A charming little retro adventure. I may be wrong, but it seems like this is the only submission which used the Icon Wildcard as direct inspiration, which definitely helps it stand out. The writing was nothing crazy, but it was pretty good and did its job well. The graphics were very nice and seemed faithful to the era this is clearly inspired by. The gameplay loop of finding presents and delivering them to your icon buddies in return for more abilities was clear and very understandable, the progression consistently felt rewarding and there were no low, difficult points.
I do have a couple criticisms. Namely, on my computer at least, there is a pretty heavy amount of input lag. I'm not sure if that's due to VSync or the (admittedly kind of over-the-top) VHS shader, but it made the game feel rather clunky at first. Another flaw I noticed is the Volume Mixing. The sound effects, along with the drums, felt about twice as loud as the music, which really startled me. It was also weird that the words in the dialogue boxes were extremely big, but it was actually a pretty funny visual gag, so I don't mind it all that much.
One more thing: It was weird how a Sprite2D was in the water, and how it wasn't interactable at all. I suppose it might've been a marker to tell you where to go, but I assumed it was the end goal, and was very confused on how you're just supposed to go past them. Maybe they were just swimming?
Overall, this is a nice little comfy adventure, which would need no tweaking gameplay or graphics-wise to be very good. I like the cute little animals walking around.
I loved the game! The nodes icons in pixel art, the music sounding more and more complete as you progress, the CRT shader... I think it's my favorite game so far! I had a bit of a hard time figuring out which ways can be traversed, but that's my only nitpick. Well done!
Comments
Really cool style, I found the pushing gloves but didnt really know what to do with them lol. felt like an adventure
A charming little retro adventure. I may be wrong, but it seems like this is the only submission which used the Icon Wildcard as direct inspiration, which definitely helps it stand out. The writing was nothing crazy, but it was pretty good and did its job well. The graphics were very nice and seemed faithful to the era this is clearly inspired by. The gameplay loop of finding presents and delivering them to your icon buddies in return for more abilities was clear and very understandable, the progression consistently felt rewarding and there were no low, difficult points.
I do have a couple criticisms. Namely, on my computer at least, there is a pretty heavy amount of input lag. I'm not sure if that's due to VSync or the (admittedly kind of over-the-top) VHS shader, but it made the game feel rather clunky at first. Another flaw I noticed is the Volume Mixing. The sound effects, along with the drums, felt about twice as loud as the music, which really startled me. It was also weird that the words in the dialogue boxes were extremely big, but it was actually a pretty funny visual gag, so I don't mind it all that much.
One more thing: It was weird how a Sprite2D was in the water, and how it wasn't interactable at all. I suppose it might've been a marker to tell you where to go, but I assumed it was the end goal, and was very confused on how you're just supposed to go past them. Maybe they were just swimming?
Overall, this is a nice little comfy adventure, which would need no tweaking gameplay or graphics-wise to be very good. I like the cute little animals walking around.
I loved the game! The nodes icons in pixel art, the music sounding more and more complete as you progress, the CRT shader... I think it's my favorite game so far! I had a bit of a hard time figuring out which ways can be traversed, but that's my only nitpick. Well done!