Rating games using the judge categories for fun

Gameplay

Gameplay wise, the game seems to be a combination of puzzles and a fetch quest. It was really short. The rat puzzle was fine. The water pipe puzzle pretty confusing. I wasn't exactly sure about what each valve was doing. I pretty much ended solving that by randomly turning pipes around. The moonshine pipe puzzle was better, but the controls for switching pipes and rotations were too sensible to they key press, so it kept switching/rotating at a fast speed

Overall it was still enjoyable, but it was quite short and a little unfocused

10/20

Presentation

The game's artstyle immediately draws in. It is very clean and beautiful. The character portraits were super cute and detailed.

The music set up the atmosphere nicely.

There were hints of the story here and there, but this seems pretty much like a prologue to a much bigger story. It didn't give too much to go on. The dialogue/humor was honestly a little hit and miss for me

14/20 -> Doubled to 28

Engagement

The tiny bits of lore you get as time goes by keep you going, although the constant feeling of being in a fetch quest could certainly alienate people

13/20

Potential

As a really story heavy game, this game could be something great, but I definitely still think it needs a more defining gameplay element to it. The extremely short length makes its potential more difficult to see

12/20

Total: 63/100 (4 Stars)

Super cute game. Not much I can say about it , there's some very minor problems and tweaks that are honestly very nitpicky things about presentation such as when a character meets another they say "Look a people!" and stuff like that. The music, the art, it's all top notch.  

Sadly game play had some issues, it took me very long time to clear the Sludge Rats part because the rats kept moving into wrong direction. There's also passability errors like the tree underneath the station doesn't let you walk underneath it like other trees. Trees have many passability problems in general, you can walk on top of the tree trunks, while some don't let you walk underneath the leaf parts even.  At the intro, you see all characters walk out of sight into the right but when you get to play, you are back to where they began to walk as if the whole walking part never happened.  Sometimes characters who are supposed to be highlighted during dialogue don't get highlighted and everyone remains dark.

The main character has no personality. The friends are always talking but the main character is totally silent. I don't even remember her name or if it was ever mentioned since the other girls talk all the time and handle all talking. If the main character is literally mute, it wasn't mentioned anywhere but otherwise, they should say something.

Overall, it has potential and with polish in these small issues it could become really great.

5/5 from me. I really loved this game :)

The art of this game was a bit too bland, but I can understand that as everyone had 1 month to work on this. The character designs were good, but the genre of the game wasn't my cup of tea. The goal of this game was to find her sister, but finding her was the least of my worries. I was just bounce around doing random tasks of each of the human-people and I just felt like the transitions weren't that great. Idk, it's because I'm an action and RPG guy haha. I need combat!

I was so confused on the pipe puzzle as I collected every single one and the correct one that I thought wasn't correct fitted. Idk...But that puzzle was a little confusing and maybe it's because how it's presented. (Maybe the pipes shading?)

The dialogues for this fit the roles of each girl perfectly but the story lacked drive. I felt no sense of purpose except just walking around and doing tasks. To be honest, I could probably speed run this game, pay attention to the beginning dialogue and read the last dialogue of the game and that's the purpose of this game. Finding her sister. I felt no danger, and the game had no "obstacles" that made sense to me to prevent her from finding her sister.

Ok, I'm too harsh on this review, so now we go to the good review.

The one thing I did like was the sprinkler puzzle. That puzzle design reminded me of portal 2. very well done. Then the rat puzzle was well done too. Nice eventing, but the map itself could use work. I didn't like the gray tone. (Maybe the map wasn't finished)

The music was good, and I felt that music fitted the title perfectly. As for the music with the crow guy, it was sorta...catchy? I got weird taste lol

The sprites were well done and the game itself isn't pixelated! Most games are pixel so cutos to do art outside of the box.

I  know plue as we worked on the beast named eliza together so....

5/5 :D 

I SUPPORT HER!!!!!!

Review for The Secret Santa!

