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A jam submission

PhrepoiseView game page

We will rock you. Also Digby is the best. I love him.
Submitted by KatVolts — 7 minutes, 54 seconds before the deadline
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Phrepoise's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall fun and playability#1192.3982.643

Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Theme incorporation
We have cosmic Horror elements. The player's mind stat directly twists the world. The player becomes isolated after being trapped in the hotel dungeon. The hotel has infinite space inside.

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Comments

Submitted

I wish rats were not nuclear bombs with simply a small chance to fail to explode. I would have liked to complete the game during the jam. I think I went quite far exactly once, got three successive keys (None, Chamber, Snoss).

The intro is cool.

The dungeon looks very good. Movement feels good enough and I like the combat system and the one-time-usage cards as rewards.  Overall the difficulty feels right too as there's no checkpoint, you must be careful of what you're doing if you don't want to die. I like that sanity carries over battles but health does not.

I think combat is very slow but maybe if I had not restarted 50 times because of the game breaking rats then I would not feel this way.

This is a cool entry, I'll play a fixed version if you ever release it.

Submitted

Loved the cutscene, well done! 


The visuals are great and I could see (and hear, because the gpu fans reved up quickly) that you made good use of Lumen.

Fast snappy movement, I like that, however the enemies and the combat did not really match up the rest.

A solid entry.

Submitted

First off I have to say I am very impressed you managed to put together an in-engine cutscene with multiple characters, voiceover, multiple shots, and subtitles! Oh and I let  out a little giggle when I saw the default Unreal mannequin as the receptionist, not a bad thing though. But I did run into an issue with the opening cutscene where trying to skip through would lead to the cutscene repeating in parts, and not let me fully skip until a few sentences passed.

The most immediate thing I noticed once gameplay started was the motion blur, the one thing which gives away a game as Unreal imo. I never really liked motion blur so I think it would be an improvement if it was either disabled or if there was an option to toggle it.

Besides that, I liked the visuals. The main characters have an interesting low poly style, same with the enemies. I also kinda like the more pixellated textures combined with the high quality lighting and reflections. Reminds me of the System Shock Remake graphics. It might be a bit too much effect for some player's machines but mine muddled through. Also, I don't know how you managed to get the edges of some of the meshes to show up like in Blender or something but I kinda like how it looks.

Bringing it back to the story though, I feel like I missed something where a couples stay in a hotel to go see a meteor suddenly shifted to a dungeon crawl through the set of The Shining. Maybe there's more of an explanation later on in the game, but I never made it to the end as I encountered the bug of being stuck after battle.

The combat was decent once I figured out how it worked, which to be fair only took one lost fight. I did find it a bit odd though how the enemy would move from being on a tile to standing in mid air. I assume it's supposed to be for showing the enemy in full, but I think if you plan to update this post-jam I would suggest having combat start when the player is on the tile next to an enemy. Just my 2 cents.

There was clearly a lot of thought and effort put into this game, I just wish I was able to see all of it. I did enjoy what I saw though, so great job!

Submitted

Hi KatVolts! Big fan of your streams.

Kudos for managing an animated cutscene at the beginning of the game. I love the story between the two main characters and I want to just watch them having their vacation.

The graphics of the hotel are amazing--maybe too amazing for my laptop. After a while the game seemed to just stop responding to my inputs and I had to force quit.

I liked the mini-deckbuilder combat, though again, it ran a little sluggish on my computer.

Thanks for contributing this!

Submitted (1 edit)

Sadly, I also encountered 'being stuck after battle' bug multiple times. Looks like it happens on rats for me. But played quite a bit to check how it goes. Battled a Rat, a Server (i think? a human-like rat), a Maid, and a Stalker so far. Saw teleports :) nice!

