I'm not sure how i found out about this game, but wow, what an experience - so much passion was put into this project, I don't know where to even begin.

The story was gripping, and the lore, the world-building, the characters were done just right. This is exactly the type of indie game you hope to find on itch.io

The story had me gripped, it ended too soon just when it was getting good lol.

I think I finally managed to find the game!

It's called Koumon No Hana by Studio Bakanal
https://vndb.org/v25090

It's no longer on itch io,
but the devs have an email and twitter, so maybe you can ask them for a copy of the game? 
https://studio-bakanal.itch.io/

Nice, the art really reminds me of mysterious murasame castle.

Nice, the Contrast between Tu'er Shen and the rowdy Roger is hilarious.... the music was choice.

I had the same error - if you just keep hitting ignore like 20+ times the game will continue.

Also, it's shader error, which means it's probably being caused by some special effect being turned on. It happens after this scene for me:



the actual fix would be to modify the shader code itself - remove any lines like

precision highp float
precision mediump float
precision lowp float

The "precision" keywords are for OpenGL ES (web builds), however, they will cause errors on desktop applications, hence the exception.

What an incredibly rare treat to see SEA/Indonesian mythology in a game - loved the atmosphere in this game, it's unlike anything I've ever played! I only wish that the world could be expanded upon more.

One more thing I thought of - have you tried asking this question in the DevTalk discord?
There are a bunch of Visual Novel devs and players there, someone there might know!
https://discord.gg/devtalk

Assuming that it was properly tagged as a visual novel, If you are sure it was created in 2022, here are all of the games in 2022 visual novels.

If you know if it was part of a game jam, that narrows the scope significantly:

https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/in-jam/year-2022 (1,825 results)

If it wasn't part of a jam:
https://itch.io/games/genre-visual-novel/year-2022 (5,278 results)

It's still a lot of stuff to go through either either way, but you might be able to recognize something by going through the list of thumbnails/ hovering over each thumbnail that looks like it could be the game.

I don't know the name of the game, but maybe try looking at yaoi game jam entries? i.e.

https://itch.io/jam/yaoi-game-jam-2023/entries

The art looks similar to this, maybe not exactly but maybe it will help point you in the right direction.
https://chimeriquement.itch.io/

It seems to be working now!
But I'm seeing that other people's RPG maker saves are showing up now on the save file, maybe that was causing the issue?

Like I was playing this other game ( https://lichtel.itch.io/japan-to-go-please ) saved a few times, and the saves from the other game are now showing up in your game? I can't load them... but my guess is the bug might have had something to do with your save files being saved in a shared RPG Maker directory, leading to issues.

This is a unique and captivating premise - would love to see the full fleshed out version!

Love the enka music and yokai/traditional Japanese folklore themes in this one! but there are a few typos like broschure -> brochure. Be sure to spellcheck!

Thank you, I added some more UI/UX enhancements in the post-jam version. There are now expressions, faces, and names in the cutscenes.

Wow nice, a point cloud puzzle is such a clever concept.
And the ending was great! it had me gripped the whole time.

Now that the jam is over, I just added a difficulty select to the last minigame to make things possible without adding extra lives, as well as a whole bunch of other features. You also no longer "need to be a professor" to run the game, it just works in the web browser right away. Thank you so much for taking the time to leave your valued feedback on this game, it made me a better developer overall and I'm going to keep making games and keep on getting better.

You can play the game in English or ภาษาไทย!
Just change the language in the settings menu.

The game seems to list an english localization option, however even when turned on the game is still in russian.

I really liked this game due to the branching paths, but save/load doesn't work properly!

I really like this dungeon crawler RPG maker game, really reminds me of the Dark Spire game.

This is super cool and unique! Unfortunately I can't finish it due to the game breaking bug that makes the main character disappear.

How to get past the electrically locked doors? can't seem to find a way to tell which door is which.

This game really reminds me of the game second sight, love these kinds of "going out of body" games.

