I'm not sure if it was mentioned on the jam page this time, but once again I'm providing an art prize of a drawing to the lowest rated entry. If you're on the MGGJ Discord, could you contact me through that?

(I have a certain reputation on the Discord server art-wise, this is a booby prize, and I totally understand if you don't want it, in which case it'll go to the next game on the list. Just let me know.)

I took the time to install a Linux distro (openSUSE Tumbleweed 64-bit) just to be able to play this game. Just a heads up for anyone who tries to do the same, I needed to install libglfw3 package to start the game. If anyone faces the “GLFW: Cannot make current with a window that has no OpenGL context” error, you need drivers that support OpenGL 3.x, and for me, I had to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

Anyways, this game has decent graphics and atmosphere - from the start it feels like a mystery is looming and Harebell is there to find out what’s going on and it peaked my interest. I also appreciate the dialogue, things like that add to the experience. I hopped around, backtracked a bit, and BAM! Hit a wall and everything turned white with no way to proceed. I had to delete the save and start over because it persists even on game restart. This time I was careful not to collide with any walls that I can see. Using Vision, I spotted some enemies on the right and headed there… got Bunny card, then went middle and got Pororoca or something, then head left and BAM! Accidentally hit a bush and everything turned white with no way to proceed.

I couldn’t complete the game because of this bug, but I managed to play through some of the fights, and with the demonstration video on the game page to fill me in a bit, I think it’s sufficient for me to give a rating. There’s no tutorial; although this may be part of the narrative, I would like some indication at least as to what I’m actually doing - if it’s a flee button then perhaps it could say “Flee.” Harebell mentioned about transformation, which is hard to notice because she transforms in the faded background. When pressing the middle button, I thought all it did was swap cards and did not notice the change in HP at first. I also didn’t expect the Vision card to be an AoE attack, because it’s supposed to be Vision - things like that feel unintuitive; the game doesn’t explain anything and there’s no revelation or a-ha moment.

Gameplay-wise, it is a decent turn-based game with some decision-making involving which enemies to attack first and what spells to use. If there wasn’t the game-breaking bug, I’d say that it has some exploration, using Vision to scout out potential leads. It’s sort of like a card-collecting mystery game, which I think is a cool concept. When defeated, the player can simply try again, and I think this is a good design choice given the current mechanics. Currently, strategy is quite minimal; perhaps allowing the player to choose which cards make up the transformation and which cards are for human-form, or allow enemies to do more than just basic attacks, could make the gameplay more interesting.

All in all, I had a bit of fun destroying some slimes. It needs more polish but it has potential. Keep it up!

the mahou shoujo file isn't an executable file for me.