itch.io

Really impressive piece of work! Felt good to play and the gradual buildup of weirdness into flesh horror greatly resonated with me! 

Also a really robust experience so far, I haven't come across any bugs or visibly unfinished parts, which is quite unusual for any jam game!

Found this one too late for the rating period, sadly, only stumbled over it when it featured in one of the top spots for gameplay. 

Should there be any sound? There was absolutly none in my playthrough. 

I liked the visuals, but a bit more light would be nice. The controls felt good, overall, maybe add some more feedback to it. But it was fun to explore the lighthouse. 

Also: This was by far the most beautiful menu screen. One might argue that this isn't exactly an important category in a jam, but it looked really good!

One problem I had was your tutorial disappearing without my input: Given the font it was hard to process the text in time and check out what's happening. 

The controls felt good and the SFX underpinned everything nicely, so movement felt good. If you want to have a jump at all, you might wanna go for a much higher jump than that. 

I think the single-touch instant kill is far too harsh, given there is no option for crowd control and the visibility is pretty low (not to mention enemies spawn and move behind me with no visual or audio cues). While I like the little subversion ofsiphoning rather than shooting, it felt a bit floaty to me since I found it hard to gauge effective range and impact. 

Strong atmosphere, but I can't help to hold it against the game that it is just a short timer until death with seemingly no way to impact it on my end. While I get that there is a message in this, it felt too depressing with no agency.

That being said, if depressive is the mood you want to go for, you did really well with the dialog, the visual design and the post processing. Personally it would have made sense to me if the campfire would have been dying down over time, too, but that's a bit nitpicky, I'll admit. 

Seems to be unavailable - can't rate that...

I liked that one! The "gun"-play isn't tremendously deep, but it is a cool take on schizophrenia, both the presence of incorporeal things haunting you and hunting you down, and the coping mechanism of willing a weapon and ammo into existence. The animation and SFX on shooting, reloading and generating ammo are great and I think there is actually a lot of potential to expand this with i.e. dual-wielding your hands or using similar copes. 

One thing I found a little too harsh was the fact, so many eyes sneak up from behind. I could easily clear my field of view, but they would get me from behind and since I am pretty sure ghostly eyes can't actually hurt me physically, they shouldn't spawn and act when I am not even looking their way. Maybe take some inspiration from SuperHot and make them only move when I move (or rather when they are in view), while spawning in view, so there's a constant pressure, but the player doesn't get overwhelmed as quickly. 

Other than that I liked it a lot, nice visuals, the posterization was effective, I only felt like those levels could benefit from a few more 3D assets. 

Fully agree on that! It's technically a gimmick, but adds tremendous value as a framing device!

I like the art and the quirkiness of the cat in general, but  boy am I terrible at those games XD Managed to clear it on Beginner difficulty and nothing else.

I am, however, impressed you implemented several difficulty levels. 

For me, the interface, while pretty in itself, was visually at odds with the idea of eldritch piano music. I think I would've preferred something a little closer to diegetic interface elements. Additionally, the response on hitting a note was basically non-existent. Some sparkle or at least a much brighter highlight would help, anything to indicated the player did it correctly, given there really isn't much room to experiment. 

As your first attempt, this was a solid start and I won't be unloading for all the stuff you couldn't reasonably learn in that short time period. However, one thing you should probably fix asap is the spawn position: It took me more than one attempt to even figure out what type of game this is, since I couldn't see the character and hadn't read the hints on the game page. If you started in the light, it would have been much clearer what to expect and how to approach it. 

Other than that, I agree with KrNo and SeeOne: Make the bullets pierce through, since the beam isnt't stopped. In fact, I wasn't sure until the end, whether I was possibly hitting more than one enemy (since they are quite bullet-spongy) and there AI acts in such a way that having a piercing ray weapon would allow for great crowd control by lining them up and dispatching them. Also lower their movement speed just a little bit, add WASD for movement input and you will have a tremendous improvement. 

Strong theme and atmosphere! I liked this puzzle format (a lot), but frankly, I feel there is a mismatch between the tight time limit and the format of the puzzle: If I want to perform meticulous translation work on books and notes, I want that to be slow and deliberate, not brute-forced due to time constraints. Maybe a different trade-off would have been more effective here. 

