This game is brilliant and really captures the aesthetics, exacting difficulty and unusual learn-as-you-go mechanics of earlier games, something not unfamiliar to an Atari or Commodore. However, it's surprisingly deep, both narratively and gameplay-wise! There's a fleshed-out story, upgrade mechanics, a world to explore, and a fairly open-ended win condition that offsets some of the punishing difficulty by getting you to collect clues! I thought the different environmental effects and the inconveniences they posed to navigating the world were very cool and well executed. I think for a jam game this is really impressive and demonstrates a lot more depth than I expected. Definitely one of the games I played the longest of! Only criticism I can think of - if it can be called one - is that some of the punishing parts of the game do seem a little unfair, like thorns that drain health on the edge of a screen transition, or enemies that appear right next to you! But unfairness is 80s gaming in its essence! I had a blast playing this.
Thanks for submitting STAKE THE HEAVENS to the SCREAM SOLSTICE game jam!
- SCREAM CATALOGUE