I like the level design in spirit: it tries to make the most of the idea, and some scenarios are rather interesting. However, it feels like some screens require precision and repetition, and the need to reset to the last checkpoint rather than the start of the screen ends up frustrating. The music and visuals are pleasant!
Seva Khusid
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Really great presentation!
I like the game mechanic - it's really neat that you get to reroll the dice - but I wonder if this becomes a tad too random. Making the most out of an entirely uncertain situation is not as fun as having some grasp of what might happen. Perhaps it would come with player experience?
I hope you don't abandon the concept - I'd love to see what could come of it with further mechanical polish!
Was there love put into this? Unquestionably.
I am unsure what makes it bright - perhaps I missed some amazing aspect? The variety of routes is the simplest element any navigation-based game could offer; the environment is bland and uninteresting. Even copying this block and covering the empty plane with it would have been something.
What I called ‘abysmal’ in the endless walking is the combination of its speed and the focus on it. It is a possible game design decision, absolutely, and it does fit the meditative nature of the game. However, the environment - to me, at least - feels borderline distressing in its repeating patterns and clear irreality. If it is a meditative game, I do not see what to meditate on.
Perhaps, I am the problem. I find this environment design lazy and careless, and fail to see any substance to this game. Do explain if I miss out on something great - I will admit my blindness.
Thank you for your feedback - a significant portion of feedback was about frustration some players found, and the game is indeed very tight on time.
Your solution would work, though it loses the thematic coherence of everything staying in a time loop - do you think something else would help? Perhaps, more time? Or clearer layout, with more hints on where to go next?
I am unsure whether it is correct to call the spinning boxes looped...
But that aside, this game is lovely! The main mechanic is VERY fun to play with - in a megaman-style level it would shine. The only small issue was the unorthodox use of spacebar for the ability - I understand the hesitation to use too many buttons, but keeping space for jumps and using, say, enter for the dash would make it a bit more intuitive. The art is on point, and the cutscene is stylish.
I genuinely hope to see this game developed into completion!
The premise sounds interesting, and I liked the use of an AI voice quite a bit - but the very first door failed to work for me*. and the rest of the level felt like a random assortment of boxes. Movement is slow and clunky - not even in a 'hey, it's a robot' immersive way.
*Our game had a similar problem: certain scripts broke when exported as a WebGL. I couldn't find a solution in time and ended up submitting a win64
A lovely game, very classical for a jam. The core mechanic and its developments are interesting (though I ended up being stuck on the two enemies, a brown button, and a tilted jump pad level). The implementation of sound but not visuals makes it feel strangely timeless stylistically - too clean for Atari, too simple for anything modern.
The movement is pleasant, the puzzles are fun. One and only one problem I could find was the lack of a reset button. Manually ending the loop would have made it feel much smoother and faster-paced.
A great submission!
A neat premise, but the actual text feels more like a drunken rambling than a genuinely impactful text. I did like the question about the animals though - it felt like I encountered a bug at first, and it was quite unsettling. If it is, in fact, a gateway to the secondary, chilling layer of the game, I have missed it completely.
It almost feels like two different games collided and neither survived.
On one hand, the cutscenes look, sound, and feel like some obscure animation from the eighties - a lovely direction to explore, and one very fitting thematically.
On the other, the gameplay is nothing like what the cutscenes represent - what do these walls mean? Why are there barrels? Why doesn't my fish make the 90 degrees turns when the level does? Why does the fish explode? And, because of the latter, I failed to notice the looping aspect beyond the obvious 'if you die, the game restarts'.
I only hope that the original idea and the stylistic cutscenes would find some different realization and do not perish in the creative cycle.
tl;dr: nice game mate make more levels
Thoroughly cheeky and uncompromising, this game stands firmly in the long line of ironic games.
Irony, of course, is not self-sufficient. If we take the pinnacle of the genre, The Town with No Name, we see it built around parodies of cowboy tropes; other examples likewise work as a a political or artistic satire. Without them, the ironic game is as vain as a 'this is so sad can we get 420 lieks'.
Ethan Survival Sim lands as a satire, even if its runway is rather narrow. The player has no direct frame of reference or even interest. Ethan the character ends up serving as a satire not on himself, but on people like himself. This is where the game garners the most of its potential, and this is where it is also lost.
A young empty-minded student is a famous archetype, and a great deal of British art is devoted to this deplorable yet undeniably funny archetype. Indeed, it feels at times that all that could be said was said; and this game fails to contribute or even discuss that wide corpus.
The elevator joke was the only one that worked for me - otherwise, it reaches for the setups, but provides no punchline to the character (except for all those things the character actually punches). Still, if this husk is ever filled with any message, I would be eager to revisit it.