Additionally: Actions don't always feel like they have an effect: I was quite confused by the safe-combination, since it seemed like I was just booted out of that screen after entering the combination. 

However,  I can absolutely see a game about a desperate librarian trying to keep it together as the world falls into chaos, decay and darkness around them!

Thanks for your feedback! The cursor turn speed needs adjustment, the problem snuck in last minute and we didn't have time to catch it before the deadline. We are also working on the combat system to expand it into a full souls like!

The atmosphere was dense and felt very tangible, but I had quite some trouble just running the game: There were some drops and stutters, sometimes lasting several seconds. Additionally with a touchpad on laptop, the controls were very cumbersome, but that is nothing I would hold against the game on a jam scope. 

I got stuck on the bottles puzzle, like many others, apparently, and overall I felt like I progressed through some of the others without understanding why. I wasn't sure, if the poems were supposed to be part of the puzzles or rather the reward for solving them. I couldn't sort or classify them in any way either, so it left me with a feeling of "Is this wrong or am i doing it wrong?" Essentially I would have liked more clarity on how to interact with the poems, really. 

I returned to the game today and found that the save-system is a bit out of control: In order to get a clean start I have to restart the enitre game, otherwise some of the dialog will remain where it was. Since it doesn't take a long time to load up, I could work around it, but this will become a problem, quickly. 

The most problematich thing is the lack of guidance: I got lost regularly, because there are no landmarks. Movement feels cumbersome with the tree colliders - the branches are hardly noticeable, so not being able to pass underneath is puzzling. This is a problem, because there are already very few features on the map. Add some memorable stones, logs, palisades - stuff you can build from your existing asset library.  This will also allow you to engage in some environmental storytelling and generally more narrative content. In addition, I would explore a more stylized, painterly artstyle: The current one seems to try and match realistic PBR pipelines, which I don't think is a great choice for the dire setting you are building or the top-down presentation. The actual quality of the 3D assets was fine, btw., you should've just used a lot more of them. 

The dialog interface wouldn't allow me to scroll, so if I get impatient reading, I skip straight to the end. Consider breaking dialog down into smaller chunks (a lot of it is set dressing anyway, very little of the text is essential gameplay info you'd have to get out in a single burst) or add a scroll box, so everything can be seen at once. If you want your text to be read, make the speed at which it appears strictly faster than any person could ever read. 

Try to match the speed of animation with the movement speed of your character controller. From my own experience I knwo that Mixamo has enough clips to implement both, walking and running in eight directions, plus sprinting, so choose the appropriate clips or go with an animation-driven system that relies on root motion. Both are valid, depending on your use case. Additionally, you chose animation clips made from motion capture. Those usually contain a lot of motion that obscures actual moments of impact and feel floaty and disconnected. That is fine if you are making a game with highly-polished, matching animation where every clip fits the rest and you show the entire combat up close, but not a Diablo-like. 

The progression system you've created is in dire need of consistent landing points: If I kill eighteen cultists straightaway, I should not be punished by not getting some of the benefits. If you deem it essential, some sort of counter or indicator would've been helpful, since cultists attack in groups and I have no control over engagements. 

This is actually another problem: Engagements where me, walking through relative darkness, until some cultists come in running to kill me. I cannot decide whether to engage (their sensory range is higher, I can't see them and have no landmarks to memorize them by) and I can hardly learn from any encounter, because they just come running and never ever give up. It would be really beneficial if I had some way of deciding whether or not I want to fight. Similarly, I would like to know, what they are capable of before the fight starts (which I could easily guess if I could see them beforehand. 

Combat Controls feel extremely sticky, because the character doesn't seem to turn intuitively. I am a fan of matching the character's directional input, but here I was constantly facing the wrong direction and couldn't turn towards the cultists while attacking. For this style of gameplay that felt like the wrong choice. With the complete lack of hit feedback (the impact clips and even the dying animation felt extremely slow and floaty, I would always swing again, just to make sure) the combat was really awkward. The choice of having your shield work on a percentage base added to this lack of clarity: I see that this is more reliable to pull off on a jam time frame, but blocking didn't feel good, more like the cultists were bugging out. 

So this is a number of initial problems to go through in a post jam fix. 

I liked the art style and animation in terms of character design, enemy design and 2D-3D-blend. The sound worked, although it didn't do a ton for me, personally, just providing feedback to my inputs, which is fine by me. 

