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SAVE ME MARISA!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #13 | 3.086 | 3.450 |
| Audio / Music | #15 | 3.265 | 3.650 |
| Visuals | #17 | 3.712 | 4.150 |
| Overall | #21 | 2.907 | 3.250 |
| Use of LGBTQ+ Themes | #21 | 2.639 | 2.950 |
| Concept | #22 | 3.265 | 3.650 |
| Story / Writing | #26 | 2.549 | 2.850 |
| Balance (Challenge and Fairness) | #30 | 1.744 | 1.950 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Team Members
SweatyNoodle, Confused-Char, EggsToast, Kaidyn24
Streaming Permission
Yes
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Comments
It's neat but it's not fun. The Jam version at least.
- Cool base idea, very bold choices for a survival game.
- The base controls are pretty good.
- The music being affected by Marisa's health is a really cool effect, especially how it illustrates hopelessness when Marisa's about to die. That, coupled with Marisa's limping speed and Patchouli not able to do anything do quite put the word "survival" in the spotlight, in a very neat way.But maybe the learning floor is too high to be enjoyable, especially for a 15 minutes-to-clear game. Like, the game asks *a lot* from the player to try getting as far as wave 4.
- There's very little room for errors to be made - there's so few margin that the experience doesn't go smoothly. The game is so unforgiving that the fun is sucked out of it.
As for why it feels that way, my guess is: either the controls and mechanics make the player too helpless for the challenge OR the enemy waves are not suited enough for the available controls and mechanics.
I guess you could try adding checkpoints instead, which wouldn't discourage the player to continue after a Round 3 game over - in that case leaving the gameplay as it is should be actually okay.
Here's gameplay where I managed to clear the game (Jam version). Hopefully it gives my fellows a way to see more of the game and rate it accordingly.
looks great. awesome juice!!! SHIT!!! ESCORT MISSION!!!!! RUN OPERATION UNDERTALEMODTOOL!!! ABORT! ABORT! FATAL ERROR!
and in such a tiny arena? i'm doing my best!
what is this supposed to mean
i modded the game so i could win. its hard!
im sorry for what you had to see
I don't understand the game. I don't get hit but I die.
Is Patchouli getting hit?
Possibly, but it didn't really seem like it. She didn't get ht much at least.
The game looks great, but it feels like it doesn't really communicate what's going wrong, especially with the multitasking going on.
I struggled a lot to get past even just round 3 after an hour of trying, then I see in the comments it goes on til round 10 :‘D I think this one just won’t be for me unfortunately. The presentation was stellar though, by far the most immediately impressive visuals and sound design. I think the main thing that bothered me was the delay between each run caused by the death screen, returning to the main menu, then showing the intro again. If I could just click straight back into round 1 after losing I think I might have had more patience for grinding it out.
If the goal was to be hardest game of the jam, this one certainly hit it. The game takes a familiar shmup setup but lumps a Patchouli on you to amp up the hectic decision making. It takes much getting using to, but is actually fun once you start understanding how to accommodate the additional load. The spritework and music assist in setting a discomforting, unnatural atmosphere. The music warping as you get hit and the random NND comments meld together into something unsettling. Controls are snappy and response. Quite appropriate for challenge.
The big question then is if the challenge itself is fair. And after a few hours of attempts at it, I have to conclude it is not. The rapid enemy patterns demand just about rote memorization of every round, and even that isn't enough when the fairies decide to throw curveballs. The game effectively has a single resource that is overloaded in its functions. Your health is the only way to patch up Patche, but also governs your movement speed and your damage output. And, of course, you need it for not dying. When you get hit so much happens at once with the aggressive screen shaking and the sudden change in movement speed that its common to get disoriented and get hit multiple times in a row before recovering. And since health governs everything else, going below half often causes a death spiral where you can't reposition fast enough nor blast away the threats. And when I clutched it out of those situations to survive the round, rather than enter a round I lack resources for I ended up throwing Patche into the wall to reset. Very against the story. From other comments I see these are intentional design decisions, but I personally find this kind of difficulty frustrating rather than fun. It really sapped the enjoyment I was experiencing at first.
I can enjoy a challenge, but if one is going to be presented at this magnitude at the bare minimum I would like a checkpoint. Not to make it easy, but just to escape the tedium The first four rounds really felt like a complete waste of my time while I was trying to get progression on higher rounds . After around my tenth attempt at round 10 I had to call it quits to try other games in the jam.
Gosh, I musta spent 3 hours trying to beat this. I got "Ending 1", which I presume is the Bad Ending or something, but I don't feel like playing through the whole game a third time to get another ending.
