Wow, really amazing presentation! The animations for the character are wonderful, the portraits are great, the story is funny, your game page is well designed, the music is good, the UI is clean, and the environments look nice. I can't believe this was done in a week!
I see this has been entered into multiple jams, so I wanted to give some more in-depth feedback. I agree with other comments on the division of attack + clean up. There were several times where I needlessly took damage just because I had stopped moving and was now stuck in suck up mode. As to the cleanup mechanic itself, it's cute but it felt a bit dissonant with the theme of being a janitor because it doesn't actually have any bearing on the game. There's no reason to clean, you can just skip doing it entirely.
Since you purposely wanted a dialogue/story heavy game, I have two comments: 1) Overuse of shaky text. Effects like that are used for emphasis and overuse quickly causes it to lose its impact. 2) Trying to be as spoiler free as possible, I felt the ending I got walked back the theme of this particular jam.
Again, I want to reiterate that you guys really did a phenomenal job with this project, and I hope it gets updated in the future. Good luck with all your jams!
Yeah, the mop system certainly has its flaws. I wanted to try a smash-bros style system, but I think having a neutral move that can't attack makes it less intuitive. Had I had more time to code, I would've coded more different attacks for the different directions. It's also tough thematically, because the game is sort of about how violence is bad, and it's a combat platformer...
Yeah I absolutely overused the text effects. It was just too much fun to use. Will definitely be more intentional with its usage in future games.
As for the theme - the ending sort of does walk back the theme, but I felt like it still worked. We sort of interpreted the theme as: "you are not recognized as the hero", which is definitely a less direct interpretation of it.
Thank you for the review!
