"I love you Dear!" "And I love you ... Dear!"

I had to restart after getting the Bad End. At very first I thought of not killing enemies or a least not eating them then realised that was dumb and that there are plenty of hints everywhere (in particular in the description of the game) about what you actually need to do that should click after you watched the Bad End. I guess at first my mind would not admit that was what the "Good" End was going to be, I did not want to eat the animals ;) .

I loved the game from start to finish.

The visuals are cool. Sure after several hours playing the game I got bored of the one tune but it's good. Instant movement is great (and super important here given three of the four last levels are huge, and you're going to replay the game to reach the Good End). The game is super smooth and snappy and very pleasant to control, it controls perfectly. The instant, turn-based combat and the encounters are excellent, the different enemies are fun to deal with. The upgrades are cool. The game is not easy and it even gets hard as you're going for the Good End and need to cope with 1 tile-range attacks. The pacing is good, the story is cool and reaching the Good End is satisfying, the Good End itself is too. The icing of the cake is that it's also a very good implementation of the theme. Given the number of levels, the two endings, quite functional enemy behaviours and a decent amount of mechanics I'd say the game is quite ambitious so it's remarkable that it works perfectly with no noticeable bug.

The short dialogs interrupting your exploration can get annoying as you're dying and they lock you again everytime for a couple of seconds (I'm thinking of looking for the flower in the last outdoor level with short range attacks). Also I understand that you need some room for the fights given how they work and with instant movement it really does not matter as much but the huge level with huge rooms and empty area just before the boss one is not my favourite kind of levels.

I lowered my mapping ambition as it went out of the sheet in each direction, the levels after the bottom one you really don't need to map anyway.

This in an excellent entry, congratulations !

I loved the premise of this game! Solid art and controls. Also, a very interesting and unique combat mechanic.

That said, the main game loop was a bit slow / tiresome. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to speed up dialogue which was often very slow.

You can watch my play through here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2116031581?t=02h22m56s

Interesting entry and a cool take on the solitude theme. The graphics are simple, but they work just fine and the movement is rock solid. 

As others have noted, the combat is unique but is  unreliable. Even if you time the attack correctly, you can often get attacked in return which makes it kind of difficult to survive more than a couple enemies. The story, while intriguing, the text was extremely slow. I ended up skipping partway through most of  it because it was just too verbose and the text appeared very slowly.

Good entry!

This is definitely one of the most unique takes I have seen on the theme. I have the same complaints as everyone else on the combat, but definitely different, good job!

Nice neat game. Snappy controls and fun story. Graphics is plain and simple but neat. Sound works well!

I'm not sure I understood the combat, I just kept moving away from the enemies

Nice with the map addons. It was really hard navigating the maze.

It’s a really great game, I liked a lot of things about it. Movement was fast and snappy (though I would prefer strafe/turning to be other way around). Graphics and audio was setting that kind of atmosphere you would expect. Combat was unintuitive at the start, but at some point I learned how to “dance” the enemies to oblivion.

Game froze at me couple of times at the second cave, so I wasn’t able to complete it, though I have played through to the second case two times…

Although movement is fast you still need to spam ‘w’ quite a lot to just get around maps, which are super huge, it was quite tiresome after a while.

Hey all, thanks for the feedback!
To make navigating the mazes easier we uploaded some hint maps here: https://johnbot.itch.io/yes-deer/devlog/708731/basic-hint-maps

This game is a gem. I like everything about this game, especially combat.
But as Mag also stuck at second cave, it was very counterintuitive to navigate

The game seems to be quite big, I got lost big time, maybe a minimap would help...but why should a dear have a map ;)
I liked the sad atmopsphere, even if it was clashing with the cartoony graphics a bit. Cool stuff...

Good job! loved the atmosphere. Weird, but in a good way!

There's a lot to like about this game it has a strong narrative through line with a sad story, the controls are tight and the positioning based combat is super cool (I'm glad I got the range upgrade early). It took me a few deaths to get the hang of it, but once I found it very satisfying and tactical.  I also liked the art.

However i got super lost in the 2nd cave I entered. It was HUGE. I got lost for like 10 minutes, died twice trying to speed run my way to the end, and then went I got to the area with the 3 bats I got wrecked so unfortunately I didn't finish, which is unfortunate because I was quite invested in the story :(

Performance was great, I played the web build.

I also like that you included an asset disclosure. It's nice to know which assets were made during the jam.

Great entry!