The first time I played it I lost, or so I thought. The cutscene that plays if you get everything right made me think I had made a mistake, so only when I lost several times by actually making mistakes did I realize that cutscene meant I had solved all the puzzles correctly and the game was supposed to end like that. I’m not sure what to do about it, probably add “thanks for playing” or something like that to it. And now for the feedback which I split into a couple of categories, some of which refer to the categories we’re supposed to give the game scores in:
Improvements: Looks like you made the whole thing during the jam. Good job on achieving your goal of making a game and finishing it!
Fun: I found the game challenging, but I could solve most of the ciphers. ANd while horror games isn’t something I’ve really been into, I do see how the slow animations help making the game uneasy.
And the randomness adds some replayability, which I find nice.
I did record video so I can look back at what I did, so here’s some mistakes I noticed I made (separating them from the rest of the feedback in case anyone wants to skip reading them as they might be spoilers, so here’s one paragraph of mistakes):
It seems I struggled understanding spacepigs. 4 is plus and 2 is minus. So 12999 2 5671 has two two’s and no fours. That’s two plusses and no minus. An even number of plusses and minuses, so I thought that meant cheese. and 12999 is above 10,000 so I thought it was chupacabra cheese. That made the spacepig very upset. I guess I might have misunderstood what to add and subtract. And I know elephants are said to be afraid of mice, but the closest I could think of was sasquatch and apparently that wasn’t right (I’m guessing it would have been chupcabra).
90’s: The low resolution and use of FMVs does feel very nineties. Well, it’s not that much of a console game since it’s probably not meant to be played with a controller (and I don’t have a computer-compatible controller, but keyboard and mouse worked).
I think the FMVs look a bit modern though, in the sense that 32-bit consoles would have played compressed FMVs with JPEG-like artifacts, but I guess these are GIFs, a file format from 1987. So I guess they would have been technically feasible in the nineties. Not that 32-bit consoles had GIF-decoding hardware, but I think there would have been ways to store those animations at a reasonably low bitrate while being able to decode them in real time without a bunch of JPEG-like artifacts.
Art: I think the 3D models look sorta like the prerendered ones you’d see in cutscenes in games from the nineties, but maybe a bit less serious, which I feel like it adds a bit of a humorous touch, which I’m not sure it’s intentional, but it kinda goes well with the names of those aliens and might be a nice contrast to the horror theme that’s also going on.
Fonts (a joke category I’ve been including in my written feedback for some games in this jam): Text in images looks like it’s rendered in an outline font without antialiasing, and the line saying “community to consume as pop culture” seems to have some glitches that I guess are intentional, and some letters in the larger font (most of the letters in “CONTINUE”) look like they got some pixels cut off or the line thickness got inconsistent. I’d probably have rendered them with anti-aliasing but at 4-bit colour depth (or implemented my own anti-aliasing, or used pixel art) and if I used an outline font I would use hinting, but I think you did that, at least for the small text (the large font’s inconsistent line thickness could hint at a lack of hinting though).
And I see that some text (the text that isn’t part of images) uses a modern font that I kind of see as non-nineties, but that’s okay because for text I think readability matters more than the 32-bit look (the whole reason I include this category in my feedback was that I noticed several games using unhinted fonts with anti-aliasing at low resolutions, where the blur of the anti-aliasing combined with the blur of the low resolution made it less readable than what actual games from the nineties had used).
And I might as well point out that at least some of the images of text don’t seem to have alt texts.