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beat it 100% with no helps! It was fun :)

Sad to accidentally skip the lava snake fight :( It looked very cool!  Is there a way to make it respawn?

You can still warp out with a memory disk, and the stop sign isn't necessary-- you can just land on the edge (you almost certainly don't need to be a mouse either,but that's a lot harder, to the point where I'm not 100% sure it's possible). I think the end sign also may let you out, but I haven't tested it yet just in case.  Hopefully there's a dialog option with Silica where she notices the softlock and fixes it for you if you show her the disks with no other disks or something.

Would be nice to have pop-up numbers to help confirm I'm making what I think I'm making from each building at the end of the round.

Fun game, but it went to a black screen of death after level 4 :(

thx

Completed my first run, having chosen Faela. A little confused on the ending-- I got a tape but I didn't get to leave the dungeon so *shrug*.  Is there a secret ending I've missed?  Also you run out of skill cards for level-ups eventually, which is a bit unfortunate.  Game was fun overall; never did figure out how to sell things.

The game seems fun so far, but I am finding the shop interface confusing.  The '?' button says to sell by clicking and holding, but this doesn't seem to do anything when done to: items in the inventory, items already selected from inventory, items on the ground while in the shop.

Game is fun, but on the second boss at the start of the battle it wouldn't draw any cards for some reason, and continued to not have any cards in hand each turn.  Maybe it is because I got a relic for ghost cards on field +1 with no ghost cards in deck?

yeah, me too, just the extra gold could almost always equal a couple extra potions or stat points or something usually.

Neat!  Lost to a boss that disabled my 'passive jokers' which appears to have been my whole strategy, although I didn't know it at the time. ~25k didn't seem possible without that, but maybe I'm missing something.

It works for me, but dang is this game slow.  I made it to level three before I ran out of patience with the slow move speed and gave up.  The enemies are okay, it just takes forever to get anywhere and do anything, even after 5 speed ups I feel about what I would have wanted at the beginning of the game.  I get that that's probably an intentional part of the theme-- most of the enemies are slugs and snails that are even slower than you-- but I guess I just don't have the patience for this sort of gimmick anymore :(

You can also put a different word over a name, though.  In this case I used 'kappas'

Very fun game!  Wish it was a lot longer-- running out of words towards the end would have been fun :)

Ok, sorry.  From start: go right to the staircase, then jump left over to where the attacks are coming from.  You need to jump over the attacks with good timing to make it to the screen to the left.  There you will see an enemy jumping up and down and shooting the attacks.  You can jump under them with good timing, or deal with them any other way, but you need to go left.  From there you will need to use fire, love, or wind to cross the chasm by jumping across with recoil, turning the enemy into a platform, or jumping up from the bottom respectively.  You are trying to go left without going up.  When you do this you will see a row of three enemies moving up and down in a short hallway.  Turn them into kittens with love and ride the middle one up to find the 'evil' sister (you can also make the jump with wind, but it's a little tricky since you have to dodge the enemies as well then).  She will cut out one of your eyes and eat it, but in the process give you the power to see what's hidden-- false walls will change color so you can tell where they are.  

From there, go to the other sister in the east.  To find her, go back to start, then go right, up the stairs, then go down and left through the fake wall below that you can see through now, dodging the attacks the enemy on the platform shoots.  Follow that path into the Tearstained Catacombs (purple walls, True Lord of Wind's area), then walk right through the checkpoint, through a fake wall on the top right, to a room with a ladder.  Climb the ladder and you will see a fairy (if you can see fairies) and a woman.  Talk to the woman exactly once and she will give you three eyes, which lets you see in the dark.  If you talk to her again, she'll restore your eyes to normal and lend you glasses (four-eyes is the pun), which have no effect, and you can give her the glasses back by talking again to return to normal, at which point you'd need to get an eye eaten again to be able to return to seeing in the dark with three eyes.

Nope! But here's some for my new PB:

So can you, like, just unequip the ring except when picking up gold?  What's the tradeoff here?

