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A Bowl of Dust's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #3 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Story | #5 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Visuals | #5 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Funness | #7 | 2.667 | 2.667 |
| Overall | #7 | 2.500 | 2.500 |
| Characters | #9 | 2.333 | 2.333 |
| Puzzle Design | #11 | 1.667 | 1.667 |
Ranked from 3 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Historical Event
The game is based on Dust Bowls. Those were severe dust storms that affected the economy of the Southern part of 1930s United States. http://www.history.com/topics/dust-bowl
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Comments
The story was a bit bipolar between serious and silly. Wish you would have picked a direction. The door puzzle was interesting, but was the only puzzle. Would have been nice to have a few more. The audio levels were all over the place. Overall, I enjoyed it though.
Best of luck.
Really interesting graphic style and story! I included it in my $101 Adventure Challenge compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :)
Only the Jam Judges can score it, but the thought is appreciated. Thank you for your comment and good luck with your review site Kratzen.
Sorry for the long response time, I was putting every single second of my free time into Danganronpa V3, and programming.
I really like the art in this game. It's absurd but gives the game a really interesting feel.
There is only one actual puzzle in this game, but it's an interesting one. Audio based puzzles are not seen very often in adventure games. I really liked it, and it had a lead-in from the cow conversation.
The audio sets the feeling of atmosphere very well. Although minimal, it works perfectly to set the tone.
Speaking of tone, the weird pink cow kind of breaks immersion. Up to that point, the game was very immersive drawing the player into its world and then suddenly a slang talking pink cow appears and takes you right out of it.
The ending is kind of disappointing. There was no set-up for it, and so it didn't really make sense. Seemed like a tacked on "I can't think of an ending" ending.
All in all a good game. I had fun playing it.
Good job! I liked the pacing of this and how I was brought through the story in a natural way, and interacting with objects/locations always gave me new information to piece together about the plot. Played to the end and enjoyed it :)
I liked the graphics, it reminded me a bit of "collage". The absurd peanut characters is an artistic choice I can get behind, but the pink cow with a phone using Comic Sans and using modern acronyms was really out of place imho.
The whole game is based on absurd, but even knowing that, I didn't really understand the ending. :(
Sound-based puzzles are uncommon, so it was nice to have one here. :)
Thanks for feedback.
I thought the cow(Hilda) would be funny as a break between more serious parts. I can see how her random humor would seem overwhelmingly out of place.
The whole idea of the ending, from what I understand, is that the dust bowl manifests itself as an entity to take everything that Bill has left. It takes his daughter, and then even Hilda leaves(which is supposed to be more comedic). Though we don't get to see the horrible thing Bill did to deserve such fate, so it doesn't have as much impact.
That's my interpretation, but I only wrote the cow parts.