The game was interesting, but felt quite random at times - I found it difficult to know what was happening. The surreal videos were a big plus, it showed a lot of effort had gone in to accumulating assets for the game!

There was a lot of walking through large empty spaces and backtracking which I found frustrating. I found it difficult to navigate the large empty field and I'm pretty sure I missed a few exits. Luckily I accidentally went behind a building in the city otherwise I would've assumed it was a dead end. I managed to get Tanner and Clare.

The key puzzle mechanics were interesting. The first one you interact with has the controls partially covered which makes it difficult to read and thus difficult to understand.

I was a big fan of this character, they had good energy:

All in all, a very interesting game which could use some attention to level design. A very unique addition to GBjam and the first I've seen with FMV.

This is surreal as hell!
I did get a hang when I picked up the gameboy, and it happened again when I tried a second time. Maybe this is just on the web version?

Super interesting use of palette swaps and FMV. The FMV's definite set me on edge, so I'd be curious to see a game that's built even more around that. What was your process in how you created them?

Love this entry! I feel like it's definitely fighting against the spirit of the jam a bit, but the surreal aesthetics and unsettling themes really make it work.

I agree with the previous comment that stylizing the FMV sections to look like they were shot in the GB Camera would have taken it to the next level, but there's so much effort on display here already that I don't feel like that's a reasonable ask.

The puzzle gameplay was a bit on the simplistic side, but it's clear that they weren't really the focus. I did run into a few situations where the puzzle claimed it had been solved, but I didn't feel like I really made things fit correctly (in particular in the "shaped like the need to escape" one), so maybe those were bugs.

The Game Boy feels like it was included more as a framing device here than as direct aesthetic inspiration, but that seemed to fit what the game was going for. It had an underlying creepy-pasta-haunted-cartridge vibe to it, since those also frequently broke with the traditional limitations of the format they were emulating, when it served their stories.

Narrative, themes, dialog, characters were the easy stand outs to me. Curious to see what you work on next!

This is a very interesting submission! 

I loved the music, and the general art style of the gameplay! The characters and level art where unique, charming, and easy to understand!

While the fmv was spooky and I was worried what I was about to see.. I dont think it felt very Game Boy at all. It was interesting, quirky, and eye catching, certainly, but for me It actually depleted from the game and felt kinda tacked on.. which is a little sad, because it looks like a great deal of effort went into shooting, acting, recoloring, and interpolating. If it better fit the pacing of the game it might have worked for me.  and if the fmv was made to look more like it was shot with a game boy camera then it would have been an A+ for me. 

With or without the fmv intro, I think the gameplay is innovative and interesting. While roating the key objects makes the game more challenging, it strays away from the limitations of the game boy, and allows me to remember that its not a game boy game, while the exploration side of the game does a great job of feeling like a game boy game! Doing things like scaling and rotating sprites might be expected in modern games, but Game Boy didnt have built in methods for doing this. All scaling and rotation would have been done frame by frame. While it might be more work than scaling/rotating via the engine, doing those animations with separate sprite drawings would have been far more compelling, since its a GBJAM.  

The dialogues were pretty close to what the game boy could muster, and I appreciated this! 

I liked the pencilhead joke! 

Maybe I was doing things wrong, but the car traffic seemed too hard for me to get through. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to go that way or not and gave up because I kept getting flattened. More hints and clues to the story would have left me more compelled to try different things. 

Maybe sometype of indication that a key or puzzle is interactable could help? I wasn't sure what to interact with, but interacting with every possible thing seemed like too much work. Though having the option to look for interesting dialogues is a nice touch for sure. Knowing where the important interactions are could help streamline the experience.

The art and music really stand out to me in this one. The dialogues were good too, and I would have loved to see more! I love the player character sprite!

Thank you for sharing your work with the world! I hope my feedback is helpful for you!

No freeze for me on the web build btw.

Hmm game froze after I picked up the gameboy in the room. Other than that, looks nice!