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A Station Beyond's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #21 | 3.556 | 3.556 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
Infinity/The Endless:
few different places where this is incorporated. for one it takes place in the void of space. some of the endings allude to infinity without spoilers
Ancient Ruins:
you are aboard the ancient ruins of a research space station
Solitude:
you are the only survivor aboard this vessel
Cosmic Horror:
the story centres around the conflict between an onboard AI and an ancient unknowable elder deity. also it's a horror in space
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Comments
I loved this very much. Great setting, great atmosphere, intriguing storyline. I only found 3/4 endings and I'm super curious what the 4th one is, but I can't seem to get any leads on that just yet. Will probably wait for someone to toss some spoilers!
Very well done!
I won't spoil it too much, but the game has been out a while now so I will reveal that but the solution is intentionally very dumb and frustrating with no obvious hints. I would call it a secret ending, if you ever played dark souls its a specific trick from their playbook. this is all I will say on the matter
Appreciate your feedback and thanks for playing!
Cool game. I love the red/black color palette. Nice PS1 style visuals. Event Horizon/Alien kind of story is very well crafted.. Multiple endings is a great touch. But this is not by any means a Dungeon Crawler game. This is a horror game with gridbased controls. There's no combat, no inventory, no level progression, no automap. The game level is very small.
If this wasn't a genre specific game jam, i would give this game a higher rating. This is not what i perceive as a dungeon crawler. Besides all that, i love your work and i think it's a very solid game. Nicely done!
fair enough. the risk was always there that changing too much about what makes it a dungeon crawler would give us a worse score. In a way though I'm glad it went off in this direction, even if we don't get a high score on this ground I'm happy with what we made :)
Nice game here! Very impressed by the consistency of the art style and the music/audio.
I liked that the failure condition is more about your actions rather than having combat, and the dialogue I found to be quite well written for the most part. the 4th ending was... interesting.
I find it a bit strange your forced to take damage when interacting with "danny" for the first time, and it took me a couple playthroughs to even understand the joker bit was a riddle since i just happened to press the right door the first time and the majority of my playthroughs went through the right. I thought the voice was just yelling at you if you didn't talk to the joker first lol.
Also a nice detail to have a name entry screen at the start, not actually seen that in another game yet, so it was a nice detail.
thanks for your feedback! Glad you enjoyed it
Yeah I think you're right about some parts seeming unclear or unfair and has definitely been a learning experience in that regard.
And yes our lovely start menu! Honestly just wanted somewhere you could listen to the sound designers whole song so it lives there
Very nice entry with ton of style! It's a bit short for sure, but it manages to setup a cool moment. Only got 3 endings. Technically, moving feel really nice, and the big voice making the camera shake is cool. Usually, I hate when you move the camera around and it makes you rotate, but you added some "snap" animation and it felt really good actually.
thanks for your feedback & thanks for playing :)
Any time I can turn a hated mechanic into something cool is a rush. Next game will be yellow paint everywhere telling you where to go
Got all 4 endings :) Worth to seek the 4th tbh. Just for the text!
There is no combat, but story was nice. It was well polished and really set mood up nicely. Music in main menu rocks btw (though you have to give it a time to hear a real banger).
I was preplexed by not being able to pickup the bomb...
Great stuff :)
Thank you for your feedback! Our sound guy will be happy that its considered a banger!
I'm not sure about a bomb.. there is an odd device laying around but it is remnants of a deleted feature. my bad :)
Oh I just assumed its a bomb! I guess I just wished to blow whole station up and that kind of looked like a device to do the job :D
in a way you got your wish 😁
Neat game. Its always nice with some monochromatic submissions. I did find the dialogs a bit much, and that was mostly the game I guess, lol. Its something I like about it, oh yeah, thats right it might be the color scheme. It makes me calm..
Nice done!
Hey,
great little game. I really like the style with pixels on high resolution, so everything is crisp and not flickering. Also that style it super coherent throughout the game. Its really well polished. Nice fitting sound effects and music. The movement feels also really smooth. Yes it is missing “combat” or something similiar, but I feel the dialog system is enough in that regard. The only negativ thing to say here for me is, that it feels rather short and low on content. But is still or maybe because of that a well rounded experience.
Great Job.
Thanks for playing!