I just spent like 8 hours grinding this stupid room in it and you know what you get for beating it? Turned to stone ;_;

Also I like pretty much every genre of game (although not equally-- I tend to have a higher bar on Interactive Fiction/Visual Novel/Dating Sim type games and a much lower one for 7drls ) so I wouldn't worry (and also what I think doesn't really matter that much, I'm just a dude on the internet ;P).  So far they've been fun, just not as engaging due to the difference in scope.

Best so far is 1:15:593

Oh, I didn't mean to imply she didn't know video game history,  I merely was remarking upon what I see as the lack of journalism in the article itself. Excited to try more of the games, although none of the ones I've tried so far have been this good (but they've been short things like If I clear 50 Stages Maybe I'll be Loved. I'll try Sylvie Lime once I finish Love

Beat it! Excellent game! 

It was a necromancer run with the crypts and all but one floor of the Gauntlet of Yendor full of skeletons and other toxic-immune undead.  And the final boss arena was in the sewers.  I don't know if maybe the game updated to target the player's weaknesses in the final area design-- it used to always be basically the same and relatively easy compared to most bosses-- but if not that is some BAD luck XD  Still managed to win somehow, and got my first necromancer clear with Ice Lance + Sleep Bomb.

Excellent entry!

Reminds me of hexcelle, which is probably a good thing.  The mutations could probably use some balance tweaking, but the game is fun in its present state, which is a great sign.  Beat it second try.

Could use an ending.

I have now read the design notes.  It is interesting to me how different what I thought was going on in the game was from what you had intended to be going on.  I certainly didn't feel like the pieces failed to fit together but I also didn't know your name was Sylvie or that the game was metaphorically about a specific real person until after playing it.  For me, the layers of interacting things was the highlight-- I, in fact, quite like multi-purpose content in videogames, although the idea that Animal Well was doing anything new with that annoys me since it's been a feature of countless video games since at least the Atari 2600.  The poor quality of game journalism is hardly your fault, though.  The multi-purpose nature of the elemental powers is cool, but much more compelling to me was the multipurpose nature of the characters and rooms.  I was particularly suprised to find out that what I had assumed were cosmetic changes-- like the eye things-- had mechanical effects (I didn't use the hint or help system at all, so I didn't know about the flower or glasses effects, but I found the one and three eye ones, and Aria tells you about the double jump as well although I hadn't noticed the costume change and had immediately reversed becoming a devil), and that getting to the True Lords without their elements was an intended feature of the gameplay, rather than accidental sequence breaking (although it sounds like you were supposed to have two abilities to get to them and doing it with just one wasn't actually intended.  Woops :/  Downside of exploration-based gameplay with skill requirements, I suppose). 

In any case, I thought it was cool, I didn't mind coming up with the details of how everything fit together on my own and I came up with a pretty detailed (but completely unintended it would seem) setting and explanation for what's going on.  I didn't think Wind made any less sense than the others, honestly Fire is the one that seems kinda out there because Love and Wind are both trying to do impossible things (If I love them enough, surely they must love me back/If I try hard enough, surely the world will be fixed) but while relationships and society are both things that are ultimately outside our control and so no amount of Sylvie-blood can effectuate that last little piece the Lords are looking for, Fire just wants to make stuff and that's not really, like, dependent on external forces or anything.  It made associating the talisman of Body with the Lord of Wind an interesting choice because the implication seems to be that internalized artistic demands are destructive even separate from physical limitations because of their obsessive, time-consuming nature.  Maybe Fire's line is "If I put enough into my art, surely it will be perfect".

Lastly I would say that parables are not trivial or trite, but difficult works to create that express moral truths in a multifaceted way.  I think you are concerned about making something that is expressing a simple message, but there's nothing wrong with a simple message-- the simplicity of a statement need not belie a shallowness to its truth.  Furthermore, the game's highly abstract nature provides plenty of space for people to try and put the things together themselves. That said, if the game was intended as a parable about taking care of ones self, I don't think it was terribly successful in that regard-- the literary form seems much closer to stream-of-consciousness writing like e.g. *The Bridge* than e.g. Luke 15.  That's an extremely difficult form, though, and it sounds like you were hoping for it *not* to be that, anyhow.

