itch.io

I like the concept but...the words I went out on were ABYRENE, AURILLIAN, and IMPASIVE, which as far as I can tell are, you know, not words.  I guess they could be words in a way that CKOFUTAU can't be, but still, it's a little weird to be playing "identify the fake word" and lose because you identified fake words.

EDIT: when I restarted, I was given WORRY, USURP, ESTOP.  Which is unfortunate because all three of them are words...

OK, works now. :-)  Was honestly surprised that almost everything was additive, i.e. I could just throw in another word or punctuation mark.  (On a second run I got "can't contain an N" and I had to change "king" to "rook" and then I had to change the initial "G" to "K", but pretty small.)  I was prepared to need to use "saturn" so that it could also satisfy the day-of-week rule, because a length limit would pop up.

Still, brief but entertaining. :-)

I have to say, having the rule cut off below the bottom of the screen does add an interesting challenge...  (Windows; Firefox.)

OK, this is outright amazing.  I haven't read it all the way through, but just the parts I read are so good.

Honestly it makes me wonder if I can even find the files I copied from my CURSE floppy disk back in 2001.  The last time I tried playing it was like 2007, and I thought maybe I just had a buggy version, but I cannot believe I didn't think to reread the stupid arch inscription.  I feel like just knowing that will be enough to get me through if I try again!  (Yeah, yeah, I know, it won't be.)

A few thoughts:

• There's a real conceptual conflict between "if you position the cursor over the right set of items, they'll be worth more" and "this set of upgrades speeds up the cursor and gives you less time to position it correctly".
• The skill tree could really use clearer distinctions between "too expensive", "able to be purchased", and "already maxed".
• I personally found the cutting tool very hard to use (on a laptop)--not easy to position it or to move it at exactly the angle I needed.

Have you missed something in the pictures?

I mean...I must have?  For one thing, the cat and the badger are standing together on the balcony before the body is discovered, so if the badger is guilty, he must have...committed the crime much earlier?  But we saw her leaving with the rabbit (and she had the rabbit's scarf, which I guess was meant to frame her), so when did it happen?  What is there in the last photo that indicates who the killer is?

I love the gameplay, the illustrations, the atmosphere...but I don't understand the evidence.  (I had to play through it three times to get the right answer.  I get what the murder weapon was, and I get the envelope she's holding in the first image, but how does the evidence show who the murderer is?)

This game is an affront to all that is good and right in the world.  That is not a complaint.  ("The blue and yellow level with the fireballs is too hard" is a complaint, but that just means I need to come back to it.)

Black bars everywhere?  Absolutely obscene.  I am reporting this to my local F.A.C.I.A.L. (Family Art Council Investigations of Art Licentiousness).  Prepare to get F.A.C.I.A.L.ed.

Eh, I've restarted worse. :-)  Thanks for fixing!

EDIT: Aaaaand done.  (I ended up having to open the frame in a new tab...computers were a mistake.)  Delightful as always.  I think I even spotted a few of the Enigmarch prompts!  (I'm working my way through it...very slowly.  Working on an idea for Day 12.  Over at Dreamwidth; feel free to check out, or ignore, as you see fit. :-) )

oh no!  I was (ironically!) in the middle of talking to Harrison--he'd just told me about his childhood, which is a weird thing to type in the comments on a game about a puzzle app in a grocery store--and I got:

An unexpected error has occurred
Go back to the previous passage.
Hard restart, clearing all progress and beginning from the start.

If it helps, the console is telling me "Uncaught ReferenceError: hints_discovered is not defined".

The dragging and the village card are definitely better.  There's still the problem that the village card says "6 items" and I can't seem to get them out.  (One being the map to the goblin dungeon.)

I didn't really get any farther than about level three, with a level-0 pet, when things got stuck.

(Also,I'm on a laptop, so I don't have a mousewheel.  I can zoom with the trackpad, but "mousewheel click" is probably not possible.)