I really enjoyed your game! I'm not a non combat game type of guy but this one grabbed me from the very first moment. The best thing about it is the atmosphere coupled with the music, a delightful combo that makes your mind wander off through those desolate lands. The puzzles were simple but creative and nice, more than expected for this kind of game, after all, it's not supposed to be a hardcore puzzling game ;) The dialog was good too, it jumped a bit too far away sometimes(with some assumptions that made me think "how did they know that?") but it occurred extremely rarely.

Now, for the bad part :(

I encountered two game breaking bugs and a visual one. The visual one I don't care and it's extremely unimportant; in case you want to fix it for later(maybe you know of this already) is the first tree you encounter when going south to the station.The issue is you can walk through it.

Now, the game breaking ones. One occurred while chasing the rats away, but I coulnd't replicate it. Maybe it was because of me having the monitor fps sync on, I have no idea. The game just froze when I chased one of them away. The other one happens every time you touch the tile to the most left of the stairs to the left outside the train station. I believe you have a move carácter X tiles to the right placed there, but if you try to Access it from below it can't , as the tile next to it is impassable and the game freezes. 

All in all, I had a great experience and time playing your game and I'd love to play it once it's complete :) The Dynamic between the characters is extremely solid, although I must point out that as other reviewers I thought the main carácter didn't speak for a while, maybe you want to make it a bit more obvious that shedoes speak.

Total playtime: It took me about 14 minutes to finish the game and it was very well paced, not a single minute was I bored.

Final verdict: A very solid visual presentation and great puzles make it on eof the most polished games I've played here. You have a nice cocktail for a longer game, one I'd love to see. Careful with the game breaking bugs tho. 

4/5 stars ^^

Reviewed for Secret Santa 2018

The game follows three young girls, Angela, Devon and Lia, as they track Lia's lost sister in the Cypress Hills. As expected from the team that brought us Dear Edwin last year, the audiovisual aspect is really great.

However, the game is quite railroaded. You aren't given much of a freedom to explore as your companions constantly remind you if you're about to enter places you're not supposed to. I can understand that somehow because each map is hand-drawn, but it derails from the experience somewhat.

As mentioned, the graphics are beautiful. There are a few exceptions, though, that I hope you will consider paying more attention to when the contest is over. The pipes you find in the city look plain and dull, perhaps because of the lack of any shading on the sprites. The storagehouse in the Cypress station looks dull with grey colours, and I quite honestly disliked the puzzle minigame there.

Speaking of puzzles, the Moonshine puzzle had a bug in my playthrough: I did not notice the buttons (I think there were buttons) for changing the pipes, it was by pure coincidence that I noticed that pressing Esc (cancel) allowed me to try another pipe. And the "turn pipe around" gimmick would work better with curved arrow pictures, in my opinion. Anyhow, after spending about five to ten minutes on that puzzle, I managed to get the thing working and could progress. I'm not sure if I could have gotten the moonshine right away, but the backtracking from Gerdy to that machine and back was unnecessary.

I can see the potential for a full game in this entry, but it still requires some extra polish before it would sell, if you're going that route. I can understand developing the story, hopefully you will consider the other points of this review as well.

Hey LazyBumStudio,

Having played and enjoyed Dear Edwin last year, I was very excited to read in the progress threads that the same team would be working on a new project, and this time with a focus on gameplay. Unfortunately, I might have hyped myself up a little too much and set the expectations too high.

Visuals:
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I actually liked the pixel style of Dear Edwin a lot more than the style used in fading remnants, and felt there was much more polish in Dear Edwin than here. I'm not sure if it was intentional or if the team ran out of time, but the presence and absence of shading/highlights on certain elements versus others (like the trees on the map versus the racks in the storage room) made the game's aesthetics look very unbalanced and unfinished. The sprites and character busts are great, though as many have mentioned, Lia not having a portrait when speaking when everyone else did took some time to register and get used to.

Story/Theme:
I know this is only a vertical slice, and I know there's a deadline, but similar to the visuals, seeing what was presented here further impressed upon me that the team might have bitten off more than they could chew. Especially considering the bar that was set by Dear Edwin.

