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Hey, thank you so much for giving the game a try and leaving such a nice, thoughtful comment! We have just started our journey into 3D with our last two games, this one included, so it's extra gratifying to hear people enjoy it as much as we are proud of it, haha.

The characters were fun to write for me, and I am sure it was fun for my wife to bring to life with the art and voices too! She says that funny you should mention, she does have some mini-comic ideas. If ever something comes of it, I could let you know if you like, haha

Thank you very much! To be completely honest the decision to add voice acting was a bit of a whim, that was helped along by how easy it turned out to do, haha. The backwards movement isn't great, yeah, it's easier to turn around and run, then turn around again. The exolanation for why it turned out like that was when I started working on this project, it was more akin to a space shooter but underwater themed, so going backwards was meant to be cumbersome. I guess I just never fixed it as the idea turned into the game we have now. Wither way, thank you for your feedback, and we're glad you liked it!

Oh I see! Thank you for letting me know :) yeah for the boss, I think loading checkpoint 5 while in the main menu actually works as opposed to dying to it, if you want to give it another shot lol. But either way, thanks again for the feedback!

Hey thank you for playing, and for your detailed feedback! Good point about the hud, that one's on me haha. As for the lemon, the mermaid's fish half is a lemon shark! Look them up, they're neat :) One of the dialogue lines while swimming down the tunnel mentions it. We figured that it would be enough to qualify as a "hint" of lemon, haha.

Regarding the boss, if you died it should have respawned you before the fight, but I think there's an issue with that checkpoint specifically. I'll have to investigate what happens there. Not sure what you mean by some enemies not dying properly, but they do also do some weird things sometimes where they chase you way too fast, so it might be a bug i haven't personally discovered yet

As for 3D, it can be complicated, but there's a really good tutorial series by dragonitespam on youtube, it's really comprehensive! Most of how this game works was possible due to those videos.

Hey just letting you know you uploaded your entire game project instead of a build of it, lol

Interesting concept! I am wondering how you achieved the box physics, they work remarkably well.

Someone's a Shaun Spaulding viewer! Wasn't able to beat the big tomato but you've got good presentation and good feeling movement here.  There is not much in the way of defense when you are on the same level as an enemy, but the frequent checkpoints at least somewhat mitigate that.

A cute little game! I especially liked the monochromatic cutscenes, I almost wish the entire game was in that graphical style. 

Got as far as the level with all the frogs, where I couldn't get past. There's some interesting gameplay choices here with allowing an infinite mid-air dash and countering it with hp loss unless picking up the fruit. I can see that being expanded upon. The aesthetic is also very gameboy color, reminds me a lot of the older Kirby games. Controls felt a little bit sluggish, I'd speed the character up personally. Nice game!

There some nice sprite art in here! Though in the future I'd try to keep the pixel sizes consistent for an even better presentation.

This is very pretty! I got about 6 levels in before I got a bit frustrated, the controls could really use some coyote time (jumping kept not registering at the edges of platforms even when I thought they should've, resulting in a lot of walking off ledges lol) The intro is a bit slow for being unskippable. You also train the player to avoid pitfalls in the first stage, then hit the player with a looping fall a couple stages later; you might want to signal where the screen wraps around :)

The vibes are very strong with this one! It took me a while to figure out what the game expected me to do, as the little black pellets aren't very eye catching. Once I got the 100 cells and the drones brought in the other things, I tried taking a cell to the guy in the upper left and got stuck. Not sure if there is more to the game after the drones grab the two robots.

Check it out here!

This game was created for GameMaker Game Jam 2024 in 8 days! As our second foray into 3D ever, we are very proud of our results. It is an unoptimized mess and you may observe some stuttering here and there... but optimization is the last question in our minds when the jam crunch hits, haha.

If you are curious, go ahead and take control of Kaisa, a lemon shark tailed mermaid warrior! Her prey are strange eldritch monsters and her quest is to figure out why they're popping up and to put a stop to it in this 10-20 minute game. If that hasn't sold you, here's some footage of the first third or so of the action!

