I liked this one overall, though I do have some complaints.
First, the good stuff. The sprites are solid Game Boy-styled images, each with distinct appearances despite the harsh color and pixel limits. The songs are absolute joys to listen to - not surprising given who's making them, but worth pointing out anyway. 😉 The maps are always just 1 screen - it's really easy to see where to go and it's virtually impossible to get lost. The puzzles weren't too hard to figure out but still made me think a little. The color switching mechanic is an ambitious twist on your standard rock-paper-scissors elemental mechanic, and even has interactions with the battle environment. Frequent save prompts, while not the most exciting feature, are still appreciated - I was able to play through the whole thing in one go, but having those saves at key points would definitely have been appreciated if I had lost at some point. The cutscenes were good too, with a fair bit of movement and fun banter between the characters. Those characters also had very distinct, consistent voices, something I haven't seen in many of the entries here.
Next up, the bad stuff. Trying to interact with the shards on the map was pretty buggy, exacerbated by the camouflage mechanic. I'm not exactly sure why it would happen, but there were moments where I would see the shards even if I wasn't camouflaged (the instance I specifically remember was in the room where we meet Alex), and even after toggling the camouflage it still wouldn't always register that I was standing on top of the shard spamming the interact button. Triggering the swim mechanic results in seeing an image of Alex standing on the floor and another of him swimming until the transition was complete - just a weird visual issue. I'm not sure how I feel about the team mechanics: having the characters switch positions automatically when you interact with their corresponding object is certainly preferable to having to dig into the menu and manually switch characters around to get the desired positioning, but then I have to question why the characters need to switch positions at all. Not sure what the answer is here, and maybe I'm just thinking too hard about it.
Gonna make a whole new paragraph for the element system because it's such a big deal. I think it needs some tuning, and some issues may have been due to the compressed nature of the game and constraints of the jam version. I think it would benefit to have some UI element similar to the one in RATD to help users remember the relationship between the elements. It could be something that can be toggled if not everyone likes it, but even with 3 elements I was having trouble remembering what the weakness/resistance relationships were. Another thing about the MC specifically: the only Blue skill available at the start is one that requires the enemy to attack the character - not great if the enemies fail to attack that particular character or don't use a damage-dealing skill. It also seemed like sometimes the weaknesses didn't work properly or didn't do as much damage as I would have expected. Maybe that was me failing to remember the relationships properly, but it could also be due to the skills not getting enough of a boost from the weaknesses. I found the combo enemies confusing too: they have an outer color, which I would think would be the part that would take priority since that's what the skill is hitting, but is it actually the inner part that determines the weakness/resistance? It wasn't clear when I was playing. Another thing that's kind of an issue is the allies that are locked to a single element. While nobody seemed to be completely up a creek due to a poor match, it did concern me that I couldn't do anything to shield them from unfavorable matchups or use White damage-dealing skills to get around resistant enemies. Some of this may be muted by having more variety of elements, thus allowing for more neutral matchups, but unless you're going to be able to swap characters mid-quest at will there will always be scenarios like this. I liked that there are bonuses for matching a color with the battle environment, but I didn't find it to be helpful, and if I had to switch away from the color due to type matching it made the bonus meaningless.
So the elemental system needs some work, and I think some of the issues are just due to the constraints of the jam. I know that's a big wall of text, mostly of complaints, but I did actually have fun playing this game and I'm looking forward to seeing how this concept develops.
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