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A jam submission

Koishi's QuestView game page

Koishi Komeji wants to find a gift for her sister, but there's a lot she has to do first.
Submitted by junejijo — 12 hours, 37 minutes before the deadline
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Koishi's Quest's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Story / Writing#193.5263.586
Use of Theme (Retroactive, Retrospective, Retro)#313.7973.862
Use of Green (Green themes, style, use of Sanae/Mima, etc)#402.0342.069
Concept#423.5603.621
Audio / Music#433.0173.069
Overall#453.1193.172
Visuals#513.1533.207
Gameplay#592.5092.552
Balance (Challenge and Fairness)#672.1362.172

Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Team Members
junejijo, Mollyyncy, Akira, Black Mage, theM3ds, Lunaria, Doody, Meg TheLoveableDork, Rose, Rozarai, Kiroko, Amamiya Rua, Yoyo

Streaming Permission

Yes

Touhoufest Showcase Permission

Yes

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

I would have liked some indication that everything being black was intended and not a game-breaking glitch as it felt like at first. That said, this is brilliantly authentically retro in like every dimension. And props for getting all that voicing in a jam game.

Developer (1 edit)

Thank you so much! We wanted to make a very unique and striking game, so I'm glad it made an impression on you. 

I loved playing your game too, best of luck with the scoring!

Jam HostSubmitted (1 edit) (+1)

Ex-plora-tion! ex-plora-tion! Ah, a game that satiates the urge to click-spam. Is Koishi always as lost as the feeling I get when playing this game? That's quite the deep dive into character mentality!

Developer

You could say it's a case of the blind leading the blind!

I managed to beat it by using the hint book. I think it would be impossible for the vast majority of people without the hint book, or at least not something they'd have the patience for. The sound and music were great, as well as the writing, and the ending was cute. For the gameplay I have a ton of criticism but I will try to include constructive ways to improve it for feedback, because I don't want to just be putting the game down.

The biggest flaw with the gameplay was the fact that nothing interactable was visible until you moused over it. This took the pixel hunt, one of the greatest flaws of point-and-click games, and turned it into a nightmare of frustration. I understand that this is to represent Koishi's 3rd eye being sealed off, but it made the game borderline unplayable even with the hint book. I would have made everything visible, but kept the "wire mode" look of everything to represent the use of echolocation. The hitbox issues are also present on 2.5; it seemed like the problem was the hitbox being the exact shape of the object, so for objects with lots of lines it would be hard to figure out where to put the mouse so that it would stay triggered. The solution there would just be to have the hitbox be a rectangle slightly bigger than the object.

Another issue I had was with how progression works. Several times I had the idea to do something, but it wouldn't work. Then after doing something else completely unrelated, a flag would be triggered and now I could go back and do the thing I originally planned on. However, since it didn't work the first time, I assumed that what I did originally wasn't the solution. A good example is how you move Orin; I had the combined item you need pretty early on and was trying to use it on the spot you had to use it on, but it turned out you can't do that until you trigger a completely different event all the way across the map. This is the main reason I used the hint book, along with the visibility/hitbox issues. To fix this, I guess make it possible to do stuff out of order within limits. For example, as long as I have the needed items and have already tried to get Orin's cart, I think I should be allowed to do the thing that actually moves her. Having more freedom in the order you do things would have made the game a lot more intuitive for me, and I might have been able to not have to rely on the hint book so much.

The visuals were alright, though it was hard to tell what some objects were supposed to be, which compounded the issues with objects being invisible. A possible solution would be to use grayscale for object sprites, so you could have more details on them. The full color art in the ending was very cute and made getting to the ending worth it.

The audio was probably the best category; the music actually felt like the kind of music that would be in a classic adventure game. The very MIDI-sounding remix of Koishi's theme with a bit of dissonance stood out in a positive sense. The sheer amount of voiced lines was impressive. I did notice that sometimes a line would not be voiced that I'd be expect, such as a line in between two voiced lines in a Koishi monologue. Also, the audio quality on the voice lines was very inconsistent. I don't know if it was due to the VA's mic quality, or the sound files being compressed, but it sounded very crunchy and some characters I couldn't understand what they were saying without the subtitles.