The physics are very well done! Unfortunately the game becomes kind of impossible by design whenever donuts start dropping in and you no longer have the side walls to keep them anywhere, so your score is kind of at the mercy of randomness.

A very well polished entry! I am not sure how restoring balance figures into it but i definitely got the hint of lemon, haha. I almost wish the assaulting creatures didn't stop, or at least only slowed down, while doing the match 3 minigame, for added stress. Though I also think some manner of health restoration drop would be nice.

Good use of the prompt! The gameplay feels pretty smooth, it's a nice basic restaurant managerey type game. Some of the curveball combinations (like the 90% lemon guy) are hilarious, though the green "melon" juice mystifies me.

The concept behind the theme usage is genius! On the gameplay front, it could stand to be a bit faster and more responsive, and the rounds do take a long time. It could also use a volume setting!

Hey, this looks very neat but there doesn't seem to be an uploaded build

I'll send you a friend request on discord, it's gonna be gydgeza :)

Hey! Our team doesn't have a musician yet, if you haven't found a team yet either, we can have a chat and see if we mesh well :)

Hey thank you for your review and thank you for playing! We're glad you liked the vibes both visual and auditory, as well as the openness. A lot of the dead ends are alternate ways of getting around, that were meant to facilitate easier access to cut areas, but oh well, haha.

I get what you mean about controls, there will definitely be a need to refine them slightly. The reason space is used to get off a ledge is because I thought jumping off would make sense but I agree that it's unintuitive.

As for combat, it was all I could do to code the robots' movement and pursuit AI before the end so unfortunately you can only run away from them. But alas, thus are the overscoping dangers for gamejams.

Thank you again for your insight and for playing!

Hey, just played your game! The mood and visuals are stellar, the monster animations are very smooth and satisfying. The movement could be faster and snappier I think but it's a pretty short game so it didn't feel outright tedious.

The parry mechanic is pretty well done, but it was harder to use efficiently on the monsters with slow attack animations.  I think I parried the big knight thing that drops from the ceiling a total of twice successfully, while the final boss managed to only hit me two or three times while I picked away at its health, because of how snappy and easy to figure out his parry was.

That nitpick aside though, pretty good job!

Hey, thank you for giving it a try!

The buttons in the robot rooms unfortunately don't do anything as that content was cut, however you can progress from getting the key! All you need to do is use it on the button in the same room with the interact button, and that will allow you to walk up to the door next to it and it will automatically open. You will know that you used it correctly as a happy beep noise will happen when you interact with a button while holding the correct key. I hope this helps!

Editing to add: the jump and ledge grab abilities are found similarly to the key cards

Thank you for your review!

Tutorializing was our biggest blind spot so I don't blame you for having difficulties with the controls. We will need to be more diligent in player training next time, that's for sure!

We're glad you liked the title screen and the general presentation so much! Considering this was our first foray into the third dimension of game dev, we are quite proud of the results.

Thank you again for playing!

Got to level 5 when in the room with the kraken, haha. Good effort, the moving feels just a little bit too slow when turning, and there appears to be no strafing or moving backward involved.

The characters seem very stereotypical, almost to the point of satire, and if that was the intent then good job with that!

This is a very large game in dire, dire need of a map, or at least directions. The presentation is phenomenal, and the gameplay works great for the most part; moving felt a bit sticky, sometimes doing double turns without intending to.

Potions went largely unused as level ups happen incredibly frequently and they are free health restores.

I talked to a skeleton who told me to go north-east to find a brain. I went that way, found a heart, and past the barrier(?) he told me he undid was a dead end.

Didn't manage to finish it, but if you work on it in the future, if you include something to help the player from getting lost, it would be a great step up!

This is a very competent entry!

The presentation is great, and I especially loved the voices. I have a couple nitpicks in this category, most egregious of which I think is the map. Without showing where I was on it and a difference between tiles that were dead ends or just weren't explored further, it wasn't that useful. Other than that, i encountered an odd dithering effect across the screen that made everything a bit less visible, which was particularly harsh in the already naturally dark level two.

