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Minds, Twisted's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #138 | 2.085 | 2.385 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
Solitude - player is alone in the horror environment
Cosmic horror - Lovecraftian creatures, entities out of the world
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Comments
Most important, I think inventory management is unintuitive, the main reason being that when you can't pick an item then the game still says you picked the item so you're certain you actually picked it at first. I restarted quite some times before I realised I was not picking the items and needed to drop other items before I could. Comments from people who say they could not use items during encounters are 100% (or 99%, not sure about the crucifix) comments from people who did not pick the items but think they did. I checked the page for the controls only after insisting quite a bit because I did not really think I was doing anything wrong.
Is there an actual ending other than the text you get after choosing one of the 4 options at the end? I tried the 4 options and some answers suggest it's just the end but maybe there's more like I need a specific item or something. It's totally fine either way, I just want to be aware if there's more to explore. I think you can wear the items which can be worn but I'm not sure it does anything.
Once I got it the game was fun. The art of the encounters is amazing, the view is good, there are some details in the environment, rooms are recognisable and the game sound good too. I love the different items detecting the presence of different characters, including the switch to Astral Plane which displays those directly but whose bar will quickly melt. It's funny and interesting that these are mundane tools. How these tools react is great with all those animations and the radio sound. I like the knowledge based fight at the end, this and the tool part are cool psychic detective things which are appropriate to the settings, it's very fitting gameplay.
Movement is not perfect, mashing the buttons gives weird results and if you want to walk exactly as you want then you need to time your button pressing which is never a good thing. Besides you should really be able to speed up the dialogs (going to the next line when pressing a button, overall I'd prefer if I went through the dialog at my own pace anyway, no need for automatic advancing through the dialog as far as I'm concerned), it was specially noticeable when trying to deal with the boss at the end, redoing the entire, long dialog to try the different options.
I think I could never use the crucifix during encounters?
Overall this is a cool entry, thanks for sharing.
Game have a nice ambiance and the monster encounter made me think of the Spirit Hunter Series, which is a good thing. There was bit too many bugs, and I felt a bit lost over what I needed to do in the game. At the end, I think I met the responsible in the basement and talked to him until universe ended. I think that's a win!
The game is pretty scary, and the movement is really good. It just kinda odd that the footsteps doesn't sound like a footstep, but I think that was an old school SFX. The texts are too small for my convenience. I have to bow forward to the screen to be able to completely read it, also the dialogue just automatically continues which is bad, because it does so when I haven't finished reading it.
Most of the place is also empty and without anything to interact on. I don't know how to do the battles but it seems like we have to select the correct answer or we get a hit to our health.
The movement sfx is kinda wild, it sounds like a drum beat. Sadly, you have to keep hammering on the movement key to keep it going. Making players do a quiz whenever they interact with a portrait is some real lovecraftian horror. I like the artwork and models. Combat is a bit boring, just another quiz if you have the key. Overall, looks nice and plays okay.
Not sure if bugged or not, but I also couldn't give items to entities? Also picked up cross - couldn't hold it. Neither I could hold locket like it shown in screenshots (I looked through all 1-0 combinations for those) Maybe something with this is to do with that.
Not sure if I like the idea of 'guessing' what we see and having always need to select 'correct answer'. I want to be stupid and do mistakes there! Also... spoilers! They tell story way before we see it... unless its implied we aware about all of it already, of course.
If you are to fix game after jam (not allowed while voting time is going) - try focus on movement (not needing to press each time for move to tile) and making dialogues stay until user input - they kind of fast sometimes. Well and bug fixes. I am not sure if I did something wrong and needed to hold something prior encounter... or its indeed bugged in there.
Would love little tutorial about how to interact with entities and if we able to restore mental power to detect them... stuff like that. For now I am not sure how to play :(
(But monster desings are awesome, by the way)
Thank you very much for playing and comment that full of quality feedback!
The whole item system NEEDS to be reworked in the future. We’re actually really sorry, well I am since I’ve coded it, that bugs mess up the play :(
Tbh, we just had too little time, it might sound crazy, but the bug with using items during encounters wasn’t occuring at all on my machine. And since I was the only coder in our team who knew how the system worked, and I couldn’t reproduce the bug I just had no time to fix it in the end :(
This jam is a massive lesson for us about the time management mostly, programming skills maybe as well, but we’re so glad that we can receive such good feedback and take a lesson out of it.
