I’m quite late to play but I was curious to come back and check out the judges’ top pick eventually!

Very robust Dungeon Crawler gameplay fundamentals. A bit on the easy side, and equipment quality ramps up unexpectedly fast, but that was appreciated for packing a full experience into a short jam game. Your endgame twist was very cool – I didn’t expect all that extra content in the last couple minutes, including the outdoor map. It made me a lot more invested in your story/world, too.

I found a coin item that said it raised my strength by 5, but I never did figure out how to use it. It wouldn’t equip to any slots and when I passed it between characters, their stats didn’t change. I wonder what that was about…?

Congratulations and best of luck with your next game.

I’m a fan of how you’ve used the MS Paint style with your ridiculous designs. The lightning-fast movement feels very appropriate. (I did notice I can step into some wall tiles if I turn corners suddenly, but it didn’t make me get stuck or anything.)

The Undertale combat stuff is put to charming use, and is that a bit of Dicey Dungeons influence in the RNG mitigation, too? It all comes together very well. Some of the enemy dodge phases should be shorter though – it drags a few of the fights out, which isn’t so much of a problem, but would be in a longer game.

That all makes sense! Pathfinding is not a challenge I’ve ever tried to tackle yet myself.

I confess I had no idea I could level up from wolves. I settled on fleeing, thinking it was just a dice roll to overcome the danger one way or the other. I might’ve figured it out if I playtested longer, so I’ll give you that one. I was more concerned with trying to rush ahead in order to conserve food/potions.

Cute visual style, even in little things like the battle UI buttons. The use of elements with creature capture mechanics reminds me of an old PSX game called Jade Cocoon, although that was a bit more Pokemon-like… haven’t seen anything like it in a while, anyway, so that’s cool. All you need is a little garden where you can feed and raise them or something!

Great music track, but a notable lack of sound effects, which really affects the feel.

A few more little nitpicks:

• All that intro text should really be typed faster!
• Agreed with others that movement should be a few times faster than it is.
• UI is a massive pain to work on, I know, but you should definitely have a standard Esc button or X somewhere to close menus – you can actually open your item and shop menus at the same time. I managed to confuse myself just trying to close them.
• I also can’t see who I’m healing when I’m in the items menu.

I think the little things like that add up, and are what you need most, compared to things like content or balancing fixes, but congrats on the unique submission.

Wow, very sophisticated spell combo system given the limited time of this jam… honestly kind of jealous at what you accomplished when I see that spellbook. The limitations feel a bit artificial, as you can (for example) start casting Sun and then take a step before it finishes to avoid losing Lun’s Shade… but it is a lot of confusing juggling, especially during combat. I feel I got a pretty good handle on the spells in order to beat one of the endgame bosses, though.

Excellent sound design, and obviously knocked it out of the park on adherence to the theme.

I found the strafe/turn controls confusing (you can also end up inside of a statue by turning?) and just settled on never using the strafe keys. Also really wanted a way to cancel levitate, as it was making me queasy, though I realized it was step-based and I could just quickly move back and forth to get rid of it when I cast it by accident while trying to cast the map one or whichever.

As others have said, this is honestly far better on basic fundamentals of dungeon crawler movement/mechanical interactions than many of the entries I’ve played. I don’t think that’s a bad priority at all, though it may have hurt it here as rated as a jam entry. When you keep in mind that a lot of underlying system work can be recycled, I could see you putting out a beast of a game if there’s a Dungeon Crawler Jam 2024…

Would agree that the lack of sound is particularly unfortunate.

As a smaller bit of feedback, I think the wall brackets for torches are too hard to see, as I initially missed the first one I was supposed to use.

The hand-drawn style is very cool, great watercolor portraits. Though I also find the child-playroom dreamworld style very unnerving, so, kudos if that’s what you were going for…

Great audio work.

It’s hard to navigate without getting lost. I can keep some reference if I look at the map at the very beginning but I tend to lose all sense of where I am before long, especially with the ice and the other-world transitions. (Also, I once ‘woke up’ on a water tile and was unable to move.)