Appreciate the feedback. Yes the content is rather on the light side, and we knew it would be from the get-go just due to timings and schedules. Knowing this we tried to see how much player interaction we could get out of a limited amount of custom assets. Still could be more I agree 👍
Oh my god, why does everything look so different after I played your game?! Crazy ;)
The atmosphere was wonderful and the game has a very nice System Shock 2 vibe. The hunt for the different endings was cool (I did ot find ending 4) and the graphics and especially the sound were great. But I have to nitpick that you have not implemnted the requirement: "The game must have combat or a similar mechanic for determining outcome of certain situations, enemy encounters and events."
But the game was really cool!
Glad you enjoyed it ! Thanks for playing
As for combat or similar mechanic I would argue that the health system tied to the dialogue is our replacement for that. Could be debated as to whether it counts but it was certainly the reason for that element of gameplay. We took the "similar mechanic" to imply that it doesn't need to be explicit combat just some sort of conflict resolution, similar to the way disco Elysium doesn't have combat but there is conflict within encounters. It's up to the jam hosts to decide whether that counts or not :)
Well, you just take damage, when you click on the last option in the messages on the first computer. Or the door you have to pry open. There is no conflict resolution, you just receive damage. That satisfies the rule, that you have to have some kind of status. But anyway, the atmosphere is sooo thick!
I see what you're saying, but our thinking was that if you engage with these systems in different ways, you will get a different outcome. The core conflict is between the ship's AI and the entity and who "wins" that encounter is down to how the player engages in the dialogue system. The conflict isn't directly the threat of an enemy attacking you, but rather the question of who you side with in this cosmic horror situation. Which fate is least miserable? you resolve this with your actions and chosen paths.
It's a stretch I know but I'm glad we went with that route for the sake of atmosphere, adding a traditional combat system would be cool and we will consider it for future builds, but for this Jam requirement, we focused on narrative conflict. If that's too far of a reach for some people, so be it, had fun and learned a lot either way :)
"God bless America" It took me a while but I eventually got the last ending.
The art , atmosphere and plot are really cool and movement feels good as well. It's fun to look for all the different endings.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for playing! Very glad someone got the fourth ending...
great entry, love the Virtualboy stylings!
Thanks for playing!
Had fun! But I will say, I will miss my eyeballs for the rest of my life; RIP, lol.
I'm very sorry about your eyeballs, Sir! New ones are in the mail 🙏
Haha, nice, hopefully they are an upgrade; the old ones were past their prime anyway. :)
This has to be up there in the top 5 surely? Great game. Did get stuck a few times. Not sure if it was me, but I found moving the dialogue along a bit odd. But I got there!
Really nice design and play. Having just stopped playing, all I can see now is red !!
Great work :)
I think there is an issue with dialogue where its hard to tell when it has ended so you keep clicking only to restart the whole dialogue. It's been a learning experience in UX for sure! otherwise I'm glad you enjoyed it and I'm very sorry about your eyeballs
Loved everything!
Great atmosphere, great presentation, great narration and the sense of mistery and discovery, nothing to point really cause it was really all good, just one thing, I really couldn't get the fourth ending I did everything I could to see all four ending but I couldn't find it and it bugs me a lot, I think it is part of good game desing to make secrets not too secret but this is just a small nitpick in a really good game!
Thanks for playing, I hope you find the final ending!
On the one hand, if I go by personal taste I find it interesting when a game goes to great lengths to hide it's secrets. I love when people find something hidden in like a 20+ year old game or something. just the idea of a game as a cryptic mystery that keeps unfolding is really interesting to me
On the other hand I can understand how it can be frustrating if the game doesn't let you "100%" it without doing something obscure. perhaps I should have said there were only 3 endings and had this be like a secret hidden ending... but then that wouldn't prompt people to go looking for it? who knows - it's one of those things to which there is no right answer.
Either way I understand what you are saying and will consider it going forwards :)
I wanted to respond and elaborate about the secretness of the secret so I replayed the game and actually found the fourth ending so now I can actually state valid thoughts!
Yeah I mean, you are definitly right with your intentions and I can agree with it but also I'll describe this ending as such "A clueless enigma", since it's clueless there is no lead, so if you look for a lead in the first place you are already lost and that's what I did in my first play through ahah, the only (Clearly stated) clue I had was "There is another one!" to be fair there is another clue but you really have to be desperate and be trying anything, so I mean, that's it, I still enjoyed the ending just like how I enjoyed the whole game ahha and make of this comment what you want! No right answers just my description of it!
Wow, overall banger game! What strikes me the most is the ambiance and atmosphere, that with the music, this was a delight. I only got two of the four endings, idk how to get the other two tho.
Also cosmic horror being litteraly horror in space is very funny to me lmaoo
Thanks for playing! I'm glad you enjoyed it!