Thank you once again, and we are happy our visual artist’s work is getting appreciated :D
Such is a story of a jams in general! I wonder what is causing the bug - generally items that greyout as an option were there, but not clickable... maybe it picked up items and run out of space somehow? Because I gathered all (or most) of the items before I got any encounter... They also would not disapear in the world itself - maybe that was something to do with it.
Don't get discoraged though! Critical bugs happen even for veteran jammers out there!
Oh no, if the item hasn’t disappeared from the world that means you had no inventory space for it! Player has only 5 slots, and all of them are occupied by starting items at the beginning, you’d need to drop something to free the slot.
But despite that, we know that there is a bug that even when having item in inventory you can’t use it.
The graphics and atmosphere are fairly solid, but there are a few places where you can peer into the void and some kind of graphic indicating the interaction locations of the asylum's inhabitants would significantly improve the experience. I'm also not entirely sure if I actually finished the game, but I couldn't find anything more to do, so...
Thanks for playing and leaving a comment!
The gaps in textures must be the delusions of main character for sure! He is walking alone among the scary stuff and you know. Nah.. I’m kidding, well it looks like map didn’t compile well in the latest version, which we must have overlooked unfortunately :(
I think I did not really understand, what I had to do. The game has some nice atmosphere and the graphic are well done, but the movement is a bit on the clunky side. I often moved a space too much etc.
The idea of completing the story, by guessing what happend is interesting. So there is quite some cool stuff here, but it need a bit more refinement.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Well, it looks like we’ve understood the movement queueing wrong, or at least we implemented it badly… Will learn a lesson out of that, and, quite possibly, try better next year :D
The interface and direction were a bit awkward, but it had some fun dialogue.
Nice work playing to the theme as well.
For some reason the last minute is cut off but I walk out into the Garden and die after the video ends: Minds Twisted by tagis & Company
Thanks for playing and for leaving a comment, even with a playthrough!
I'm a bit torn on this one. On the one hand, the premise is really cool, the gathering of items and using each as a solution to encounters is cool, the atmosphere is great. On the other hand, the movement was really clunky and the encounters seemed bugged. Although I had all the items on me, I could never use them in encounters. I had the oujia board but couldn't give it to the Friend, I couldn't give the camera to the Son. Did I need to have those as active items? What DID the active items do? But you can never tell when an encounter is near, unless maybe those items tell you?
As such, I died in the basement due to running out of lives even though I had the necessary things on me:(
If you make movement snappier (perhaps even instant given the scope of the asylum) and add a few tooltips in game here and there, this could be a really cool horror story.
We’re sorry that you’ve experienced bugs in our game. Frankly speaking, this game is one of our firsts, first for some members of the team. We were trying our best, but bugs are certainly possible. We will investigate that encounters, but I am not sure if we are allowed to patch our game after the deadline(?).
Even though, we’ll find the bug and fix it after the voting ends. Since the jam has ended, we have additional thoughts and possibly we’re going to rework the map and several systems coded in hurry.
Thanks for giving it a go and for sharing your opinion about our game and pointing out flaws, we hope you’ll be interested to check it after some time, when we fix those things!
The game has a nice atmosphere and a good vibe. The information from the text are needed later in the game, but it goes pass to quickly, better to have player step forward by input when they have had time to read it. WASD is queued up but infinite and player is not able to hold keys to keep moving in a direction. There were a few places with missing walls player can see through.
Anyway its a nice entry. Good job.
Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. We initially thought about visual-novel style dialogues, but as the jam went, we’ve experienced ups and downs with our dialogue system, so we decided not to tamper with it more before it would’ve got too late :D
Nonetheless, we’ll try to develop better input handling in our future projects! Thanks once again, on behalf on our team, for your comment!
I played the game for about 15 minutes. I got bored because i couldn't find where i should go next and the game didn't make me want to play more. Every room and corridor is similar and there is no map. Art style of the game is nice but a little dull. The environment is too bright, it should be darker. I like the retro look. I don't know how combat works since i didn't progress that far. Insanity meter is nice touch too but again i didn't play it that far to see how it works. I don't like that you should walk into the interactable object in order interact with them, you should be able to interact with the game world with mouse cursor in these kind of games. I think also that in grid based dungeon crawlers, corridors should be narrower. Levels are designed like labyrinths in dungeon crawlers. I respect your hardwork and time spent for this game. You gain valuable experience from this effort no matter what the reception be. I wish you all good luck!
Thanks, we appreciate your opinion and quite extensive comment! We’re taking the notes! Game jams are a new thing for us, and we’re more than happy to receive such helpful feedback!