The menus are a bit bugged too, I had a minor panic moment when I pressed escape to exit the map and instead it brought up the game menu, which then I couldn't exit cause of the map's "take note" function. I realized pressing enter helped though.

That was not the end of the map screen bugginess though as its exit button overlaps the rest button and does not disable it, so I exited the map and went straight into a rest at least once, haha.

One last bug regarding the gameplay was the ability to attack enemies through the doors, or when they were two spaces away, which they could do nothing about. Once I realized I could do that, it kind of broke the difficulty.

But all of these are minor issues when taking the whole of it into account. Good job!

Apep is defeated!

As an enjoyer of egyptian mythology, this was a fun little delve. The combat felt a bit sloggish in the first area, where I still wasn't doing all that damage, but that was no longer an issue later on.

For some reason the combat music is very quiet compared to the rest of the game. Other than that, the presentation is pretty solid! The combat screen's UI gives me persona vibes, and feels maybe a bit anachronistic, but it's stylish enough to make up for it.

The movement feels really nice, and I especially like the wall bonk animation's inclusion!

All in all this was a good experience :)

Hey, nice to see another gamemaker game! I wasn't able to finish it, the difficulty was a bit punishing (the timing on those flamethrower tiles got me) but I got a nice look at it I think. No damage for the yellow bar in combat seems pretty harsh, and in general the pointer on the bar feels like it moves just a bit too fast.

I wonder if you use emulators often, as the control scheme reminds me a lot of the good old days. I don't encounter ZX for keybinding often, and a WASD alternative would have been welcome, but it didn't take me that long to fall back into the old bicycle seat, or however that saying goes, haha.

I am wondering what is the game design choice between having to use keys on doors, but just walking into a wall switch to trigger it. My suggestion would be to automatically open a door when walking into it while in possession of the necessary keys.

The presentation is well put together, and the movement itself feels good! I feel like you've got the bones of something solid here, it just needs some polish.

This is a genuinely unique game among the one's I've played! The sort of minesweeper/battleships way of dealing with the combat is pretty inspired, though it took me up until close to the end to figure out how it related to the trigger levels and the room clearing.

The only thing I can really complain about is that the game's objective is really not that clear until you completely clear a trauma for the first time. I was wandering around for a while looking for an exit, not realizing I had to make one in a way, haha.

A minor bug I think is that combat encounters get triggered when exiting the B-menu or when walking into a wall without a doorway. 

I also have yet to figure out what mindfulness does.

Either way it's simple and to the point, a good length, and a well executed idea!

There are different controls for WASD + mouse, WASD no mouse, arrow keys + mouse, arrow keys no mouse, numpad + mouse, numpad no mouse, and controller :)

You change the layout by pressing left/right in the controls screen

Hey thank you for the review and we're glad you had a good time with our game! Verticality was something important for us to include from the start, so we are happy to hear it works so well!

I am not sure what you mean by having certain things possible or not on mouse versus mouse/keyboard, as all the controls should be available for all control schemes. Though I will admit that they're not the most intuitive so maybe that is at fault here.

Thanks again for playing!

Thank you for playing and I am glad you had a good time with it! Also please don't feel like not figuring the grab out right away is on you, probably the biggest mistake I made in making this game was not toggling the autograb on as soon as you pick it up, haha. As for when you would want to have that off, there was more platforming planned where falling straight down would have been more beneficial than clinging of of a ledge would have been, but we never made it that far. UI for it was also planned, but I ran out of time and couldn't fit it in.

We are particularly proud of the presentation and level design, so I am glad you found those two categories to be to your liking! The little robot is the titular Gizmo, who was meant to have more dialogue but alas, jams and time limits haha.

Either way, thank you again so much for your review and for playing!

Thank you for your review! The game is essentially the answer to the question of "what if dungeon crawler but parkour" haha

 i am wondering if you were pressing jump and direction in quick succession, rather than holding space and pressing a direction, as there shouldn't be timing issues with the jump. We did have an issue with not managing to tutorialize it very well so that is on our priority list for the post jam fixes.