I’m impressed with you getting a turn-based tactical grid combat system into a week-long jam. I thought the combat was impossible, clowns were just warping into me in one turn and annihilating my party, but then I saw your youtube gameplay clip and felt that my original party composition was just completely worthless for battle. Taunt wasn’t helpful as I’d still take enough damage to die. I don’t know how I’d do it without Lion/Witch for the stuns and move speed. (And even then my party got wiped very fast after managing to navigate down some stairs, so that’s as far as I got.)

All in all fairly sophisticated, but could definitely use some balance/difficulty adjustment, and some way to keep a sense of where I am on the map.

Your combat mechanic is actually very cool, abusing enemy patterns is a satisfying puzzle, fairly simple but with room to be expanded upon. More tutorializing would have helped – maybe just some one-time pop-up to tell you that tiles highlighted in red will mean danger there on the next turn – but it’s a good thing you can get right back to the first fight in a couple seconds, or I would have bounced off before figuring it out.

I saw you note the lack of checkpointing on the game page, and yeah, I definitely took two steps on the floor my first time in cyberspace and died before I knew what hit me… but after that I was able to trial-and-error the rest without taking risks, and beat the game.

Very theme-appropriate, and I like the visual style. More landmarks to break up the levels would have helped a lot with navigation, as I just had to fall back on “follow the left hand wall” maze tactics when I got lost looking for the door to use a keycard on.

It would be nice if the monsters also took damage stepping on those floor symbols at the end, jerks. :)

Very sophisticated effects/lighting/sound design!

Though it is a very cohesive package for a 7-day project, I am not sure the orb-clicking adds much to the game as it is – with the notable exception of the ‘health’ one, they seemed to feel the same. In a longer project I think it might work better with more ties between the theme of the challenge and the orb defense segments? Undertale’s combat gimmicks would be the most obvious example of tying ‘bullet’ gameplay to other things that are happening, while aided by text and art.

Cool writing/use of theme.

I didn’t love the combat – I was just trading hits hoping to win and heal off a level-up, but it got me killed. Combat could auto-resolve without missing out on anything, and it would play much faster.

But kudos on the self-imposed restriction of making this as a playable Game Boy ROM(??), that’s crazy! I wanna try it myself now.

I like the way you tutorialized your controls by writing them on the walls. Spooky enemies. Cool music. Great use of theme / setting!

Got lost in the maze and wasn’t able to finish. Combat is a bit too high in potential for instant failure/restart. I got killed once by an enemy I didn’t see behind me after warping. Some sound effects would have gone a long way.

Thank you!

Interesting game.

• A unique and engaging combat mechanic. But a bit simple too. Mostly all I did was defend to find out where the enemy was and then heavy attack the same spot. Might be better if they moved around out of turn order and you had to watch the ripples / listen more, or had other skills to reveal them briefly? Hard to do all that in the span of the game jam I know, but just sharing my thoughts.

• The minimap is good. I would prefer some angle marker on the player position so I would know which way I was facing, as I was sometimes double-turning in the dark and getting disoriented. Also maybe mark “walls” with a border line around the tile if you’ve touched them?

• Definitely want more than one “Hello?” sound effect if you’re leaning on sound design!

Cool enemy sprites. Otherwise plays too slowly and feels too RNG-dependent, but I do like the dice game emphasis. There was a 3DS game called Crimson Shroud that I highly recommend checking out if you want to see a really well-executed take on that… at least on youtube, as I don’t think you can buy it anymore.

Wasn’t able to get too far here because whenever I died I’d be back to the start with an 80% chance of dying to the first slime again. (Was I supposed to start with 0 in all stats?)

Thank you for playing!! You are the second person to say they brute-forced with two digits. The fourth is only available once you have the other three, but I’m curious if it’s always the same one tripping people up. You said you beat the minotaur, so I wonder if you missed his little questline where you can talk to him after a point, and missed the one from the hotel concierge? I can easily envision people mashing the attack button and not noticing the text change because the combat was too simplistic.

I have heard the slow movement thing a lot, will definitely speed that up next time!

Thank you for playing! I caught the vod of your stream. Really shows me how much I need to work on tutorializing things within the game itself, especially with regards to using the pearl and talking to NPCs.

And yes, the narrow field of view was a bit of an unfortunate trade-off. I mostly navigate my own game by minimap, myself. The tunnel-vision has its benefits for getting up close with the character art, but I would do it differently now.

