Really loved the spell-combination mechanic - I always love stuff like that, so it was my favorite. It was great playing a more puzzle/exploration focused game too. The use of the theme is really compelling and a really strong entry! Great work!

I accomplished a task the necromancer was never able to accomplish.

I like that there's a possibility to fight one of the gods even if I have not tried. You've got quite some content there, the spellbook is furnished with a lot of combinations at the end.

I am happy you chose instant movement, the game plays very smooth. Combining runes is cool, and putting mechanics like an automap behind such a thing always increase both the cool factor of a game and its atmosphere.

The puzzles are fun, combined with the extra pressure or not busting going forward is generally not trivial.

Very cool game, congratulations.

Amazing atmosphere, loved it. As others stated, a lot of text to read and it repeats itself.

Great submission!

There was a lot of text to read. It kept on coming as well. Just when we thought it had stopped, there was more text and we couldn't move forward. Then there was more text. 😉

We had some difficulty with the controls. Our muscle memory is baked into Q/E being rotate and A/D being strafe. It may not affect everyone but it made it slightly frustrating to move around for us.

We loved the runes and combining them to cast spells though. This tied in really nicely to the duality theme too. Good job there.

The font choices were nice and the map spell was a great idea. We quit the game accidentally by going to the options menu to change the volume though.

We played for 12 minutes but we were unable to not trigger the pressure plated to get out of the room with the dark portal, even though we were floating in mid-air. Was this a bug or did we miss something? During that time we didn't encounter any enemies so we couldn't judge the combat system. Given the short attention span of game jam reviewers we'd suggest less text and more getting into the meat and potatoes of the game earlier on. This is advice we should listen to ourselves sometimes too!

Well done for producing an on-theme game with such interesting spell mechanics. We'd love to see how you progress with this post jam.

This is VERY well done. I've been watching you develop it on stream and was looking forward to playing it. A true puzzle crawler. Thoroughly enjoyed it, though I did not finish it in one sitting, but will do so.

I haven't finished it, but I'm considering doing so later, this is pretty good. This feels like one of the more balanced entries I've played so far with a fair amount of difficulty.

I quite like your spell language system, and tying it to the meters. It's a very creative and immersive interaction method!

The sound design is very coherent and put together as well. It very much helped the game atmosphere.

I'm not quite sure why but the movement feels disorienting compared to some of the other entries I've tried, and it's not an issue with the instant movement.

I feel like it has something to do with the turning (I doubt the camera isn't centered... But for instance on the statues if I turn with A/D I would expect to be facing the walls? But it appears to wrap me "around" the statue, which confuses me since under the grid limitations I don't believe it makes sense to be able to be behind the statue?)

Since I personally found it very easy to get disoriented I had to rely on the minimap spells a lot, and kind of wished they operated on a real timer or more than one "action" worth of time.

I find it refreshing that "game-over" seems to be just kicking you back to a starting point sort of like a souls-like. Although unfortunately since it is a bit annoying to retravel back after every "death" it's a bit hard for me to consume in one session since it took me a little bit to properly figure out how to play. Having a spell to make a checkpoint or something could be nice and hopefully not break the balance.

You definitely nailed the theme! It was nice to see a more puzzle-focused game here. The only part I struggled with figuring out was when it told me I had to use the yin/yang runes on the sol/moon portals, since they were white and black so I assume they were actually yin/yang portals instead.

I had a good time with it, even though I died a couple times in the combat section because I kept messing up the strafe and turn buttons. My biggest suggestion is that you speed up the text boxes, as they were a bit on the slow side. Also, you got some reflowing issue with how you animated the text boxes (it going to the next line mid word) which, assuming you're using TextMeshPro, you could have used the maxVisibleCharacters property to animate without that issue. Just a minor quibble.

Good work!

It's tricky to balance puzzle games for jams. Some gamers (like me) just aren't likely to get very far, because we're not good at puzzle games.

On the other hand, if you make the game too easy, it won't appeal to people who love puzzle games. It's a dilemma.

Seems like a nicely crafted puzzle game, but I ragequit after the 4th or 5th return to the lobby.

Really interesting mechanics in this game with the rune based magic system. It was pretty tough to manage the balance at the beginning but I got the hang of it, and the puzzles were an interesting application of the system. The sound design is also great in this game, the ebb of the background music adds a ton of tension to the dungeon.

