Play game
Everpresent Ruin's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall fun and playability | #142 | 1.951 | 2.231 |
Ranked from 13 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme incorporation
So the solitude theme was incorporated by only having one party member, it's really just you and the monsters in there. Then I also attempted the ancient ruins theme by having all the walls in the area be crumbling with an open roof that can see out into the cosmos. And then I attempted to include characters from general Lovecraftian stuff for the cosmic horror, though I didn't end up doing as much as I wanted to due to running out of time.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
While clearly lacking polish, this wasn't such a bad little game.
The biggest issues I found are the lack of sound, as you already know since you apologized for it on the main menu, and the clunky UI.
The UI especially was more noticeable as I didn't understand how to close out of it at first. I read the "X and P for back" control, but didn't understand that it referred to being used in the menus. It also didn't help that the first combat encounter spawned right on top of the first conversation screen, so I wasn't sure what was happening at first. And later I found I was unable to open the inventory again outside of combat.
Speaking of the combat, for the most part works fine. Though I was confused at first and thought I encountered a bug until I discovered I had to press Spacebar to get through each step of combat. After that, it was pretty much smooth sailing until I ran into Cthulhu and he flattened me out. Which is fine because I assume I saw almost all of the game. I vastly prefer short and sweet jam games to those that drag on too long.
I also found the tiles to be a bit too small, like I think the distance between steps should be twice as large.
This is a great foundation for a dungeon crawler, I think you should really look into getting sound effects working for various things. Like menu button clicks, attacks, enemy pain/death sounds, item use, etc. Aside from that though this was a nice little jaunt, good work!
Yes I finally beat him!
Took a while to get the hang of this game, but once you do it is a much better experience than the visuals and first impression gives it credits for. Take you time and play it and you will enjoy it!
Thought I was in a bug where I could not close my inventory in a combat. But I managed to find the X button that closed it and I could continue.
The building up of stats was fun and the combat is spot on, easy to do and fast.
The final boss I was spamming space to attack, but space also closed the win screen so I had only a few milliseconds to read something about winning. Maybe don't have that on space, just make it click only or something.
What you got here is a solid game loop, the game is fun to play. And that might often be the hardest part to get right in a game. So just some polish to solidify all other parts and you got something here!
Great Job!
Got to the end and got my ass handed to me by C'thulu, which is fine. It's a solid game base, movement felt okay, combat was nice, the base RPG elements were there. It could certainly do with a little polish to make it a very good experience and some bug fixing (like others have reported, I also got stuck in the inventory once by pressing ESC, which kinda locked me into inventory limbo). I could see myself going through all of it to beat the 4 bosses mentioned at start once the game is updated. Good job!
There are some bugs with menus that prevent you from going forward and you need to restart the game. Found Fireball and Lighting... but felt like using them on the boss was a waste due to need to heal every now and again.
I would love to be able to click through enemy attack log personally. I was confused at first why it didn't do anything when first time encountered them and got locked out of controlls - I though that its another UI bug at start...
Base fondation is there, though. Bit beef on top and its golden :)
The leveling and combat feel decent, and while the grid squares are a little small that is mostly made up for by the speed of movement. The graphics are solid (although you should really be using the 'Nearest' texture filter for pixel art), and the lack of audio doesn't hurt too much. The menus feel a bit clunky - a decent chunk of the time I simply couldn't pull up the pause/item menu. Also, potions didn't seem to be doing anything?
I couldn't beat Cthulhu, but that felt about right.
I second, that the leveling and combat system feel well implemented. The graphics are nice enough for a jam and the movement feels snappy. It is a shame, that there is no sound, as it does wonders to the atmosphere. But the game is hard, I got my ass handed to me quite a bit. Solid entry!
I beat the demo.
I enjoyed the game. The best feature by far is that at any moment it plays as fast as you press a button, I love that. For example I think steps could be smaller, 10x7 tiles is a for a small room , yet as you can go through it as fast as you want then it's no big deal. The combat system and the fight with Chtulhu are good. I really like the colourful look of the characters and items.
More than one time I restarted because I was stuck inside menus (for example when inside an empty inventory X and P did nothing so I did not know what to do).
It's a cool entry, thanks for sharing.
Glad you liked it generally! I will try to fix that menu thing (not sure what caused that because I thought I made it so you could back out of item menus but I'll look into it)
Note to others that both the exe and pck files are necessary separate downloads.
The best thing this has going for it is a pretty fully implemented turn-based battle system with stat point allocation on level up, items and magic skills. I found a boss fight to be kind of a steep curve if I was supposed to win it at all (not exactly getting at the true essence of cosmic horror by shooting fireballs at Cthulhu).
I found the Z/X controls kind of unintuitive, and seemingly got locked into the items menu until I used an item, as none of the Z/X/Enter controls got me out of it. And while there is mouse support, the player needs to tap through with Z first if there are any pending messages in the battle log before the mouse will do anything. So I think the UI stuff is a priority.
Well done though and thanks for submitting.
Thanks for the feedback! I have heard the item menu thing a couple times now and I'll look into it, and I'll also look into making sure the mouse can confirm dialogues as well.
Just beat the demo boss! You've got the bones of a good battle system going here. As you work on it in the future, sound would be a welcome addition, and some sort of map, landmarks or variety in the tileset wouldn't go amiss. The pack and menu buttons also don't appear to work. In the inventory, I would have some sort of text telling the player what the items they've picked up do; I didn't realize the book gave me a spell until I checked the special abilities later. But all in all, for a couple days, this was a good effort!
Thanks! I did intend on having text tell you what each item did (which is why there's a random box underneath the item menu) but I ran out of time to implement it. However I will look into the menu button not working because it should be working outside of battle. As for other features I'll definitely look into it (especially sound), but I'm glad you generally thought well of it :)