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Twisted World's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #6 | 3.972 | 3.972 |
| Execution | #7 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Metroidvania | #8 | 4.111 | 4.111 |
| Sensory | #8 | 4.222 | 4.222 |
| Enjoyment | #24 | 3.556 | 3.556 |
Ranked from 9 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Engine
GameMaker
Team/Developer
Just me. I go by Shnaz on the weird wild web
External assets
none
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Comments
Great graphics, love the floaty Celeste hair. I wish I knew how to do that.
I appreciate the amount of attention you put into the level art as well as the dialogue.
Such a cool mechanic! I wish you'd introduced it in a more contained area, as it was overwhelming falling into the sky right out of the gate.
What a reveal on the shadow monster! Love that.
I feel that you're ramping up the complexity in the quantity and amount of enemies, as well as the mechanics too fast. I'm going to borrow a comment I made on another jam entry because it's relevant here, too, for solving this issue:
With something this unique, your average player will need you to start simpler, and very slowly ramp up the complexity. Portal is an excellent example. First room: walk through a portal; you win! Second room: grab a box and put it on a switch; you win! Third room: walk through a portal (at the right time), pickup a box, walk through the portal again (at the right time), put it on a switch; you win! It seems dumb when you look at it laid out like this, but there's a reason Portal is so widely acclaimed. By ramping up complex/unique mechanics over time, you ease the player into understanding the playspace possibilities. Then you can do all sorts of fun crazy stuff as the game goes on and player skill increases.
Also, please add an in-game tutorial for my sanity.
I really like this concept and world. I'd love to play a full version of this game if you choose to continue development.
So sick!! Love the concept and execution. Really solid core mechanics, movement, and gameplay. The first time the levels flipped it was mind blowing! Also, the flowing hair of the character was a nice touch. Love all the designs and minimalist color palette. It all works really well and has a cohesive aesthetic I really enjoyed.
Unfortunately my playthrough didn't quite match up to how charmed I was by the graphics, dialogue, and overall design. I felt lost right away since the eye told me to go up and left, but that was a dead end. So I went to the right, and had a tricky room without a clear direction to take. Maybe it just ramped up in difficulty too quickly, but I had a really hard time navigating the first room just to get to the hallway section with the rolling spike enemy. I wish there had been a checkpoint at the beginning of every room because I usually already took damage by the time I reached it, and wasn't long before I died and had to restart back in the larger hub room.
It may have been a skill issue also; I tend to have better control when I can use arrow keys for platformers, so I definitely took some damage due to lack of precision on my part using WASD.
Maybe that first room doesn't actually need damage threats? The eyeball guys were a fun challenge because they never did damage, but they still posed a platforming challenge as you get used to the controls and rotation mechanic. It was a really cool layout and I would have liked to just jump around experimenting for a bit, but the mortal threats made it feel too punishing to explore freely.
So while I didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped (due to difficulty), I was blown away by the execution and inspired by the core idea of this game! Amazing work!!
Sorry! I was going to add arrows, but those darned keys will end up failing if you press UP+LEFT+Spacebar so I default to WASD controls by habit. I'll try to implement a keybinding system when the jam is over so that people can set controls that work for them. The first room was supposed to teach the player not to face challenges head on, and to try and find a way to cheese past obstacles which is why it was intentionally rough to do it "normaly". the game lacks linearity because its a metroidvania, though the game really did need some sort of map. I do agree that the respawns should have been room based though and the bosses truly are obscenely difficult, when I tackle super month I'll implement an easier difficulty for the game. Unfortunately, this game only has a hard difficulty as of now. At least I managed to set up a working save file system so the game doesn't need to be completed in a single sitting (it just isn't obvious as there is no menu).
Hey there, Im so glad you enjoyed my game! I came to check yours out. The charm and the visuals are top notch for sure, definitely at a marketable level of polish. It looks like most of my gripes have already been addressed, overshooting jumps, more invincibility frames after getting hit, and confusing level design. I see a lot of potential with the concept of flipping the world but it feels like im thrown into the last level of the game right at the start in terms of difficulty. I will say however it is sort of fun to wander around and figure out where to go but i think most people will find it frustrating. I think it should ease into the gameplay and introduce mechanics in a more manageable way. I got the attack, a couple of inkhearts, and the double jump, found the eyeboss which wasnt really beatable with what i had but i will come back to it later and try to beat it! A map would also be helpful, maybe there is one later but it is really easy to get lost. Overall I am very impressed with the level of polish for the time you had!
Yeah, the first room was trying to teach players to not tackle the challenges the game provided head on, and to instead use tricks to bypass them, but most people just ended up trudging though anyways! I'm certain that this is a bit of a niche game, and the difficulty isn't for everyone (I was going to add different difficulties, but this game was made in the final 10 days of MVM so some corners had to be cut). I had trouble making a useful map, because the whole thing would have to rotate based on character orientation, and I think players would still get lost even if I provided one given the ways most rooms are divided.
Very cool design and mechanics here. Enjoyed the simple graphics too, cool hair physics haha. The bosses were quite hilarious, I was able to get to the eye boss but that one just seemed impossible. The difficulty was too harsh for me overall even though I usually enjoy hard games. The bosses were just fine but the map felt too confusing and twisted for its own good, I'm afraid. The movement was also so slippery that I kept overshooting jumps. The character should also have a longer recovery time after getting hit, now just one enemy can off you easily. One nitcpick also: it's not entirely clear which one of the options you're choosing when given one.
Overall, great design and execution but I just found it too cumbersome, sorry.
