushing.  (See original comment for a spoiler on what I think isn't the most obvious mechanic anyway.)

All right, glad I came back to this. :-)  There's a lot of cleverness in it.  I still don't love the guess-the-spell-name mechanic (I'd be fine if it just told me that the spell I found was called "levitate" rather than making me go through a few hint presses), but since it's not much of an obstacle, it's easy enough to focus on the very good parts.

yeah, I know you're the dev.  My opening question was a snarky way to point out that commenting "what a gr8 game!" on your own game isn't a great look.

I don't know what to tell you about tapping not working; a screenshot won't show much, since the whole point is that nothing is happening.  (I mouse over a card and it moves a little, but clicking it does nothing, and when I mouse away the card moves back to its position.)

As for the other, here's what the game looks like when I start:The text below it, by the way, is legible to me; the text in the UI is too small, or too dark-on-dark, or both, for me to make out.

Anyway, here's how it looks six moves later:

Text below hasn't changed, but the cards and rows just keep zooming in.  It stops around move 10, but of course by that point everything's overlapping and the third row has moved off the bottom of the screen.

Do you know the author or something?

The game is too small to see.  Until I start playing cards, at which point the board gets larger with each move until it's too large to play.  The rules are wrong (it says to tap things, when in fact you have to drag them) and are too long to really make sense of.  Game elements overlap so it's impossible to see anything.

Conceptually good, but there are some visual improvements it could use, namely a much clearer distinction between floor and wall, and a clearer distinction between pushable souls and target souls.  (When I squint, it looks like maybe the target ones are a little dimmer?)

Anyone talking about how level 7 is just too hard is welcome to join me over here on level 3 and tell me what I'm missing. <sigh>

Ah!  That makes sense.  Though...it's also telling me I'm stuck the moment I move through it.  Maybe it would be better to have a button that says "you're stuck! [undo]" so that the player can see what's happening?

I like the concept here--but I can't tell why he keeps saying he's stuck.  I don't know if the rules aren't clear to me, or if the game is overenthusiastic about deciding that I can't continue from my current position?

I'm not a fan of horror in general, but man, the richness of the story and the family connections that you've put into this outweigh any aversion I might have.  (I'm not surprised by this!  I was blown away by the demo for Funeral for the Sun.  Already wishlisted and greatly anticipated.)

(V qba'g guvax jr svaq bhg ubj?)

oooh, wait, I got this one!  Tvira gung uvf fcvevg vf fheebhaqrq ol svfu, naq tvira gur ubzr ivqrb cynlvat ba gur GI jurer ur'f fjvzzvat jvgu uvf fvfgre naq gura uvf byqre oebgure qvfgenpgf gurve sngure jvgu oveqjngpuvat, ur irel yvxryl qebjarq gung qnl.

In rot13: gur pebffrf pna or zber guna guerr-ol-guerr, ng juvpu cbvag lbh arrq na bireurnq ivrj gb frr jurer nyy gur lryybj sybjref ner.

Which is to say that it does get more interesting, but very much in a "draw a map" way.  If you're not looking to map out a 3D space, then no, it won't get any more interesting. :-)

I love what's going on here but boy does #8 have me stymied.

Oh, certainly the hint method lets you work around it, but it's a basic flaw in a puzzle if the only way to get the answer is to ask for hints (or, in this case, to more or less literally spell out the answer).

OK I'm also having trouble with "Tiling the Floor", since it tells me to take a quarter of the area of the diamond-shaped regions, and I have diamond shaped regions with a total area of 18.  (I don't think I'm supposed to put "4.5" in the sudoku grid?)

I'm more than a little confused by the Kitchen Counter.  The extraction says to "The number that the finished grid shows - the number of Briquets used in the puzzle", but...I'm not really seeing a number in here?  (Note too that the upper left is underdetermined: several more rectangles can be put in the spaces that don't have numbers next to them.)

Is it a 19?  It looks kind of like a 19.

I think I may come back when it's been updated.  I'm interested to see how it all works, but with three spells I'm not sure where I'm going next. 

And...guessing the spells may be kind of a lot.  I thought the ambiguity of the second spell was interesting--I know I'm not the only person who tried [rot13] "whzc" first, and I liked the little challenge of figuring out the right word, but for the third spell there were just too many options: I thought it was "fyvqr", and then tried "tyvqr", and even after hints for all but the first letter I was trying "fyvat".

I plan to be back though! 

So...in the second mosaic, where there's a blue gate on the left and two orange ones on the right.  If I step on the black square on the right, is it not supposed to take me to the next level?  Did I misunderstand the goal?

> checkpoints are available

OK but do they have to be?  (I used a red key on the north door, and then to go out the east door, and I can't restore back past that, but also can't push the red or purple key out of the room I enter.)  

OK that was really sweet.  (And not easy!)

Hey, cup of tea and a cat is a great ending!

I love how new this is; the idea of the room behind a door depending on what key you use is a clever fantasy trope but not one I've seen come up in games before, I don't think.  The levels put it to really good use, and there kept being twists I didn't see coming.  Great game!

To be honest, at first it felt like a pretty standard sokoban-like, but you introduced some really clever elements and challenges; by level 15 or so I was already going "wait there's more? that wasn't the hardest one?".  Very satisfying to get through!

Very nice.  Some neat level design in there.  (I will say that the level where you start in the C-shaped cage was my least favorite, insofar as it hinges on what I found to be counterintuitive behavior--the ability to push a box away even if you yourself can't move.  But otherwise, no complaints.)

Is "exercise in mapping" a puzzle?  Is it thinking, or is it a mechanical task?  Eh, given how much trouble I had keeping myself from getting turned around, I think yeah, puzzle. :-)

Once I did start mapping, it came together much more clearly.  I appreciated the penalty for guessing being non-fatal but enough of an inconvenience that you wouldn't want to do it.  

Got about two rows into Tetris before it hit a bug (pieces dropping in the wrong place, and appearing as overlapping other pieces, and then a piece stopping right above a gap instead of going into it...).  Did not look further.

Oh.  Yes.  Using "X" was not on my radar for that.  Well, thank you--I'd finished the game otherwise, so with this I just had to go play several series of notes and I was all set.  Glad to have officially finished it, because it was in fact fun overall. :-)

...it's taking me even longer.  How do you use the piano?

For anyone who made the same mistake I did: You can use a key on any lock on a door, at any point.  I found the game pretty much impossible when i thought you had to wait for timelocks to disappear before you could open a regular lock on that door.  (Just me?  Oh well.)

Once I got past that, I won the game on the first try, but it still felt like an accomplishment and not something trivial.  It's quite good.

OK, I see there wasn't much more than the final message, but I'm glad I went back and read it anyway.  I like this.  The main thing it might have lacked is risk: navigation seemed very easy (I fell off the screen once this time) and generally low-penalty.  But the exploration aspects were very cool, in terms of transforming the world around you and in opening up new places to go.  I hope you decide to see where you can take this!

Huh.  I was kind of enjoying its surrealism--got as far as, um, making a green...thing...rise from the ground.  But then as I went back across the space, I reached the starting point and suddenly I got the original "you know what to do" box and I couldn't dismiss it.