Love the title screen/great tree music in this one!

It's got an old man with explosions - what's not to love?

Love the vibes and music of this game!

Be sure to join the Tokyo Frequency Discord where you
can post in the looking-for-a-team channel to find teammates as well as links to game dev assets.

• https://discord.com/invite/tAcyDBpXZK

Team Formation Advice

• Introduce yourself: Post a short description of your skills and what kind of project you’re interested in.
• Complementary skills: Try to team up with people who have skills different from yours (e.g., coders with artists or musicians).
• Communication: Decide early how you’ll coordinate (Discord, Shared Docs, Notion, Trello, etc.)
• Keep it simple: Small, focused teams often produce better results than very large groups.

Theme: Travel

🌍 ✈️ The holiday season is here — and while real-world travel is expensive, game travel is free!

Create games in the Traveller’s Jam about journeys, destinations, and adventures.

Base your game on a real location — no fictional worlds.
You can stylize it, miniaturize it, or reinterpret it, but it must have a recognizable real-world anchor.

Choose 2+ limitations (ranging from time-travel 🕰️ to unique transportation methods 🛶) and go all out, the only limit is your imagination!

🌍 Join here ✈️

It's out here if you want to check it out, I ended up making a Bâan fangame:
https://tokyofrequency.itch.io/baan-rinradas-mystical-departure

I had to take out the random card loot and just give fixed loot at certain points
as it felt like it was hard to balance it properly with the weakness system I implemented.

But I still think this genre has a lot of potential and will be playing with some more of these mechanics in my next game.

Like the lighting effects on this one! It's a bit too punishing though when it comes to the boss fights, the difficulty is too hard, and if you lose, the penalty is too high.

Hi itch.io staff,

It's been more than a month, and all my posts require moderator approval - would like help resolving this so i can post again.
I've tried contacting support for the past month several times to no avail.

Here's my support ticket ID:
320849

Thanks

3 Gigachad Petes, the only true way to crush the final boss...



In all seriousness though,  I must've played through this game like 50 times now! I never really knew that these kinds of games existed before this, am now going down the rabbit hole of deckbuilder games.

I'm just so inspired by your game that I'm going to make my own deckbuilder game now.

Do you honestly think people play games to read long text tutorials and go into settings menus?

The ship is still very hard to control even with the simplified controls, something just feels off about the physics. I just kinda want to move forward and get to the objective... and it seems like you're punishing players with this unorthodox and befuddling control scheme. The pull of gravity is way too punishing, to the point where moving forward, the most basic of motions in any game, is challenging and painful.

If you reprogramed it to just move forward with WASD and removed these punishing thruster controls, I would probably have a lot more fun with this game. but as it stands now, at least for me, it's unplayable.

Then why isn't it enabled by default?

This game has a really great visual style, and the sound design is on point - I can tell that a lot of care put put into the UX of the game and how it was intended to feel.

However, the music got a bit repetitive though, it could've benefitted from a few more themes (especially one that fit the tension of the scenes). Also the game seemed to introduce a lot of areas and characters in one small interconnected area,...

it might be more beneficial to not introduce everyone in the same small area, rather starting with smaller puzzles and maybe just one character and building them up, slowly introducing more.

Love the homage to monkey island/lucasarts adventure games though.

It's like A Way Out, but in 2D. I like the idea, but why is the resolution 1/4 of the screen, was this tested? Also, the characters moves so slowly, and the dialogue was very repetitive, i.e. i have bad knees so the other guy can move the boxes, or i can't open this door, so the other guy should. got it the first time, don't need to be reminded another 10 times.

This was a cool idea, but it would've been cool if you actually got your party members though either an actual JRPG overworld OR a visual novel style, but getting them all at once doesn't feel like you earned them. The music that plays when you get a party member and general vibes overall were on point though, love the neotokyo aesthetic.

Love the Tolkien-esque aesthetics, Chris was too greedy, but i kept on feeding him and and he turned into an OP beast.