Did you get the double jump or dash upgrade? the double jump upgrade can be found to the right and up from the drop off, while the dash can be found three rooms to the left and two rooms up from the drop off. While you can theoretically beat all bosses with only the stick and no powerups, you really need either the double jump or the dash else the next few bosses will be of a nightmarish difficulty. Finding a few Inkhearts helps a ton. Only reason why I didn't force the players to get some of those powerups before the boss is because it was designed to be a speedrun type game that allows some progression skips.
Seriously though, not even I can beat that boss without dash, double jump, or with just three hearts... (also if you fall next to it instead of falling directly into it you can dodge its attacks a lot easier)
I didn't, didn't think that the game would allow me to ignore items needed for a boss I could still access. Tried playing this again but it didn't exactly go well as I couldn't even pass the nose boss, no idea how I did it on the first try earlier as now it was incredibly hard. The attacks are way too fast and you can't know where they're coming from in advance so it seems very rng-based if you win it or not.
Don't know if you could do that boss later more easily though because it doesn't give you anything that seems mandatory at that point.
You know you could have reloaded your save with R. The game has a functioning save system, just no main menu. Its a shame you ended up losing your progress because you can complete the game right after beating the nose (or hand)! As for the attacks, there is a pattern! the nose will only attack in the first three rows up from the ground, and like lightning it will never attack in the same row twice in a row. Once you learn that it becomes a game of jumping through the space that the last bullet traveled through, or you can cheese the boss (by staying in the fourth row up). If you stay on the ground and run right, you should almost never get hit by spikes, as you will typically recover from the attacks in time.
Well damn, didn't know reloading a save would work even after coming back later. Yeah, I noticed that the attacks never come from the same place twice in a row but the boss just starts spamming the attacks on low hp so much that I couldn't do it anymore. Will give it another shot later.
Hello,
The amount of originality in your game is wonderfully overwhelming. Sure it is hard, and thank you for highlighting that, but it is rewarding and it gives satisfaction and sense of mastery and accomplishment.
Really well done and well thought.
Congratulations!
Keep in touch,
Cheers
Ok this one is quite the gem, I won't lie.
The sense of personality this game emanates is stupidly strong and I love all of it. From the aesthetics that are a mixture of cute and bizarre that I adored to the chaos of gravity switching and the little pieces of worldbuilding, they all just oozes charisma. Even the slippery controls felt so great and helped to stabilish this game as it's own being as well.
Granted, it takes a while to get used to how it plays, and my biggest critique would be that the game kinda throws too many mechanics right at the start, so it does feel pretty wild and unfair at first, but oh boy when I started to get the feels of stuff I was being pretty excited to see where I was gonna get accidentally pimballed into next!
I was actually gonna complain about how the gravity switches sometimes felt like they would accelerate or deaccelerate you at random, so I was thinking they kinda depended on luck more often than not, but I actually ended up understanding how their acceleration worked on the middle of the Pyreye fight, so one more reason the game should have gave a little more easing in with the gravity shenanigans, because since that boss revolves solely around it witouth much else to distract, I managed to actually learn how those things works
Speaking of that boss tho, I didn't manage to actually defeat it, I stopped after on the last attempt the game decided to softlock me into a random wall when I entered the room, and I didn't saw your comment about being able to reload the save, but now that I know I can get back to where I was, I'll definitelly pick this up to finish it later tho (Might make another comment if I find anything else worth mentioning by then, but I kinda doubt I'll have any other issues with it tbh)
Here's gameplay vid if you would like to see it:
Thanks for playing my game. When I uploaded it only half of it was actually playtested so that one room between the boxes that you got softlocked in went completely under the radar. That other area you got stuck in near the pyreye boss fight... yeah, yet another victim of lack of playtesting. When you went to fight pyreye without the dash powerup, I began to worry as without it, they are the hardest boss in the game! I can't for the life of me figure out how you managed to wrongwarp though, I'll try to test it out when I have the time but I won't be able to remove it before the jam is over. I started the jam late and ended up having to rush to get the second area done. Fortunately this game has a large number of different paths you can use to reach the same destination.
Anyways, thanks for uploading a video! It allowed to me find a couple glitches I missed and places I'll need to work on if I make a full version. The random acceleration you spoke of is because the gravity rotates to the position instead of immediately snapping to it. Its not actually random but it is rather confusing.
Yup! I started to see how the world actually rotated during the Pyreye boss, I guess that was actually a good thing I didn't had the dash by that point then, since I had to rely solely on those (And I think the boss really works like that, despite the difficulty spike, wich could be a little smaller indeed lol)
Also, no sweat with the softlocks, I expect them on jam games, and aside from the last one, they were still close enought to the beggining of the game to be manageable (would have been even better if I knew about the R to reload thing tho xD), but yeah, would be nice to get rid of them
I managed to replicate the wrong warp glitch! Its incredibly hard to hit the ground at just the right speed and angle so that the transition bugs out and sends you diagonally out in room position. The glitch is really hard to perform, which means that you have the darnedest luck. Thank you for finding this really had to find glitch! If you hadn't posted a video I would have never found the cause!
As for the whole dumping of mechanics at the beginning, I tried to ease the player into the world rotation and slime at the home town and in the first two rooms out from the drop off. I tried to introduce a new mechanic every room (since they are so huge), but I think I may have overdid it a little.
Always a honor to put my luck to good use B)
Thanks for the replies btw! And thanks for the game too, of course x)
Alright just a quick warning. This game is very hard and was designed to be a bit of a speedrun/rage game. The second area is technically completely optional. If you get stuck, try fighting another boss or looking for more powerups. the "R" reload actually loads last save so you don't have to complete the game in a single sitting. Just hit "R" in the house and your old save will be loaded. Lastly, be sure to save after bosses lest you lose your progress.