This is one of the best games in the history of mankind. It is the pinnacle of humanity, masterfully blending the story with the great graphics and dialogue. The harsh thinking puzzles, the characters, the heartfelt story brought tears to my eyes. By the end of the game I was sobbing with tears of happiness falling on my face.  The game really made me feel like I was a hiker boy using mystical powers to help these poor villagers. It really immersed me into the game.  The score also provided another layer of depth to this complicated masterpiece and I truly believe that this game deserves an award, a Grammy, and an Emmy for its masterful storytelling. This game is ready to go into the market and I will personally buy ten copies and play it everyday.

This was an incredible game. The concept was great, the use of the theme was great, the art and visuals were great, the puzzles and use of the slider box was fantastic, it's hard to believe this was made in only a game jam's time limit. I did get stuck a couple of times, the main moment being the qr code, but I got through it and finished it! The ending felt a bit anti-climactic, that would be my only criticism, but that's such a minor thing after playing and experiencing such a great little game. Seeing all the fish start swimming up the river and following them to listen to the joy of that fisherman finally able to fish again was the highlight of that game, and I want to thank everyone involved for creating something so solid. Great job!

I really love the aesthetics of the game. The way everything just slides simultaneously is just so satisfying. The puzzle solving progression is also very smooth! After finishing the game, the slider gets randomized again, I'm not sure whether that's intended or not, but it felt kind of weird....

All in all, this is definitely a really great game! Good work on finishing this under 48 hours!

Really cool ! Definitely original. It feels like a finished game already. I thought the early push for game of the year was a joke, but maybe it stands a chance after all ;)

Really cool and well implemented mechanic, the art / pacing / writing was great too! The only thing i can add is being the annoying linux user :p. If you could include a linux build next time it would really be appreciated, the game crashed at 5 or 6 slides and i was really excited to see the QR code and river complete forms. Will finish it when i have time though!

I see a lot of well-deserved praise here, so I'm going to try and offer some constructive criticisms that I'm not seeing brought up. The fact that you can use the artifact no matter where you are was not clear to me and may have cut off a ton of players just because of that miscommunication. When you read the sign, it implied to me that you press tab to use the artifact (which must be the sign) and then go from there.

I got lost several times because there is no indicator where you are on the map, but also because there's only so much you can do to make a tile look unique in monochrome style. I'd love to see a pointer for where I am even if it just tells me which tile I am on.

Early game you have to use your tile to explore the borders of the map which could be fine, but I thought it was unintuitive and more annoying than cool. The map doesn't show what borders are explorable, so it felt like a guess and check to find out if I lined myself up for a useful border connection. This is only annoying because of how early game you must slide tiles despite there being so much free room, so to check everything you slide along the borders.

The QR code was cool, I just wish it were placed differently in the slider order or that there was a better indication of what tiles had a QR corner. I definitely noticed the corners before but that doesn't mean I remember which tile had a corner and because of that I spent a lot of time slowly walking around the tiles to search for corners. I think the big thing here is just that you do walk kinda slow and you have a ton of ground to cover at this point.

When the river guy shows up, you aren't able to initially complete his puzzle (or at least that was my order). I got stuck here trying to figure out how to connect the two points I know exist but seem to be impossible to reach. I wish there was something to indicate you connected the right tiles to the borders, so then maybe you could connect both borders and say, "Well I know these are right, I'm just missing a piece" and get to the conclusion that I needed to reach which is that it's impossible for now.

I hate to admit this, but I accidentally completed the final slider puzzle and am genuinely confused about why that solution was the one. I do understand that you were supposed to line up walls to create a border, and the river pieces to help guide you to that conclusion, but the piece of the map that forms a U wall did not seem to belong anywhere and still looked out of place on the final solution. I can appreciate the difficulty of this, it is a proper slider puzzle after all. My point is that I wasn't actually sure what was the correct formation and might have given up if I didn't stumble into the answer. Visual feedback on when you place a correct tile could do wonders for establishing the intended final map.

Now if I had to speedrun my nitpicks...text goes a bit slow, water tiles do not look like water tiles when not connected properly (collision is wonky too), I found several spots where collision does not match the graphics (thankfully nothing game-breaking), the tangled orbs felt really out of place and like busywork because of a slow walk, I wish you had a more open connection tile closer to the start of the game to make exploring a little smoother, and I wish the water/river parts on the tiles looked more different from the walls (similar colors, sorry I'm a lil colorblind).

Wow I wrote quite a lot, but I also played quite a lot here. You have a chunky experience of a game jam game here and I absolutely loved it. It amazes me you got all of this done and balanced progression in just 48 hours. If I don't see this in Mark's top 100 somebody obviously isn't doing their job here haha. Cute aesthetic, great job on guiding the player, most tasks feel intuitive enough to want to continue playing, and the music managed to not annoy me after spending maybe 15+ minutes playing this. Phenomenal work here and I hope you consider publishing this in some capacity! 

The game was fun to play (finished in about 30mins-1hr).  I really loved the art and music, everything feels relatively smooth. 

The only issues I had when playing were;  

1. pushing the TAB to open up the artifact (might've just been my keyboard) 
2. that I couldn't rearrange the map when I found all 8 missing pieces.

great game, I was really engaged. The main mechanic is creative and applied in clever and diverse ways. 

Got stumped with the code bit (formed the 4 pieces but don't know what to do with it yet).  Might have to come back to it later because know I need to see this through

really excellent game !! every element joins together (hehe) really nicely, and the concept is incredibly clever. the cute writing kept me playing and really helped the game's pacing. great job :))

Possibly the best game I've seen in the jam so far - absolutely incredible! 

Music, art, level design, neat little dialogue changes and a freaking code!? 

Well done, this game rocks!

Great job, everything is very well done, the secret code part was really cool. ~ Do check mine and give your valueable feedback:D

Definitely one of my favorite takes on a moving map style of game, especially with the character interaction added in.  Plus the sort of "dynamic" difficulty by adding new tiles as you progressed, leading to the "final challenge" which was actually pretty hard.  

The main points I'd say for me personally about this would be:

• The specific interactions were awesome.  Nice little ingame quest system that definitely added to the game and added challenge without strictly telling you how to complete it.
• Adding extra tiles was a nice bit of dynamic difficulty.  I just wish there were more to be honest!
• Some sort of multi-move for the map would be nice though.  Mostly for the early bits since there was a lot of just moving all the way along the walls.

Everything about this is absolutely amazing. Great game and excellent job!

Great job, everything is very well done, the secret code part was really clever XD

Wow, really well done. Great art, animations, sounds... Great job, for real!

Probably the best game I have played so far in the jam. The art is amazing, the music is incredible but more importantly the gameplay is super fun. The scan level is incredible and the ending is super satisfying.  Even the theme is followed really closely. You can definitely publish this game. 

This is brilliant!! I literally went on YouTube to learn how to do slider puzzles because I was having so much fun and felt so determined to beat this thing!!!! The art style was minimal in a way that was still charming, the sliding mechanics had just enough juice to them, and for almost every mini-puzzle, there was some call-back to the theme of "join together". Definitely one of if not my favorite game throughout this jam! Well done. (p.s. the music slaps!!! Good job on that too!!)

Hey, this is one of my favs this jam, really gj! I like the music and graphics which reminded me of the old pokemon games, I love the original slider puzzle and this is a really interesting take on it. I wonder how many tiles you can set up in a full game.
If I got it right(?) there are tiles outside the 9 you can move, thats a bit confusing because you dont expect that at the start, so I was stuck for a while, and mid game that just makes you remember those side tiles instead of watching them with tab, so maybe consider a way to explain it better