I think something got stuck: I can enter and exit the village, but I can't move its card (which was really annoying when my pet wandered behind it), and now I can't take items out of it.

Also, is there a way to pan?  I can zoom in and out, but I can't move the area after I zoom in, which is irritating when cards spawn just offscreen.

I was completely unable to jump up from the first marble you encounter--or I could get on it, and jump, and it took me exactly as high as the 6-domino square, but not high enough to get onto it.  Is it just me?

Things I love:

• The entire concept
• The physics--the tactile sense of falling word tiles and of rearranging them
• The proverbs (I played five or six rounds and at no point did I say "what is that supposed to be? That's not real")
• The distractor words (which are well chosen)

Some very idle thoughts about next steps, if you decide to go further with it (people don't always, for game jams, but it's such a neat idea!):

• It'd be cool if the words indicated whether they were "on" or "off" the white stripe--slight gray background if they're not, maybe?
• Proverbs are, well, familiar by definition, which cut down on the challenge for me.  I wouldn't want to try this with things I didn't know at all (you could use Japanese proverbs in Japanese, and I'd just be moving tiles around with no purpose), but I could imagine using phrases that can be put together through logic but aren't entirely apparent.  Morals from Aesop ("Change of habit cannot alter nature")?  Shakespeare quotes?  Lines of Emily Dickinson poems?

Anyway, this was fun!

noooooo Sebastian is a good cat!  (He didn't break anything!  It was just a cardboard box.)

The only problem, really, was when my cat killed some of my chickens.

(He knocked something off a shelf in the back room.  By the time I got back from making sure nothing broke, six or seven chickens had starved.)

Totally charming.  (I'm a sucker for a talking magic rabbit.)

Aw, that's charming!

Certainly I had fun shooting balls around the table and making red squares go boom.  But there are also mechanics I really didn't understand, like

• Why, once my damage-per-ball is high enough, do some squares die on the first hit, while others don't?  Do identical-looking squares have different health levels?
• Does my health just go down over time, or is something causing it that I should avoid?
• It doesn't look like anything is attacking/damaging me, so what is the "shield" upgrade for?
• "Prestige 1" seems to give $2 instead of $1 per enemy...but the enemies seem four times as hard to kill, which means there's no real incentive to play at that level.

It feels like there's a lot going on that could use more in-game explanation.

(Also, if you don't mind a couple of quality-of-life suggestions: it would be nice if there were a graphical distinction in the skill tree between things you can afford and things you can't.  And it might be nice to see what your current stats are--damage per hit, radius size, ball speed, etc.--so that things like "+1 durability" feel less abstract.  If an incremental game is all about Numbers Going Up, I want to see the numbers go up. :-) )

Reloading the page allowed me to continue.  Signal followed; circuit completed.  All the same, an eight lab analysis ought to result in no new information, or even be disallowed; a complete systems crash seems excessive.

I had analyzed seven artifacts in labs.  Analyzed an 8th.  Interface no longer responded; not certain whether interface faulty or something was listening.

Oh, I totally get that.  At some point I came across SCOWL, which was usefully separated into tiers based on how common the words were, but I don't know what its current status is.  You can also take a look at https://www.spreadthewordlist.com/, which is designed to be an open-source list; it's crossword-oriented, so there may be phrases in there, but it might still be a useful starting point (I think it's also a scored list, but I'm not sure).

Mostly I'm relieved to know that I wasn't being incredibly dense. :-)

I hear you about puzzle design though.  I love that game jams get people motivated; I hate that they encourage speed over thoroughness.  I hope you come back to this and tweak things, because it really is fun and clever.

Seems actively antagonistic to the player.  (Not just the precision timing; the delay in emerging from a purple teleport with a jump immediately after it, for example.  Or whatever the [expletive] level 5 is, where I made it into the second chimney but on top of everything else, jumping at the right time doesn't even always get you onto the next platform.)  I've been enjoying the releases and I kind of wanted to see what was going on here, but not badly enough.