What I really didn't get was the idea of gameplay behind it: I could reasonably easy evade any enemies and there was the hint about blue fog, which presumably helped, but it was hard to tell, whether this was because of me running away or the fog obscuring me. I didn't find any clues whatsoever in regards to the combinations, so I just brute-forced all of them (which, admittedly, wasn't that hard). I am not sure if this is because I didn't see any clues or there weren't any. 

Are there any consequences to being hit by enemies? It seemed like there was some sort of hp loss and re-fill at the green spots, maybe, but it never actually came into play.

Also: I reached the first floor, tried to get past the barricade of bones and glitched through the floor to my (presumably) death. 

I had trouble getting into it: 
There was very little guidance (as in: I didn't know what I represent, what my task was, why am I here). Also I had virtually no feedback on hits or misses, no projectiles to be seen, no impacts, just numbers going up, some of the time. That wasn't exactly engaging for me, personally. I especially couldn't see where to go (other than: into range to shoot green bacteria blobs). 
What would help the game most, in my opinion, is clear feedback on hit, on getting hit, on miss and on being missed by enemies. There were some shots sailing past, but I could hardly see them, much less make any meaningful decision based on them, because they were too fast and too unpredictable. Allow me to somehow track where the AI is shooting, i.e. more, but slower bullets, each with a trail, so I can see and respond. If you want to have a jump, make it much more substantial (higher, wider), so I can use it for meaningful maneuvering. 

Sadly I could hardly play it, since no fullscreen button was displayed and its chosen resolution was almost twice my screen size. I'll not rate this for, since I can't give any informed opinion, might try again on the other PC witha larger screen. 

I liked the idea and the whole thing looks very simplistic, yet pretty.  The sound worked well for me, both the ambience and the feedback sounds. Only the decayed keys sounded a bit out of place to me - I think that is a matter of tweaking the SFX assets here. However, the gameplay was a bit too obscure for me: I really had trouble figuring out what the game even wanted me to do and I was never certain, whether or not I was stuck or just had the wrong idea about my next action. 

Thanks a lot! Glad you liked it!

The destructibles are actually quite simple, just activate/instantiate the version in small pieces and then foreach(shard in shards){
shard.AddExplosiveForce(<appropriate strength and distance>). They go ballistic like that, because some of the colliders overlap, which introduces a certian amount of chaos and upward motion. 

Additionally, having some that break easier than others adds a bit of variety to an otherwise small set of destructible objects. 

I really enjoyed placing them, tho! Glad you liked it!

Thanks!

Glad to hear you liked it! W've had a blast making it, but expading ad refining comba is high up on our priority list!

Thanks for the hint, I will give it another try later! If the increased wave pressure is by design, maybe I can push through it by the right combination, the shield just didn't seem to work very efficiently, but maybe I just botched it in my first playthrough... Will see later!

Unclear yet. There will be a patch and a lot of the assets and code will be propagated into our wider library for future projects. Whether we will develop this one into a product we have not discussed so far. 

I don't think I get it...

Looks really neat and consistent! The artwork is chosen nicely and I realy liked how the planet moves in response to my cursor input. I like the sound design and especially the tactile card handling. Bunching all card interactions into the same drag-n-drop modality was a good choice. 

The atmosphere felt like that of a typical oppressive sci fi movie about isolation and mental deterioration (some might call it "decay") and I find that the music really added to it, as if someone was listening to a Spotify playlist titled "don't hang yourself" while working overtime in space. 

I would have liked more interactivity and control over what the gun is doing, since I lost a lot of shots to poor target selection. Additionally, in mission 3 or so, the ships started to move really fast all of a sudden - so fast that I could not have stopped them, even with a full hand of ideal cards (which I didn't have either way). Felt unreasonable, compared to the numeric increases serving as difficulty spike before. 

Overall I think this is a cool game which needs some tweaking and should be continued in a post jam update!

Note: I had a hard time reading the hints for each ration, the font just blends with the artwork. 

Found it, too, by following the road and walking across a hill to chop birches. The first "Internal memory Allocation" thing seemed genuinely part of a 4th wall breaking decay-thing, but dropping through the map with no recourse and no way to even exit, didn't. So I am not sure which parts are intentional.