I'm glad you liked the vibe! I am neither the artist or the composer of the team but I am happy with how it all came together in the end :)

Hey! Finally got around to play this for myself and I have got to say it is very impressive for how tiny it is! I really like the game design around looping the player through the rooms around the circle.

I think my biggest complaints are twofold: the inability to step back (ha da death or two due to that) and having to start over when dying. I know due to the limitations o how it was made that perhaps checkpoints may have been hard to implement though.

I am curious, is there a pattern to the crabs' movement, or do they just pick directions back/forward on the circle randomly? It is sometimes annoying that you get trapped between two, duck into a room, and then have to wait for them to make up their mind about which way they're going to leave. Doesn't happen too often though, so I'll give it a pass haha.

Anyway, other than those minor things, this really was a very solid, bite-sized experience! Doesn't overstay its welcome and every moment of it is meaningful. Good job!

Just played this and I enjoyed it! It's a bit tight and hard to navigate even with the map to be honest, the different wall textures/colors don't help all that much in orienteering until you're a ways into the game and know to recognize them.

I was glad for the no progress loss on death, as enemies are very punishing. The game essentially expects you to wait for them to walk near you so you can spam attack, otherwise if you walk to them they attack way too fast for you to win. Which either option is a bit of a pace-breaker.

Controls feel nice and tight, though I've had a few deaths due to QE being turn, a remap between AD and QE would have been welcome. But I admit that's more of a me issue.

I don't think the speed upgrade really helps much considering the mining speed is already quite fast, but it is funny to just instantly eat away at a wall so this isn't a complaint, just an observation.

That all out of the way, this was competently made! A worthy entry into the jam, you should feel proud :)

Went through this and it's a pretty good entry! Honestly my only hard complaint is the responsiveness of the movement; turning is very slow, and only moving forward when the forward key is released is a bit of an odd choice.

Other than that, I would suggest you turn the stamina red once it's below a certain value so it jumps in the eye easier, this one is more on me but I died once pretty far into the game because I just didn't notice how low it was haha.

One small nitpick is that the opening scroll goes away by itself before there is time to finish reading it. Maybe attach a button prompt to it?

Either way, this was fun! The resource management actually feels very competent and balanced, and in the future more ways to improve than load and stamina could be implemented, if you choose to continue working on it.

Bit late of a reply but thank you for the review! It was a pleasure and a privilege watching you play through it and we're glad you enjoyed your time with it!

You're not the first person to get hit with the interdimensional robot police bug crash, but rest assured it's first among the issue fixes for the post jam build.

Hey! Thank you for the great in-depth review! We're glad you enjoyed your time with it even despite the more unintuitive aspects :)

With the disclaimer that this is an explanation and not an excuse, a lot of the issues you cited come down to cut content we ran out of time before we could implement. For the ledge grab, you can toggle it on/off, and you only need to hold shift when it's toggled off, otherwise t behaves as if shift is always being held automatically.

Esc closing instantly was a holdover from the debugging stage, I will have to add a confirmation window for that definitely.

I planned on being able to toggle between QE strafe and AD strafe but I'll be honest, I just plain forgot I was goin to do that by the time I got to the control schemes. That one is my bad, haha.

The game essentially autosaves your position every minute, which is how the reload works! It's mostly there in case there's a game breaking crash so that players don't have to start over. Glad it was useful :)

Thank you again for the amazing review and the opportunity to watch you play it! It's always a great resource for learning to see others go through your game.

Hey! I know you watched me play this on the stream, but I'll leave a comment here just to summarize my thoughts anyway.

It's interesting how small the map space actually is and the bulk of the game is actually the combat. For how small it is, this was one of the games I spent the longest time playing among the entries I've gone through so far!

The humor was honestly on point pretty much throughout the whole game. The missing assets and some menuing and gameplay adjustments were the only nitpicks I had, like allowing the canceling of assigned energy, or having the battle pace improve by changing the action point acquiring message at the start of every round.

All in all, a very good entry ,and I am glad I got to play it!