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3 things I liked about this entry:

  1. Custom graphics that fit the horror vibe and seem tailor-made for the game. There are even side doors!
  2. The story is compelling. I want to learn why everyone is transforming into monsters!
  3. The battle system is unique. Several enemies have a positional element to them. And not every "encounter" is necessarily a battle.

3 things I did not like:

  1. It's too long for a jam game. I couldn't finish it, and the bugs (particularly the hunger system bug) discouraged me from trying to finish. I recommend in the future that instead of going for maximum length, try cutting the scope down so you can polish what content you have.
  2. Information critical to the player is lacking. There isn't an easy way to check the time or your hunger status (which may in turn have helped you detect the issues with the hunger system earlier). I also don't know what the result of crafting items will be, or what the benefit of cooking certain items will be, and if I choose something to craft/cook I'm committed to doing it.
  3. Combat could use some more refinement. It's far from the worst I've played or seen, but here are some examples of my issues: the fact that the multi-shot from the shotgun seems to always miss makes it not worth using, the durability system doesn't make sense to me (your weapons break but you can still use them, and they're still mostly fine?), and while enemies do make use of positioning it is hard to tell what difference their position makes.

This is a truly ambitious game. A bit too much content for a month-long jam, and as a consequence there are quite a few bugs and spelling errors, but overall it's really fun and nails the horror atmosphere! Were it not for the bugs and the length I would honestly try to finish it.

Thanks for playing!

For the games' length - yeah, I have a habit of making jam games generally too ambitious, that's just part of what makes a jam exciting to me! Its a bad habit and often results in janky unpolished jam games, but every once in a while it really pays off.

There's no quick way to check specific status numbers, but you can check if you're hungry, tired etc by looking at yourself in the mirror. I didnt want to have too many specific numbers there, just wanted the players to have to generally "take care of themselves" at home, but not necessarily have to fine tune themselves to numbers, if they're not critical like life and stamina. I felt that would make the life stats too prominent and take away from exploring. The way I see it, the more of this info is shown, the more it implies that its important to constantly worry about, so keeping it abstract would help the player only worry about it if one of the stats is low. Of course, because of the hunger glitch, hunger IS something to constantly worry about right now, but obviously thats a glitch, not really something the design is meant to deal with! The hunger glitch really comes from not testing the game myself extensively enough in the last few days of the jam, I focused way more on adding exploration content, and of course tested that stuff by warping to it, not by playing the game at length - thats when stuff like that can arise. Unfortunate, but it happens!

Im considering to add small icons in the menu screen (if I can figure out how to do that in mz) that appear if you are below 50% of a stat, like a warning before the real status effects hit you. That way you get a bit more of a warning you can check back on, but still without giving you too many numbers to look at.


For weapon durability, the idea is for weapons to break based on a dice roll, but get to a "half-broken" state first where they are still usable.  This usually makes it a bit weaker, but more importantly, using it becomes risky - if it "breaks" again a second time in combat, you're left without a weapon mid-fight. I felt like this half-broken state was important in  a game where you cant switch weapons mid-battle, to avoid a situation where you are left with no weapons at all just because of a single bad roll, even though you went into a fight with a completely pristine, battle-ready baseball bat - It can still happen of course, but now you need two consecutive bad rolls, so you have way more wiggle room to deal with bad luck.  Maybe a key issue here is the wording, all the half-broken weapons are described in different ways, they should have some kind of more explicit, HALF-BROKEN tag or something that makes this more clear. And maybe the tutorial about weapon breaking should be re-written too, might not be clear enough.

Thanks again for playing, I appreciate the thoughts!