There is now a video playthrough for the main path on the game's itch page. Recording it I think I saw your most likely problem in terms of guidance. 

Thanks for your kind words! We've had a blast making this game and are so glad people liked it! There are aspects in the gameplay, guidance and presentation we want to fix up in a post jam fix and your feedback will help with that!

I really love the idea, both the subversion and the fact you have to convince the crew with a random assortment of picked up words. I would've liked a broader set of phrases and some sort of fail state or narrowing down. So far I had to mostly guess the right answer and didn't see much in the way of clues, other than some of the dialog lines. 

The visual art is quite cool, too!

I like the core idea of a growing thing that slowly devours the whole place.

Looked very nice and chill. I loved the subversion with dusting the statue: The townsfolk actually just forgot about the eldritch god of decay, so you have to work on your PR XD

Otherwise it seemed solid, no bugs, everything went very smooth, only the player character wouldn't rotate the way it is shown in the title screen.

Shame about the shader, I liked the way it looks in the screenshot!

I do not think I am grasping the idea of this game. Can't seem to interact with anything, including the apparitions, just walking down in a straight line. Didn't get any sound effect either, the aspect ratio  it was displayed in makes me think there might be some glitches involved or my Browser caused problems. 

I do not think I am grasping the idea of this game. Can't seem to interact with anything, including the apparitions, just walking down in a straight line. Didn't get any sound effect either, the aspect ratio  it was displayed in makes me think there might be some glitches involved or my Browser caused problems. 

I agree on this, at first it felt a bit irritating to not have them out continuously. I think it would be cool, to see them for much longer. Not seeing the current weapon constantly made me want to iron-sights aim, which I think is the opposite of what you are going for with this one. 

This is so metal!

I love the fluidity and the absolute zero f***s about any and all notion of slowness or methodical approaches - it's just all violence all the time! 

In Ernest: I would appreciate a better feedback on my current HP and taking hits, plus I think this game with its constant screenshakes would benefit from heavier, more bulbous enemies and some more intense VFX upon hitting something. With the gaunt shapes I can hardly see whether I am hitting, much less doing any damage. 

Nevertheless I am enjoying it and it looks pretty cool in its straightforward simplicity. The way limbs and weapons are animated add a really old school feel to it which I think is a great choice here. The music really drives one into a frenzy, too. Amazing work, keep it up!

Just sad that I am really bad at this type of game, but that is certainly not your fault XD

Yes, the font display in windowed is somewhat hard to read. It works much better in full screen, in case you want to return to it at some point. Thanks for the solid rating!

Thanks for the kind words! The rendering and artwork took up a solid chunk of our time, so we're glad to hear it was satisfying!
Could you detail when you felt the visual cues lacking? Theoretically there should always be a hint, either in a cutscene or a key's item description, so I'm not sure if this points to a technical bug or just a guidance issue. 

The game is quite pretty in its simplicity, and it sounds good! I like the overall idea!

That being said, I struggled to get the gameplay: Quite often I would experience black-fades for no apparent reason, losing substantial points. Not sure if this is an intentional thing because I messed up, but it certainly didn't feel like a bug. 

Other than that it was quite cool to explore and tinker with the machines, strugling to keep them in check. It integrates the theme very well and createas a hopeless, depressing and most importantly horrific atmosphere - all things I do want from a horror game! 

I like the atmosphere! This game is clearly out of scope for a jam and as a fellow scope creeper I can relate!

Very nice, dark-and-somber mood! Getting a progression system into a game like this is impressive for any jam game and I enjoyed the sheer depressive worldbuilding! That being said, I overperformed the progression cureve and ended up not getting taught how to use the fireball spell or the shield, just straight to the final sword.

There were only very minor bugs across my several playthroughs, but the mismatch between movement speed and animation (and the overall Mixamo-quality of the animation clips) was a bit on the heavy side.

The level design would have benefitted from some more landscape features (rocks, trees, a cultist camp, anything you can do with the assets you already have, really). I had tremendous problems to keep my orientation, since there were hardly any landmarks to navigate by. Given the significant size of the playable area, this posed a serious problem. 

Despite my critique, I want to see this project succeed, so I'll stop here. If you want more feedback, let me know!

Yeah, there is some tweaking to be done in patch 1.1, for sure!