That was way too frustrating for me to make any decent progress. I couldn't get past Parsee. Having to scan the whole room with your mouse due to the darkness is just the opposite of "fun" to me.

The update to the hitboxes helped a bit compared to when I first tried it, but when you have an object like a table in an inverted U shape or some kind of frame in an O shape, it would have helped a lot if the inside of the U or O would also be part of the hitbox. A simple bounding box encompassing the object would have made them much better for me.

Developer

I'm sorry you felt that way about the experience. If you're open to trying again, we're hoping to have a hintbook out soon.

Well, I'm sorry you felt sorry about how I felt. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time or anything but I may have come off too harsh. I just wanted to give constructive criticism and give insights into why I didn't like it, because to me, those things help getting better at making games and that's what game jams are about (to me at least).

While what I said about the hitboxes is likely to make it better for almost all players, it's likely that there are some players enjoying scanning through the screen like that, so keep in mind that while insights on what players like can be valuable, you don't have to feel bad about any particular player (like me) not liking a game. That may also be just not the right type of game for me.

As for trying again, there are so many entries this jam that I doubt I'll feel like it once I'm done with them, but we'll see.

Submitted

Okay, finally finished the game. Took an unimaginably long time. The new update did make hitboxes a bit better but there were still a lot that were just a bit too small. I think more locations should have some white graphics to make it much easier to know where stuff is in relation to each other. Also, a minor thing but you cant see the names of items in the suitcase once you pick them up, which is a little annoying. I think the puzzles themselves, though, were mostly fine if it weren't for the visual issue, except for one at the beginning of the game, where, 

SPOILERS (there isnt an option to black out text in itchio unfortunately)

after the first action you do on an npc, which ends up failing in the story, you have to go back to the mansion to interact with a previously uninteractable object to get an item.

SPOILERS END

aside from the problems with the gameplay itself though. I found the writing itself to be fun, the voice acting especially elevating it with how chiptune-y(?) it sounds. Though Reimu's VA in particular had her voice quality worse than the other characters for some reason. The music and animations for the characters were also pretty nice. The cutscenes were especially fun to watch. The story also has a pretty funny ending puzzle.

Though I recommend someone to play this after the dev makes a hintbook, as it's very easy atm to miss an item somewhere and get stuck unless you look at every nook and cranny.

Submitted

Is the game supposed to be entirely black with only hovering over items having some white? Im getting very lost in the rooms and the clickable objects' hitbox being really small doesn't help. Stuck at parsee and only have the slingshot and sunflower and don't really know what to do. Feels like I'm just blindly moving my mouse around until i find something to click and i dont know if im missing something.

Developer (1 edit)

Hey Valonad,

Yes, the black background and halo on items is the intention of the game design. I'd talk about why in detail but that's spoilers for anyone else. 

As for the items, we're working on making them bigger as we accidentally scaled them too small during production. That will be patched in a future update, which we hope to get out in the next day or so. 

Thanks for playing!

Submitted

I refrained from rating the game due to the items being too small (and possibly a skill issue on my part) since i havent actually solved it. Gonna wait for the update to make stuff a bit easier to find till I give this game a shot again.

Developer

Hey there again, 

Our latest version (1.0) is now live if you would like to give it a try.

Submitted(+1)

nice work! while I am not a fan of clicking games this was quite fun and engaging, I especially like the artstyle, very unique, and the voice acting is a nice touch, great work!

Developer

Thank you!

We're hoping to have a more polished version out soon for your enjoyment, but I'm glad you liked what we were going for as a concept.

Submitted(+1)

the Touhou setting and theme really makes it interesting to play, especially with perhaps stuff like references and Easter eggs added! keep up the good work!

Submitted

hey! really cool how this has voice acting! pretty rare for a jam game. just letting you know that going south in the room with the sign in it causes the game to crash

Developer

Thanks for letting us know! We'll try to fix it ASAP.

Developer

Hello again,

Our latest 1.0 version has fixed that issue and lots of other things if you'd like to try again.