The biggest issue for me is that I finally unlocked Yin and Yang runes after figuring out how to balance my energies and use the magic and then accidentally went out of harmony and then spawned outside of the map before I could figure out what to do next! I would have liked to fight some enemies as the ice and fireball spells looked like another interesting extension to the magic system, so I may come back and try again.

Great use of the theme as well.

Really interesting entry with good visuals, unique mechanics, really impactful sound design. Fantastic work!

An absolute gem of a game and one of the most commited to implementing the theme. This is honestly impressing. 

The start was a hard balancing act but I love how little handholding there is, despite how cryptic the game looks. Reading the spellbooks gives all the tools needed to understand how to approach each puzzles and encounter, it's absolutely lovely how you made such a complex system without needing a tutorial.

Movement feels great, the camera position and fov are expertly set up, this is one of the very best in this regards. I did feel that the game lacked some landmarks to make exploation easier, the minimap never showed for more than a few step and getting to the latter parts required quite a bit of memorizing (or drawing an actual paper map).

Nothing too major but I also though it would be better if our energies harmonized by themselves after every death, I kept forgetting to re-harmonize when respawning and ended up dying quite a few time when going back through the portals.

Fantastic entry overall, top notch on every aspect.

Great game, took some time to learn all the spells, but when I figured it out it came natural what next spell combination will be.

Not without bugs, obviously, but I want to point them out, as maybe they're specific to my machine config. First of all text flickers on Safari, making it unreadable. On Chrome game runs fine, except that some of the effects and enemies are missing when you go to the second portals in Sun and Lun. Like after killing enemies in the second portal Lun portal they still shoot at you once or twice.

But overall I really liked how you need to keep track of a balance of dualities and how you solve puzzles with clever use of relevant spells.

It took me a while to get used to this but I did enjoy the unexpected ways I was solving puzzles. Like flying over spikes and the such. The mood was very strong.

That's an amazing level of polish for a jam game, I getting strong Myst vibes, which I love. It took me some time (and reading the comments) to get the hang of it, but once I did, I had a great time.

Beautiful game!  I love the ambient morphing music, especially the cello section, music and art worked well together.  Loved the ambience of the background art.  The text moved at a fairly natural speed for me (good internet) and enjoyed the puzzle basis in the story and interaction.  

The rune concept has some potential, casting the spells to float over the spikes or the density spell to trigger pressure plates is very crawler like.

All in all its an interesting combination of a rune system and retro crawler elements.

Any plans on extending this?

Hey Captain, I played your game :)

•  nice title screen, it scared the heck out of me. Nice idea to set it like that graphically :)
• I liked that you added "Options" as well. I didn't needed it, but loved that you took time for that!
• your introductory text and generally the entire text content is pretty good and well thought, advancing the scenario nicely, along with great music
• superb, top-notch graphics and great performance, even on my crappy laptop :) Love optimized builds that run blazingly fast!
• great dungeon crawling movement and love the ui simplicity, although I had to use AD for turning left-right once again :) being used to QE mostly, but its me nitpicking :)
• loved the concept of acquiring skills that opens the way between the two worlds :) Truly into the theme.
• would love to have an automap to traverse these big maps :) but I understand the challenge.
• I liked the concept of forcing you to return to "base", similar to return to your village for reinforcements etc. It really makes your crawling easier with additional knowledge.

Overall, a great idea and execution and definitely deserves further development and more versions <3

I'm really impressed with this one!

I really like the concept of keeping yourself in balance to be able to progress as well as the fuel for various spells and abilities!

I don’t mind needing to sit down and read for a bit. Only thing I’d change would be maybe a fast-forward type of button / “hold down this key” to make it go faster, kind of thing.

Controls were snappy and I enjoyed being thrown in a maze to figure out what’s going on! My favorite aspect would definitely be the rune collection and later combination for different abilities. That alone fleshed out into a larger game would be really fun to play!

Nice concept! One thing that occurred to me ... for future versions, it would be cool to be able to have a setting for turning off animated "self typing" text, if you know what I mean? 

Very nice! The spell system is interesting, if a bit confusing due to the two-way casting order and it was also hard for me to remember the spell costs or other requirements, resulting in a lot of trial and error. I managed to get the two runes in each portal, then continue into an enhanced portal to reach the puzzle with those ring pedestals, but at this point I'm starting to lose interest due to the complexity (if you can call it that) to try simple things, and I'm not hooked enough to continue playing.

Even though I lost interest, it's a very solid entry! Good job :D