Wow, I thought some other games were retro. This game is retro. Kinda charming.

I died a ways in; I dunno if the slimes started hitting harder or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention while tapping through to resolve battles and took damage without realizing. That’s definitely a risk when you aren’t choosing skills or anything, and I should know, as my game has virtually the same battle “system”.

The map helps a lot. But it would be profoundly easier to navigate/pick stuff up with hotkeys.

I’m not happy about your pun, sir.

Wow, I love the undersea setting for a dungeon crawler. Your monsters look so cool. Great sound design, UI, typography, everything visually executed extremely well.

Since you just random-battle farm for a drop, it’s easy to get confused at that first NPC blocking your way. I think you’re well aware that the gameplay/combat is shallow (no pun intended) right now, so I needn’t say anything more, haha.

I also think this game was meant to have extra up-down depth controls to get to shallower and deeper water.

Really solid deckbuilding hook with the poison/stall and cleanse mechanics and everything! As others have noted I got stuck after the Templar, but I can really see the potential there, especially being tantalized by an increase to cauldron size after the boss.

Pleasantly surprised by the fluid enemy animations. Cool boss music too.

Not sure where the theme comes in? Poison vs Healing? But there’s Weaken too, does that make it a triality?

Turn speed feels slow, relative to move speed.

I’m not exactly rating games on typography but that font choice is real bad, lol.

Oh hey, you’re that Frankie! I saw some of your pixel art streams a long time ago. Great art, man.

I think it does honestly work as an autobattler. With a short look it seems like a really mechanically deep submission. Do all these character skill levels actually do things, or is it just a bit of fakery as a taste for a larger game?

I was a bit lost without a manual. No idea what an autobroker does, but selling it sure nets me a lot of cash for hiring much better crew right out of the gate… I didn’t get very far before it crashed on me, though. No idea where the theme plays in.

Absolutely had to play this one on the basis of the screenshots, love your character art and use of color so much. Great sound design too, and interesting interpretation of theme.

Utterly confusing otherwise! As others have said I thought it was a rhythm game but I think the encounters are just rock-paper-scissors spam? I found several mirrors to interact with, but got completely lost.

Amazing presentation! Had visual bugs starting on Firefox but worked better when I swapped to Chrome (unsurprisingly). The character creation is really cool, though more for style points than fleshing out the gameplay, which is a bit on the simple side. A week is very short though, I know.

My guy had a bow and ran out of arrows, kinda becoming useless? I never found more, and I’d already picked up the health items before taking damage. But it was pretty simple to step in and out to cheese combat with my other character anyway.

Thank you for the kind feedback! Heard that a few times about movement, guess I’ll be speeding that up when I do a post-jam patch… 😅

Thank you!

Very sorry to hear that. I’ve learned of some extreme performance issues on certain systems. The movement is supposed to be a framerate-independent 0.25s per tile, but on certain systems you get like 5 fps and it takes over a second just to move once. I have plans to mitigate that in the future but for now I wouldn’t recommend trying to run it on an old laptop or on browsers other than Chrome. The Windows executable should also be fine.

• Absolutely nailed the classic tone/aesthetic! Very well made.
• Perfectly incorporated the theme! Though I was definitely confused when I came out the Shaman cave – I initially thought I just took a second hall leading to the same exit and the same town got corrupted by monsters while I was away, so I was lost for a bit.
• Should have custom mouse cursor art to go with it though, lol. It breaks the immersion a bit when I have to use the windows mouse cursor to close a dialogue and so on.
• A map would be nice.
• Could use a torch hotkey since I just swap it out for a shield every time an enemy is a tile away… or so I wrote, but I just found the “torch shield”, haha.
• Guessing it’s not true that the Beast Sword claims to have a -15 attack roll. It feels like an accuracy upgrade over the +10.
• The momentum system is interesting, though not as sophisticated as having other more varied moves besides accuracy modifiers, like status effects would be… Hard to cover that in a week, of course. I only really had to ramp up from careful to heavy attacks against the necromancer. On the whole it felt reliable enough just spamming heavy.
• The 8-legged ones respawn when I load my save and I’m not sure that’s intentional, I get no new dialogue from the oracle after killing both. I went on to beat the necromancer anyway, but didn’t hit any new conversation triggers. I guess I beat the game?

