Such a cute game! Really love the pixel art here. The ending is really nice too!! (Even if it's pretty tough to get to xD) But it's a really rewarding game someone like me can play again and again. Really enjoyed it. We put a lot of effort into our games design too so do come play and rate ours as well ^_^

I loved the cutscene. Really nice work with the names! Made me laugh!

The game itself is a bit too hard I think. 

But after all: Well done. 

I love your art style. It's so great that you made the cut scenes. Music also fits the game. The gameplay is too difficult tho. Overall nice work!

I really like the story and the humour. The gameplay is really difficult, but okay that is what happens in game jams. Overall a pretty good jam game.

The graphics are really cute, and I like the dialogue between the mouse buddies. The music during the chase is also very fitting, and I like that in the beginning you can choose to reject or accept your friends' offer to help.

I see that a lot of other people have commented on the difficulty. As a general rule of thumb, for game jams, you should ideally make your game really, really easy to beat. The reason for this is that since there's a bunch of other games to play, if people get frustrated with yours, they're more likely to move on to another one. Additionally, you won't get feedback for the later parts of the game since they can't reach it.

There's a couple of things I would change. First, add coyote time, which is the grace period where you can still jump after leaving a platform. It was really easy to accidentally slip off a platform when I was trying to jump to another one. I also think the gravity should be lowered a little, and the hazards should be more clearly marked. I could see that the lightning was harmful, but the white puff clouds were not obvious at all and the rocks are really hard to see. Finally, I would decrease the speed of the tentacle monster, I think he catches up to you a bit too fast.

You've got a really comedic story and some great graphics with it to boot. Unfortunately I wasn't able to beat it, I would have really liked to see how the rest of the story plays out.

Good job on the music and graphics! Especially the monster is really well done. I like how the sprint mechanic makes you decide between going too slow and too fast :P

Cool idea with having a decision that influences gameplay so it would be nice to have an option to start from the beginning after a failed run to choose differently.

It's a bit frustrating when messing up one jump can mean that you have to start over but first need to wait for the monster to pick you up, often more than once >:C

• Thank you so much for including a windowed version. I hate fullscreen games with a passion

• I was very confused at first because I was trying to understand what “Extraterre strial cheese” was supposed to mean (the title screen has a line break)

• The rain (and accompanying ambience) looks good and I really like the impact particles it creates when it hits the ground

• Usually I wouldn’t recommend mixing multiple styles (in this case pixel art and just normal low-res involving things like gradients) but I feel like it looks pretty nice and gives it a sort of charm especially since it’s like the style shifts between the foreground and background

• I don’t like the sun and the mountains though. The sun is very pixelated but since a gradient is used it stands out and creates a weird banding effect where you can see how the pixels change and group together. The mountains don’t have the same issue but I just don’t think they really look like mountains. Their shape is pretty recognisable as mountains though

• The dialogue system is lovely. The way the characters appear over time is very nice. Though I feel like the SFX that comes along with it (which I assume is supposed to be the mouse) gets a bit repetitive since it seems like it’s the exact same SFX each time. Perhaps randomising the pitch slightly could help or picking a random SFX out of a few pre-made ones?

• The road/path has these things on it but I’m not really sure what they are. I think it also looks quite jarring because of the mixels (mixing of different pixel resolutions)

• In terms of the player sprite, I feel like some of the colors used don’t have enough contrast. Some of them practically completely fade into the white fur. There’s also quite a lot of similar colors which makes it seem a bit noisy (especially in areas like the cheeks)

• Someone else mentioned that the mouse does not look like they’re starving but I strongly disagree. I have an ongoing mouse problem so I’ve seen a lot of mice recently and they all look cripplingly obese even when they’re hungry (their fur adds a lot of bulk, the bodies themselves are actually quite small). I applaud you for your accuracy

• I feel like the camera moves too much when the player jumps

• The movement itself feels good and responsive

• I don’t think the walking animation looks very readable. It seems a bit slow as well. I think the way it speeds up when the player is sprinting is a nice touch though

• I love the names of the NPCs

• One of the only games where I didn’t skip the dialogue because it’s actually good

• I didn’t expect to meet an eldritch horror when I jumped in that first hole

• The tentacle guy’s sprite is pretty good but I think it could do with a bit more hue shifting

