itch.io

This is very charming! It might be a short game, but there's proper challenge in matching the designs, and it feels well-scoped to a game jam's time limit.

I love the core concept and it definitely does get you thinking about a danmaku battle like (abstracted and schematised) aerial combat. Very nicely done!

Damn. Damn! This's excellent. Lovely art assets proficiently used, sharp writing. Bravo.

This is fun! Once the dash, slash, and different types of crop come together it's nice to potter around harvesting things. Obv. the art assets are limited, but they're also charming--there's something very funny about Youmu lying listlessly on the bench when Reisen's not there.

This is smart and pointed! I enjoyed the gradual revelation here very much. The little portraits work very well, and it felt like a coherent aesthetic held text-box and images together.

This is very nice! The time mechanic is a fun idea, and with the rewind always available it still feels pretty chill.

Perfect cover image / main menu image, also.

A Touhou tokimekimemorialike is a great idea, and this is very crisply presented, especially for a game jam game! Very impressive, thank you for making it!

Hah, I think I've done similar things when writing. If that's what happened then a game jam is a great low-consequence place to have practised scoping and prioritising! I'm sure the experience will stand you in good stead.

This is nicely made for what it is, and it's much more impressive than what I'd manage if I tried to make a game to the same time limit, so bravo! The sprites're cute and there's already nice attention to little details like the offering box. 

Good unhurried, chill vibes in this one! It feels very relaxed. I like how the little speech bubble icons stand in for text--efficient and evocative.

This is very clever! I like the variety of challenges that it throws at the player. All of the art is nice, but I was especially impressed by the backgrounds (including all the small in-passing details) and how they change through the race.

Wow! The drawn and collaged images work so well here, and the prose is beautifully efficient. I love the main text box, which is not a phrase I expected to write. So much of this manages to look tactile, which works very well together with the writing about itching, reaching, hurting, resting, rotting. I don't live with hEDS, but I've certainly served my time in hospitals in the last few years, and the medical scenes struck home. Thank you for making this!

This was good fun! You use assets very efficiently and get a lot out of things like the pattern elements in the background. I like the mostly-greyscale presentation and the care visible in how and where text appears. Thank you for making it!

I enjoyed this--it's fruitfully unsettling! Thank you for putting it together. I'm impressed by how many ideas and images you keep up as consistent throughlines. I'm also impressed by the attention to small details, like the sound effect for saving. And it's always nice to see something using 4:3.

Very much enjoyed this! The triptychal layout is very nice, as are the architectural 'stages' in the central window. And it's nice to see assets from the Livre de chasse manuscript. The script's evocative and effective, and I thought it did a good job implying necessary context without ever feeling like it had paused to lecture.

A couple of very, very minor snags which I note in case it's helpful, not as a criticism: a few times, I found the music cut out when I scrolled back in the dialogue; and in a few cases I stumbled slightly over dashes in the text which could perhaps have been em-dashes to distinguish themselves a bit more clearly from hyphens.

Main thing is, I liked this--thank you for making it!

This's a great concept.

I love all the polish and detail in the interface, which fits it all into Jana's note-taking and recording, and the soundtrack felt fitting. (I guess it's just, like, epitext, but I also love what you've done to integrate the itch page itself into the colour theme.)

The script is admirably efficient, and I always felt that dialogue on screen was there for a purpose. I don't know that Gabrielle's side of the story landed quite as well for me as the others, but that might well be a matter of taste--and I found the other two plenty unsettling!

Very impressive. Thanks for making it!

This rips! Lovely little game. Took me a few minutes to identify all the information the cursor was throwing at me, but that's still the right place for the info, I think. The shooting sound effect is chunky and well-chosen: I could listen to that gunfire all day. Visually/aesthetically the whole thing's impressively coherent for a jam game. 

This is very evocative and unsettling! I liked the battle mechanics, which kept me on my toes. And I really liked the enemy robot designs. In each case I felt I could see some loose link between appearance and arcana. So you selected good assets for those!

Wow! That sounds amazing--I'm glad to hear you're enjoying CWKB, and what a context in which to read it!

Nice work!

Really enjoyed this! Thank you for writing it.

Now that it's finished (more or less), I want to say here how well-realised The Gordian Cycle is. It really captures the (superficially) dry tone that some of its influences have, and creates the same need in the reader to fill in emotion for themselves. I love the careful imitation of a multi-witness tradition getting edited together for a modern audience, too!

Thank you! I have thought about publishing a physical copy, yes. I don't want to rush into it, as I suspect it's a task I could easily mess up. But one of my goals in 2026, health and work permitting, is to look into some kind of print-on-demand option.

