The gameplay is quite hard to comprehend at times. The hit box often blended in with the background, making it hard to understand where the limit was as well.) There's also issues with the dream journals, as I can never quite tell if they're working or where to put them. (The guide doesn't really offer a lot on that front.) The keyboard scheme leaves little room for error, upping the difficulty. Would love to see controller support.

That said, this game is extremely solid with a great concept, excellent use of theme, and absolutely banging aesthetics. The nightmare music is especially awesome, with the battle backgrounds deliciously 80's. Great job!

good game. quite hard though. the thing that affects this the most is the fact that i need 3 hands cause i have a qwertz keyboard layout not qwerty.
many ppl in this jam sadly force the use of the Z key which is really annoying for qwertz layout users as X and Z arent next to each other. i have to have my left index finger on Z(right next to T) and my left pinky on X to make it somewhat work but that really hurts the left hand after a short while.
for most other submissions though the gameplay is either easier or the usage of the Z key isnt as extensive.
on behalf of all qwertz users i ask you, please include a keybinding option in future works so players can set the keys to use by themselves OR use the spacebar instead of Z to make it easier for qwertz users.

I'm so bad at this game, but I really liked the concept and the bullet hell portions were appropriately challenging. It was a fun experience and I'm going to come back to it to improve my routine once I've been able to rate more games. Nice job!

i have about zero idea what is going on here, giving people their relevant square thing does not seem to slow or do anything to nightmare meter, i thought the lose condition was someone losing all emotion (or capping out on it, not sure which is good or bad), but i saw people go like super black after getting hit on their pattern and i could continue fine. i beat the game first try in hard but would lose no matter how well i did on bullets very quickly in lunatic

i do really like the patterns and the variety of dudes you got in here, thats alotta sprites for jam time. having so many difficulties is also very cool

and since i can dodge the patterns and basically win if im on hard mode, its good enough for me. good game

A game that’s very intense yet perfectly fair. I enjoyed the smooth transitions between bullet hell and sim managements, and the music complements the game pace amazingly well.

Fully suppressing nightmares seem… kind of difficult to do, at least not without sacrificing attention towards other nightmares? It’s probably just me, as I’ve only cleared Normal and Hard. 

I really enjoyed the game overall!

Enjoyable execution of a great concept.

I beat Normal to Lunatic without much trouble, but Nightmare seems very difficult. Most of the patterns become almost impossible to dodge for me, although some can be can be cheesed by staying at the bottom of the screen (the bullets despawn before they reach you), and some are fairly easy to dodge legit (the green "Oo." lines of bullets that bounce once, and the slow lines of diagonal rice).

Disregarding the hard to dodge danmaku, Nightmare difficulty is great in that it forces you to enter the nightmares, while lower difficulties can be beat by mostly just playing the sim aspect well. In that sense, Nightmare is the most fully realized marriage of the two different parts of the gameplay.

Also, some patterns have bullet scaled to a small size that seem to randomly kill? And the small bullets being rendered behind the large bullets isn't great. These are minor problems, and most patterns (on lower difficulties) feel fair and well-designed. I like that the game natural makes you repeat patterns, so you can feel your improvements as you play.

Also, it would be nice to have a more clear cue for when the dream-icons switch, as this can be a matter of life and death on Nightmare. Like a sound effect and clear visual queues towards the characters that suddenly have the wrong books on them.

Also, I think running should be the default outside of the dreams too, rather than requiring shift to be held.

So I listed a bunch of stuff I didn't like, but I that list is exhaustive. Everything else is great, and all-in-all it's a fantastic game.

Fantastic concept executed really well. Reminded me of Star Fox 2.