• I’m a bit confused with how the running section works. I just avoided all the platforms and ran straight into the rocks which made by progress bar hit the bottom. I was then picked up by the tentacle guy like 3 times before I was brought to the “Try again” menu. Edit: It seems like when the progress bar runs out you can no longer move and then the tentacle guy kills you. I think you have 3 lives? If so, that’s not very clear. Maybe a health counter would help? I also think the progress bar itself is quite hard to read as sometimes the progress bar looks empty even though it’s not actually empty

• The lightning adds to the atmosphere but I feel like the mixels grab too much of the player’s attention

• I keep on forgetting I can sprint

• The running section is really difficult but it was very satisfying once I started to get the hang of it

• The platforms feel a bit maze-like in that sometimes you have to go a specific path (which seems unpredictable) or you will die which is a bit frustrating. For example, here I cannot go anywhere except left which leads to my death:

• I like how the tentacle guy’s hitbox wasn’t just a giant wall since it made it quite a bit more forgiving as you could kind of manoeuvre around him to get away

• I don’t really understand what the 2 NPCs are doing during the running section. When I get picked up it seems like they run past. Are they saving me?

• I like the cheese sliders for the volume settings

• It feels like once you get caught once during the running section you’re destined to lose since it messes up the flow of things. I find that this is even more true if you’re progress bar has already hit 0 as well. I’m not really sure how to give much critique on this but a restart hotkey would be nice. Perhaps the tentacle guy always drops the player on a platform? It’s quite frustrating when I get dropped on the ground and am just left there to suffer until he comes back to pick me up

• I think the tentacle guy’s hitbox should be just a little bit smaller. It’s always fun when you just barely scrape death

• I think there should be a progress bar showing how much of the running sequence you have completed

• I like how the tentacle guy doesn’t start moving until the player does

• At first I thought the lightning was just for decoration but it seems like it also depletes the player’s progress bar? If it does I think this should be made more clear

• I think the movement would feel better if things like coyote time and input forgiveness were implemented

• The “Play again” fade out transition is nice

• Sometimes it feels like I just get teleported into the tentacle guy’s tentacles and carried away

• I spent over 30 minutes trying to run away from this tentacle guy but I wasn’t able to do it. If you have any tips please let me know because I really want to finish the game and see the ending as it’s pretty fun. The dialogue is really entertaining as well. Well done!

• Edit: I just replayed the game but this time I ditched Julies Cheeser hoping it might be easier but it was actually harder! Good attention to detail though. I understand the interpretation of the theme now

The start was very funny with great narrative and all! Afterwards I just kept on dyeing though lol

Check out the review video below:

An interesting game, to improve the idea, you could add the ability to control small mice, something like a button to call assistants. The mice turned out to be very cute, but it doesn't look very much like they are starving, very well fed for this.

i'm not gonna comment on the difficulty specifically because many people have already discussed it but i will say in your next game try to make it so that it feels like dying is your fault, not that it wasnt most of the time in this but id often fall off a platform and get stuck in a situation that i literally could not get out of, however the music was great and the visuals were pretty decent, the jump was a little heavy but thats not necessarily a bad thing as long as you design your levels around it. overall though one of the more solid games ive seen so far and i can't wait to see what you do in future!

People have already talked about the difficulty, so I won’t hark too much on that, but the art is awesome and I really enjoyed the story elements. The squid monster is creepy as hell. I wasn’t able to beat it but I’m going to come back and make another attempt soon!

Here’s my game if you’d like to check it out.

Pretty nice game, it's super hard but I love the story at the beginning and the choosing between two options. Also I like the animations, however, I would consider making the game a bit easier for next time. 

Extremely hard game, very cool idea and funny story but oh my lord is it hard. The gravity is too high in my opinion but this game has a lot of charm (i musta tried at least 50 times or something to try to beat it and still did not beat it). Good (rage) game. Markiplier would throw his chair over this.

https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-5/rate/927683

It was a fun idea, bit hard to control movement. Music was nice. Text too slow.

The dialog added a ton of charm to the game. The platforming certainly was challenging though, I  was unable to beat it. Very engaging!

Your game looks great, dialogs are intereting, sadly I couldnt finish platforming segment

Really nice game. Kind of funny but not as dumb as mine :)

I was interested in this game from when I saw some of your sprite animations in the Brackeys discord chat. Fun game and concept! I love the characters