• Absolutely nailed the classic tone/aesthetic! Very well made.
• Perfectly incorporated the theme! Though I was definitely confused when I came out the Shaman cave – I initially thought I just took a second hall leading to the same exit and the same town got corrupted by monsters while I was away, so I was lost for a bit.
• Should have custom mouse cursor art to go with it though, lol. It breaks the immersion a bit when I have to use the windows mouse cursor to close a dialogue and so on.
• A map would be nice.
• Could use a torch hotkey since I just swap it out for a shield every time an enemy is a tile away… or so I wrote, but I just found the “torch shield”, haha.
• Guessing it’s not true that the Beast Sword claims to have a -15 attack roll. It feels like an accuracy upgrade over the +10.
• The momentum system is interesting, though not as sophisticated as having other more varied moves besides accuracy modifiers, like status effects would be… Hard to cover that in a week, of course. I only really had to ramp up from careful to heavy attacks against the necromancer. On the whole it felt reliable enough just spamming heavy.
• The 8-legged ones respawn when I load my save and I’m not sure that’s intentional, I get no new dialogue from the oracle after killing both. I went on to beat the necromancer anyway, but didn’t hit any new conversation triggers. I guess I beat the game?

• There’s a lot of good art for this game (like that title screen!) but a lot of it is spoiled by the pixel scaling issues. I’m sure you’ll address that when you get more time. Likewise with UI functionality type stuff.
• If I die I don’t actually die? I can just keep on going and be invincible?
• Not fully sold on the real-time combat. Waiting for enemies to walk into your tile, freely hitting them and then backing up to repeat was the way to go. I wasn’t taking damage at all until I backed into another enemy while kiting a Ghost Mush with really high HP, and then died basically instantly. You’d have to find a way to make timing/positioning basically the entirety of the game complexity, I think…
• Please fix the your/you’re typo on the second dialogue window in the game thx
• Unclear how the theme plays into it, as far as I got.

Wow, incredible old CRT visuals and vibes. Sound too. Simplistic gameplay; I don’t really have any choices. Defend seems to be the same as Attack? Would like a keybind other than space bar if it’s the only key I press. Actually took me a while to realize I could press it while walking around to get a menu, though.

Strategy seems like it would be to avoid the teleporter trap(?) and just grind at campfire. Not sure if the theme comes into play at all.

Thanks for playing and giving your feedback!

• Sorry you had trouble there, especially since talking is most of the game. I think I can fix some of that with a little extra tutorial text. It likely doesn’t help that if the first NPC you approach is mindlessly violent, F will do nothing. I should probably have a “They have nothing to say!” fallback line.

• CTRL does nothing. Maybe something just happened when you walked into something, and you thought another key press did it? Very curious, this is why seeing people first-time stream your games is invaluable for feedback, so you can see the exact process that leads to a thought.

Thank you! Yeah, that’s fair. There isn’t really much of a direction except where the map funnels you. You get the pearl and see what there is to be done with it.

Thank you! We do intend to do that, as well as posting our 1.1 patch that adds the intro we didn’t have time for, improves compatibility, and fixes some other issues. I’m not sure what the jam grace period is for seeing the games in the state they were originally submitted in.

Hey I love some Deadly Premonition, Pathologic-ass NPC quest gameplay even if it’s not really there yet. The player character sounds like Luigi. I got ganked by some spiders.

The cheap scares seem appropriate. The note-powered shotgun certainly was An Idea

Love to clean! Just like Super Mario Sunshine!

Wow!!!!!!!!!!!! 0/10

Ugly?? Sounds like you should be trapped in a school that teaches some dang manners

Kinda spooky, not gonna lie. I picked up some objects but was just kinda wandering around and my ass got caught. I wonder how their spawning and movement works. It’s a big map, maybe too big??

The slaughterhouse setting reminds me of an episode of a horror podcast I listened to not so long ago, Magnus Archives, “Killing Floor”. Or the abattoir in Pathologic. It’s a nice choice for creepy stuff.

Thank you! I’ll pass that on to the artists. :)