Thank you for such a generous comment! (And my apologies for taking a while to reply…) I'm delighted to hear that you still find so much in the poem!

I had a feeling that the resurrected warriors related to Kamen Rider as well as to myth!

I hope so!

Thank you!

Thank you! I've had some health troubles lately, but I'm hoping this will give me something continuous to chip away at while I recover.

This is a very generous and moving review: it means a lot to hear that you've found the poem so fruitful! Thank you!

This demo is great fun! Some of your music choices and things like the searchlight intro definitely summon up the spirit of Conan / Lupin / Saint Tail / Cat's Eye &c. Having time to spend clicking around and working out a solution fits the premise very well. I think the only thing that threw me was something very minor: the pillar box outside Ramona's (postbox, mailbox) was surprisingly short; those things are normally shoulder-height. But that's hardly a problem, and actually I thought it was kind of cute.

Good luck working on the rest of the game! I'll keep an eye out for it coming out.

This was fascinating! You picked great assets to use, and you work with them very efficiently. The elements that you created directly (I imagine?) do a lot, too: the 'halo' behind Haydee immediately intrigued me, for instance, and it was very cool to see the script offer a couple of lines to contextualise it, and then see it used later to tell us about Haydee's state of mind. (If mind is even the right word for talking about angels, &c &c.)

I wasn't quite sure about the phrase 'twain ropes' (definitely not 'twin ropes'?); I suspect 'a shit pay' would be better as either 'a shit salary', or 'a shit paycheck' (in NA spelling), or just 'shit pay'; and in one line, 'It's shell' probably ought to read 'Its shell'. But those are the most minor of nitpicks, and I am mentioning them because there weren't any larger issues. Overall I thought this read very well, with some lovely uses of language that sketched in an engaging, unsettling background to the story.

Narratively, it was also neat to read a VN in this game jam that gives us a third person's glimpse of a relationship rather than placing the point-of-view character's own romantic relationship(s) at the front of our attention. That aspect also makes this function powerfully as a self-contained short story, which is sensible scoping for a time-limited jam, as well…

Haha, I’m glad that that was worth mentioning! I think these seemingly small things like character motion add a lot to the texture of the story and the characters. I never complain about a VN missing them, because I know many projects have very small teams or just one person behind them. But when a VN does do this I always notice!

If I could, I would give this a sixth star, because it's the only visual novel I've read that mentions Wotsits.

This feels very wisely scoped so that it wouldn't be too long, and could therefore be extremely polished. And it certainly is polished. Lots of little touches that impressed me here, including playing with the interface and fitting in small motions for the characters.

I enjoyed the slice of the VN that you have in the demo! There's some very confident and effective use of varied typesetting here, and the whole has such coherent presentation. The committed choice of just a few colours works very nicely. I can't comment on the Spanish text, but I thought the English read well, with a good grip on register and dialect and some well-chosen idioms. (I think there was one line where I might have found toast more natural than toasts, but if that is the level of detail one has to zoom in to to try to give feedback, things are going well!)

If you do take this project forward in future, I'll be interested to see where it goes.

This demo was a good time! I really liked the style and execution of quite a lot of the art. The dialogue worked for me and often felt quietly funny. I also like how you've summoned up some of the atmosphere of late teens spent somewhere that's not the most inherently exciting place in the world—very efficiently, without that many assets used. I'm afraid I can't comment on the voice acting because I'm a boring turns-the-voices-off person, but it's impressive that you're including it, and also good from an accessibility point of view.

I wondered in a few places whether the narration, distinct from the dialogue, might be dialled back, to avoid the risk of saying things we can infer already. Perhaps that's just a matter of taste! One or two lines included vocabulary which I'm not sure was in circulation in 1997, but (1) I might just be wrong, and (2) even if that is happening, that's a legitimate stylistic choice (no one writes historical fiction about the fourteenth century in Middle English, and nor should they). Also, the drawing of Nat with her tongue out is funny, but I thought perhaps it appeared too often, diluting its force—in my opinion, and it's only an opinion, that sort of image works best when used most sparingly.

None of those things were a big deal. Overall, I thought this was a very likeable snapshot. Good luck working on the rest of it!

That's great, thank you! (And pass on my thanks to your girlfriend also!) I'll put a link to that in the main post.

Yes, I think if you link a zip here in a comment that'd be great. I can edit the post to point readers down to it if they do want it. Having a portable version (however rough and ready) would be really good for people with long commutes / intermittent internet access / &c &c. Thank you for offering!

I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it, thank you! I think (hope) that one of the good things about the project has been that lots of readers who aren't necessarily hugely into reading poetry have still found things to like in CWKB. It's good to know that you found the recordings of performance added something, too.

Thank you!!