The game's description paints a picture of a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, with phrases like ("Humanity is a lonely shell of what it once was..." and "...search for answers in a world that has forgotten mankind..."), and yet, for a good part of the demo we have three teenage(?) girls talking about eating peaches and friendly bickering with each other in a way that would seem more appropriate in a high-school slice-of-life setting. At first I even thought that through some bizarre reason peaches are now the only way to sustain life and is worth more than gold, but the game doesn't do anything to confirm or deny this idea.

The main quest dialog suggests that our protagonists seem to be in a hurry to find someone, wanting to avoid detours or being too involved with other people's troubles, but then the same trio also has time to fool around in garbage bins playing jokes on each other. As such, I have no idea how we (the audience) should be identifying with these characters and their predicaments, making it very hard to feel invested in them. 

Also, the fact that they are the only human-like people in the game (so far), but also don't seem surprised to see animal-people in town, have numerous interesting implications, but what these implications are were not even slightly hinted at in the game, leaving me to wonder whether it was even necessary to present these side characters as non-humans in the demo. (ie. Chekhov's gun)  

Gameplay:
For me, gameplay is about giving players agency and having interesting choices. Choices can be story choices, progression choices, battle choices, etc. but regardless of form, it's about giving players some form of self-expression and having more than one outcome. Having said that, even though there was the mouse chasing, the water pipe, and the distilling machine puzzle, I felt that those were more like interactive elements than real gameplay. 

Yes, they are something to DO beyond reading dialogue and moving on the map, but not something you can PLAY with, not only because they were required to progress the story, but also because there is only one "right answer". I understand that the definition of gameplay and games differ from person to person, and so I might have simply had expectations that were not aligned with what the team had in mind.

Overall:
Make no mistake, despite my disappointments with the game, I'm fully aware of the effort and work that went into building fading remnants, and I applaud the team for that. If this review sounds especially harsh, it's only because I believe (and still do) in what this team is capable of, and felt there could have been so much more. I sincerely hope that the team finds encouragement rather than discouragement from what I've written here, and am still very much looking forward to your future projects.

Cheers for another IGMC finished!
Andy

This was the comments I gave when playtesting the game, I figured I'd post here as well.

I love the graphics, they were Excellent. Though I loved your first ideas in the game progress thread I think that the style you settled on was very good.

Busts were lovely, especially Devon, loved Devon’s colours!

The music was Wonderful. Very good and thematic.

Gameplay was easy and fairly intuitive (though the pipe one did stump me for a moment. Lol)

I didn’t like having to go back to a map multiple times, but that might just be me, I like knowing all the information and not having to go back again and again to talk to someone (A little like Angela I think lol).

I like the characters, especially Devon, she was adorable! And not going to lie I immediately decided that she and Angela must become a couple! Because that’s what I do with characters when I’ve known them for more than 2 secs. (Don’t be insulted, this is a good thing, when I start pairing characters it means they’ve really resonated with me).

I understand that Lia is the main character, but I actually thought she was a mute for a while before I suddenly realised she was speaking! I think maybe I’m just used to having a face during a conversation to look at when someone is talking, having nothing other than the people on screen darken took me too long to realise it was another character (I might not be making sense!)

I thought the hints you dropped about the overall story were interesting and worth more exploration (which is obviously what you were looking for). I would have loved to see more of the story, and I hope you’ll continue the game after the contest. I also want to know why some of the characters are human and others were animallike.

The ending of the contest game got me thinking that maybe Angela and Devon are figments of Lia’s imagination (or she's schizophrenic or the adventure is going to parallel getting over something terrible, and coming to terms with the death of her sister or something) what with how they were talking about her and her sister (why would they all not continue to travel together) and also, I would love to know what happened in your world!

Overall the game was very good and I enjoyed it. It felt very short, but I know that was probably due to time constraints, and obviously I would love to know more of the world and what happened.