First - story. I am not sure what happened after narrative and first look at the hotel. Everyone hit by meteor shards kind of? There is just a sliver of pre-story missing, but that kind of feels important, judging from all love put into story prior. Only thing 'connecting' everything is that we are still in a hotel with meteor-like shards everywhere. But why we suddenly alone in there with closed door to some dimension maybe and everything is suddenly scary? Btw, if you fast skipping the story it always 'stuck' on 'a rock from space? i have to see it' moment. And you have to listen it through (with repeated phrases) to continue.

Visuals are good, music is tense, voiceover was a nice touch (even if only one person had a good mic! ;) ). The only complain I have would be that free look with mouse feature... it really doesn't seem to be needed for the gameplay and confuses more than helps outside of the battle (also it not only moves left-right-up-down, but tilts view for some reason, making it even harder to use). Probably the game would feel much better with no free look at all. Unless there is some mechanic I haven't actually manage to reach...

Combat felt really good. Maybe you can speed up animation of resolution a bit, but other  than that - I liked need to balance body and mind and how you use them both as a resourse every time. 'One time use' mechanic maybe also could be explained in rules menu... its one time per battle or one time only? Was hard for me to tell with freezing after combat bug :( Sometimes I could do several battles and sometimes would get freeze on the first one.

Attack first move didn't seem to work properly. Used it against block moves and it felt that i should be hitting before enemy would place the block, but no. No hit was registered. Its shame though - it was one of interesting mechanics to me.

All in all its hell of a shame that there is such a stopper in a way (lock of controls after battle). Would love to try and get to the end otherwise :(

Submitted

I thought the combat was interesting, because I do not play deck building games at all.  There seems to be a disconnect between the gameplay and the intro as they are very different stylistically.  

Submitted

Okay, the atmosphere was intense and the card battle system was a nice touch, but maybe a little bit too slow. Movement instead was fast and snappy. I too had a lock of my controls and could not do anything after acquiring a new card. I posted complains under some other Unreal engine games that I do not think that it is the right tool for the jam. The games are most of the time VERY large and have nothing to show for that size. Your game stood out of the Unreal crowd a bit and was quite beautiful and seemed to use some of the engine´s features well.

Submitted

Nice sound and visuals. The look around gave me some motion sickness. Game broke after combat, replayed and got same issue second time. I think its when I'm accepting a reward card. Could not move. Ambitious project but a bit broken as is.

Submitted(+1)

Nice game! Good ambience and narrative (even if the character could have some reaction to the hotel being filled woth eldritch rats and maid). The fight system I like a lot too, however I did not understand how speed work, does every enemy just have more speed than me? and if so why are defensive move bypassing that?

Very cool game nonetheless, congrats!

Also the receptionist being the UE mannequin with no voice is very funny to me lmaoo

Submitted(+1)

Very nice game, with a real intro story. Graphics and environments are really impressive. Got a game breaking bug after getting out of combat mode.

Submitted(+1)

Gave it a try and got very lost haha. The sound design is great and the visuals work very well!

Some way to at least keep track of landmarks would have helped I think.  I also didn't really know what my objective was, or if there even is one beyond wandering  around. The mouse monster still has a direction vector attached to it, I don't know if that was intentional. The intro, elaborate as it is, also feels very disconnected from the rest of the game. Especially for how long it is, it told me nothing about what I needed to do once in gameplay. On a side note, the cut to and away from the android receptionist was funny to me.

Regarding the gameplay, I think some balancing might help. I died twice due to unlucky card pulls, I feel like 5 in health is a bit too low.  10 may be too much but a 7 might have worked better maybe? The enemies also don't really seem to move from their spots, though I think I saw a crystal rat in a different position after a while.

All in all a good effort!

Submitted(+1)

I would've really loved to untangle the mysteries inside the hotel, but the game gets stuck sometimes after winning combat and you can no longer move from the tile you're on. Happened to me several times and I had to restart, so I never really got to experience very much.

The premise is otherwise pretty cool, being stuck in an infinitely large hotel with corrupted bellhops and weird crystal rats.