Also the spacebar isn't working for jumping.

EDIT: against my better judgment, I right-clicked to open the frame in a new tab; the spacebar worked there.  Against my better judgment, I kept playing.  Ended six stars short, but I doubt I'll be returning to it, somehow...

...oh, I was really hoping the bug was "sure, have two adjacent dining rooms", because I cannot for the life of me find anything that follows the rules!

(There's only two places the bathroom can be, right?  If it's in the isolated room in the NE, then there's a bedroom next to it, and then living rooms on either side of it, kitchens on either side of those, and then there are still two rooms in the SW corner.  That's where I ended up putting two dining rooms.  The other option is in the  center-east room, but if you go clockwise and put down a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen, then the dining room ends up in the center-west, with two rooms above it.  What am I missing?)

There are games with good puzzles that think they're funnier than they are.  And there are funny games that think their puzzles are better than they are.

This one is neither; it's a funny game with good puzzles. :-)  Really good work!

(There's a...I don't want to say "bug" on the last level, but it's a little weird that the restriction is that dining rooms can only be next to kitchens, but the final floor plan has two dining rooms adjacent to each other.)

> There might be words missing, if you find any contact me!

What word list are you using? If the "words missing" were obscure ones, I'd get it, but it looks like your list doesn't have "pigs", which falls into the "ultracommon" category.

ooooh, platformer!  That's interesting!  (Speaking as someone who isn't always great about stepping outside his creative comfort zone, such as it is.)

I did hit a bug while in the Tomb of the King, while trying to reach the secret that's visible from the entrance: I must have landed weirdly or moved too quickly, and now my frog is shapeshifting.  When I stand still it cycles through sign, diamond, fire, nothing; when I move, it cycles through gray disk, blue disk, key, slime; when I jump, it's arrow, and then I think something else but I land before I can tell.  (Restarting from the beginning fixes it, though, well, now I'm at the beginning...)

More engaging than I expected from the description!  (Not just a typing game, it turns out!)  But..."delete" to reset isn't working for me, so thanks to a misjudgment about slope, I've got a car flipped over near the A key and I can't seem to reset.

...or second, or third, or seventeenth...  This was your chance to say "oh no! I made an impossible level, I'm so sorry!", but no, instead I had to go solve it.  (Which I have.  Thank you for assuring me that I could.)

Neat!  Looking forward to seeing where else you go with this.

I've never seen this automaton before, and it's very cool.  But I'm very much stuck on the level labeled "Nice! Can you do it again?", where I've got this problem that only one of the four pieces even has a wire along its bottom edge, which makes it very hard to connect them.  You're sure that one's possible, right?

Clever!

The scrabble-like exploration of an overworld is a cool concept.  And clearly it held my attention, since I was 314 tiles in when I scrolled down to see the comments (at which point the game crashed).

I think it has promise!  There are the bugs (the crashing; the surrounded chest that still says "7/8"), possibly some QoL issues (I kept trying to fish when I was just a little too far onto an adjacent tile; sometimes the letter draws felt imbalanced), and of course it would be nice if the game had more to it (an exit to a next level? a store for spending fish?).  But it's a really solid core of a game.

Finally, finally got back around to this after stalling on it back in August.  Glad I did; it's very well done.  Excellent work on this.

The idea is indeed interesting.  The problem is that not all of the buttons showed up on the screen--I had a playthrough where it told me to press the red button, but there were only three buttons, none of them red.  (I'm currently looking at seven buttons, including a red one, though not a green one, which was also missing on a different playthrough that wanted me to press it.)  Needs a little work to make sure the buttons all appear.

The idea is interesting, but I ran out of time on the first day when I was about three pages into the guidebook.  I'm generally skeptical of timed games anyway, but there's at least got to be enough time to read the rules.

Oh, that was lovely.  Thank you.