Pretty much everything about this game is great. Awesome text scrolling across the screen, awesome voice acting, awesome Paper Mario thingy with Marisa, awesome mechanic where your HP and MP and movement speed are all one bar. It's great. But also, 80% of my time playing this was pure suffering.
As you know, the enemies showing up from offscreen and immediately shooting at you (or swarming you in the case of the eye thingies) make the game harder, but in a way that isn't very fun. With that and the way the mechanics are mostly unexplained, the game is very heavy with trial and error. Pretty much every wave of enemies past round 2 is only surmountable by failing at it and then memorizing it & thinking up a specific "trick" to beating it. Reminds me of Ninja Gaiden for NES. Whether that's a compliment or its opposite is to your discretion. Beating it felt nice at least. Genuinely though, I do quite like games like this, that feel like insurmountable brick walls. It's amazing to beat a game that, just a moment ago, was so unforgiving that you genuinely didn't know if you'd ever beat it. If I weren't caught up with beating this game as quickly as possible so I could rate everything, I think I'd have a lot more fun with its "unfair" difficulty.
And this may not be super important to ya, but I found it funny. During the final phase of the final boss, I was holding Patche, and wanted to use the Spark on the boss. But I accidentally rightclicked like 5 frames before leftclicking, and threw Patche at the final boss instead. Throwing Patche did an insane amount of damage, and basically instantly defeated the boss. But... she only had 1 HP when I did it. So the final boss's defeat cutscene played, and then as soon as it ended, Patche died and I Gameover'd before the End screen showed up. And of course, that obviously doesn't count at beating the game, so I played through the whole game again, and did the exact same thing right at the end, but this time Patche had like 4 HP, so I didn't gameover and got to see the end screen. This kind of "Gameovering while the final boss is exploding" thing has happened to me like, 7 times across different Touhou games, so I gotta thank ya for adding another instance of it to my collection.
In short, it's like Embodiment of Scarlet Devil-- extremely charming presentation and solid gameplay design overall, but it's pretty unforgiving and abrasive in its difficulty, to the point of only feeling rewarding to play if I'm in a very specific mood.
Ending 1 is the good ending, I should have specified that, but I did the endings when I was half asleep. TnT
Fun fact: I think I accidentally made it harder to get a bad ending than a good ending.
The game is supposed to be like an NES game, but I maybe went a little overboard on that idea as I just made the game really unfair. I do actually like games that are unforgiving in difficulty and is the reason why I got into Touhou.
Sorry but also not sorry for causing the classic "die as the boss dies" thing. Sorry because it is really unfortunate, but not sorry because it is really funny because of how unfortunate it is. You get an imaginary gold star for beating the game though!!
Probably my favorite concept from the games I played, but... I'm just terrible, didn't got too far in any of my playthroughs TT_TT
Favorite Parts: The concept and style is amazing! I would love for a more accessible version or to just git gud at it XD
I'm planning to do a post-jam version with difficulty options, so if you want to try the game post-jam, there will be an easier (and harder) option!
This one is actually really cool. I like the idea of having to move Patchy around so she doesn't get hit. It's really hard as advertised but I really didn't like those fairies that zoom in off-screen and immediately shoot, even if there's set spawns.
I probably should have fixed the fairies... -_-
This game is certainly hard. Every action Marisa can do costs resources and that places a tough execution challenge when Marisa has to act as legs for the Great Unmovable Library.
The game demands routing, through that is more to do with how fast enemies shoot once they have spawned. It would be nice to know when enemies spawn and when the next wave will appear to ease the challenge of learning the enemy route.
I also note that this game is unforgiving with invisibility which is notable when Patchouli is surprised attacked from the edge of the screen. Makes every round tense when a mistake can end the run as simple as not picking up Patchouli.
But I got to say, it is not often when a game requires the player to have the proper knowledge about every move, every round, and every enemy in order to have a chance of beating the game. Perhaps this is more of a test between Marisa and Patchouli?
As for tips for beating this game:
Hey, thanks for the comment! A couple of the things I do regret not adding is stuff making enemies less annoying on your first playthrough and Patchouli not moving out of a group of enemies when she is being damaged. The memorization and resource management required to beat the game are very much intentional, and are main points of this game, so I'm glad someone recognized it!
The field doesn't increase in size, the screen actually zooms in and the player gets slower and I'm glad that a lot of Patchouli's dialogue works, as it was the one thing I didn't test and was scrambled together before the deadline.
Finally, I'm curious, did you end up beating the game?