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Sanctuary's Grasp's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Completeness - Is it an unfinished tech-demo, prototype or a complete game? | #3 | 4.400 | 4.400 |
| Gameplay - How fun is it to play? | #4 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Overall | #6 | 4.004 | 4.004 |
| Audio - Does the game have nice sfx and music? | #11 | 4.120 | 4.120 |
| Graphics - Is the game aesthetically pleasing? | #12 | 4.380 | 4.380 |
| Theme - How well does it incorporate the theme? | #72 | 3.020 | 3.020 |
Ranked from 50 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
This is awesome, love quite everything, from thé graphics to the sounds. Well done !
OMG, what a game! I forgot I was playing a jam game, and when it ended, I was, “what? where’s the rest of the game?!”
Amazing graphics, solid sound design, and great combat mechanics. It had me engaged every time.
The only thing I would consider would be that if the player initiates combat, it would be good to know what the enemy will pick as they’re at a disadvantage, but perhaps that’s part of the balancing.
Amazing game, amazing execution. Excellently done!
This game is a really nice throwback to dungeon crawlers from the old time. The graphics and especially the music are very great, it looks and feels very retro and I like that. It took me some time to understand the fighting system, and I am still not sure if I understood it correctly, but since you can repeat fights until they are "good", I was able to progress relativly smoothly until the end. Nevertheless its a refreshing mechanic and fun to play. :)
Its cool you can gather all these optional items if you put the effort into it, especially since you can get lots of them without even fighting. Thats a nice touch.
Overall it was a really fun experience playing the game!
This! Was! Amazing!
I absolutely loved this entry. Incredible visuals, great combat mechanic, and a story on top of that! Absolutely incredible.
I’d pay for a full version of this game. Any plans to continue developing it?
Thank you! This was a distillation of a longer game that I've wanted to make for around a year now, but I'd more or less convinced myself that I'd made something completely inscrutable. Right now I'm a bit sick of it and the code is a mess, but I'd like to come back to it when I get myself some better tooling.
What a great game! I beat it on easy, will try on normal later. I love the graphics style, the timeline mechanic in combat, and how you can auto-resolve using your best result from that enemy! Great job!
Really great entry, really hard to escape isaac lmao but i think that was intentional! a fairly balanced battle system paired with great visuals = a great game!
Great visuals and coom atmosphere! I think the combat was a cool idea, but I defintely felt like I should have blocked stuff, but took full damage sometimes. It has a lot of potential, but the battles could really shine with some extra balancing.
The combat system felt like it had promise and looked very interesting. Unfortunately we didn't really understand what we were doing though, even having done the tutorial.
The volume slider (which were desperately needed) didn't seem to work. We tried setting the sound to zero but it was still full on and very distracting.
We liked the map and the fact that you could see, and then potentially avoid, the enemies. The saving checkpoints were a winner and made the game much more playable.
Well done with your submission. Best of luck in the jam.
Oh, whoops, that's embarrassing! I made the mixer groups and hooked them up in the options, but forgot to set the sounds to those when I added them. Thanks for pointing it out, and the feedback!
Check out my live review at https://www.twitch.tv/scalphamission
Loved the aesthetics in this game. In particular I really like the skeleton battle which forced me to change my tactics using the Aegis. The combat system took a little while for me to understand, but once I did it felt like there was a decent amount of depth. All in all great job.
BTW: how did you achieve the pixelated look in this game? Is it just a low-resolution render texture, or are the textures on the assets themselves pixelated?
Thanks! For the pixelated look I used a custom render pipeline in Unity called HPSXRP. I also crunched down all the textures (the highest res texture is 64x64), but that was the biggest factor. HPSXRP is great for giving a PSX (and, to a lesser extent, N64)-style look, but it's also fairly restrictive in what you can do with it, as unless you want to write some custom shader code you're locked into a few different versions of the materials.
I've also had good luck with using the Retro 3D shader pack which applies the lower resolution through a post-processing layer. While I don't think the look is quite as nice as HPSXRP, it's nice if you want something that's easier to put into a project (or if you only want the effects on some scenes and not others).