Idk.  I guess I just think you're selling yourselves short on this piece.

P.S. In the design document you seem to be concerned about the game being too difficult.  I don't think any of the challenges took me more than 30 mins individually, and I'd say the game was challenging enough to be fun, but a bit on the easy side.  I know you suggested True Ending no outfits, but that's basically what I already did and not getting to wear a flower is sad.  I didn't look at the helps, but if the boss difficulty slider goes the other way it might be nice to put that somewhere else or signpost it or something so people don't miss it thinking that section is just to make the game easier.  Although if it just changes the bosses' hp that sounds more annoying than fun as a change-- the regular false lord fights took me the longest of any boss because it took me until the second one to realize I could moonwalk with the sword if I pressed right and left at the same time (which kills the boss in seconds, so I actually thought it might be a glitch, but it looks like it was intentional though intended more for the Fire jump than the sword).  Speed ups or something might be fun, though.

It's interesting how asymetrical the game is.  For the player, elves are kinda bad and lizard spies are kinda good, but since elf healers heal the player rather than the enemy regardless of team, and likewise for lizard spies, lizards are crazy good for the enemy and elves are absolute trash.  Nevertheless, because the enemy doesn't know that all units other than spies and dwarves are trash, the game quickly becomes unloseable. Also there's a glitch where if you click next step too quickly to try and skip through a fight you get a huge amount of extra money, so I stopped after that around round 60 or so I think.

Not sure what's up with merging; it didn't seem to do anything.  Though it's also not necessary, of course.  Maybe it is just an easter egg for the gold star you get at level 3?

To see in the dark, you need three eyes.  When the kind sister heals you after the evil one gives you the same deal she gave Odin, she gives you an extra as well.  The evil sister is located in the upper left third of the central heart-- try using Love or Wind where the three shades go up and down together.

Note: Running out of time on a boss doesn't do damage, it just instantly kills you.  My bad trying to math out a 50/50 since I had a shield thinking it was better not to risk wasting one of my seven hearts XD

Got what says its the true ending, but I never did solve the pseudo-braille puzzle :(  

Game is awesome 10/10, will show to my best friend. Thanks for making this!

I've found this puzzle that says 'Aria was here' in psuedo-braille (upside down) but I don't know what to do with that information... 

I made it to the True Lord of Love with only Wind powers.  That was intense! I'm honestly not sure if I'm doing this the way you are supposed to or not but it was extraordinarily difficult compared to the rest of the game, though still very fun and rewarding. Looking forward to seeing where this all leads.

But maybe you are supposed to kill them later than I did after talking to the True Wind Lord without having met the false one yet... idk.  I can't imagine making it to the True Wind Lord without both fire and love...

Found another fairy that clears things up.  You aren't supposed to not kill them after all it seems.

Game seems awesome so far.  I didn't think I could make progress otherwise and I wasn't too suspicious of the objective, so I killed the False Lord of Love, but when I went to the celestial garden with the key I got afterwards it looks like you are supposed to be finding the true lords instead, but then when I reached the end of the area there's a portal that reads identical to the one where I killed the False Lord and its not active anymore so I assume you need to get there without killing the false lord, but I don't know how I would get the key without the power of Love (or, honestly, how I would then get to the end portal of the gardens without it in an area that felt like love-themed puzzle platforming).  I wonder what I am missing...

Works great now :)  MADE IT TO ROUND 17

You may be interested in Against Great Darkness, which is also a roguelike/breakout hybrid.

Game board does not display properly on Firefox, rendering the game unplayable because only tiles in the top left of the window can be clicked, most of the playable board is off-screen, and most of the board that is on-screen is supposed to be off-screen and so is non-interactive

Is there an end?  I just finished collapsing everything into the red roofed building @ ~20k and I kinda figured that would be the end because 2^11 is 2048 but it is still going...

Game could use a boss and ending.  Got far enough in that rooms take 20+ minutes each just because of how many waves of guys there are (and a little bit how much health they have, but mostly just how many there are).