Neither of those had any effect on the UI, though, so I had to do that sizing and layout by hand.
Awesome, I have been trying to explore ways to get that ps1 vibe and this helps a lot :) Thanks for the indepth response
Really enjoyed playing this, very polished for a game that was only made in 7 days. Turns out trying to hide from Isaac in his home is a bad idea...
Looks and sounds amazing! Do you have plans to release this?
I'd like to revisit the mechanic and flesh out it a bit more, but I'll have to see where my motivation is after I recover from the jam. As it was, I was running out of puzzles I could stuff in the dungeon. Apparently I need to play more dungeon crawlers!
I very much liked the feel of this one, and the amount of polish is very evident!
However, I found the combat to be too much of a challenge, some encounters left me wondering if I was missing some type of key item, or if was even meant to defeat the encounter (isaac for instance).
The map design and trap design is creative, and well thought out. The combat system itself is very well designed. I feel as though this title may be a winner!
Really nice. The combat system is very tactical, one of the best I've seen in this jam (honestly or elsewhere, it's very good). The tutorial wasn't painful, very clear (and this game needs a tutorial) and the save fountains are very convenient.
I'm not sure about the balance - I was able to crush it until I reached a dude throwing fireballs at me that I had no real recourse for. Perhaps I should have gone another direction to find better gear before fighting him? He kind of looked like a merchant so I wasn't that scared of him :) I'll probably get it on a future play through.
All in all a very good entry.
Yeah, balance was tricky for this. I have next to no experience at balancing encounters like this, I got so used to playing it that I can't reliably tell the difficulty, and I just had very little time. As for the acolyte, the fireball move is best countered by using the dagger, as you can inflict a few 10 damage hits (the fireball has no shield and a relatively long cast time) before he can launch it off.
A great game, I felt there was a bit of discourse between all the graphics, some simple pixel art for the enemies mixed with high res pixel art for the environment mixed with very high res pixel art for the menu screens.
Otherwise a very polished game, never made it to Isaac? Had no idea what I was doing as all doors were closed and kept dying instantly on rocks
Combat had some really good concepts, I liked the turns, but no idea how to get items.
Also, the auto-battle feature was great, saves having repetitive battles.
Excellent game! Enjoyed the puzzle factor of the combat and the autobattle feature for repeat encounters, really fun to figure out the best strat without having to remember it for later lol.
Wish there was more, honestly. It ended rather abruptly after level 2(or did I miss something? Probably!). Also, Isaac 2 stronk
Lots of polish and juice has gone into this entry, it's really great. I really liked the combat mechanics, calculating the best combination of moves to use to maximize my damage while still having enough ticks left to throw up my shield before the opponent gets a hit off.
The one thing I wish I could do is respawn or flee or something so that I could more quickly get fights over with when I run into you know who (Isaac <_<).
I really appreciated the tutorial dungeon as well, a nice level of detail has gone into this game to make it feel like a full and complete experience which is rare for jam games.
Visually this game looks stunning as well, all the textures and the UI backgrounds were gorgeous and I don't know if I'm crazy but it looks like not just pixealting but also a bit of texture wobble going on that looks great.
Sound design is great as well, the adventurous bgm and the combat music combined with the ticking of the turn rope as it moves up, even minor touches like the subtle text type sound.
Really great entry, nice work!
Polished, polished, polished. Looks good, sounds good. Has the right "feel" to it.
The delay system is cool in theory, but felt a little bare. I didn't get the impression of the Duality theme.
Overall, very impressive! If this is a solo submission then doubly-so!
Very nice, the battle system is very close to Helen's Mysterious Castle and that's a good thing because it's very fun to play. Ambiance, sounds and graphism were very dungeony and crawly, which makes it super good! Beat the paladin, tricking it in a loop with dagger and shield eheh
Helen's Mysterious Castle was definitely my primary gameplay influence. I keep looking for other people to do iterations on that battle system, but no one did, so I decided I'd just do it myself. It made me appreciate even more just how well-designed HMC is.
Yeah it's pretty crazy it was not iterated more. I think your take was great too especially how you shown the timeline.
Really cool idea for the move time in the combat. Movement felt nice