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This was a great entry, the first one this jam I stuck with to the end! I liked a lot of things:

  • The passive aura "attack" worked nicely, particularly when chasing/fleeing
  • Pleasant visuals. Possessed cat toys, oh no! And the pixelated bits at the beginning were interesting, I expected that to return.
  • Most SFX, jump in particular
  • Appreciated the checkpoint on the top level of the library
  • [Edit] Oh yes and the ending was adorable!

A few complaints:

  • Some platforming was irritating, like bumping into shelves from below. I was afraid the ending was going to have trickier platforming, thankfully it wasn't too hard as I was starting to get frustrated.
  • Dark vent sections, especially since I thought I needed to explore them. At first I had guessed my goal was to cleanse all the mice (since the floating things respawned), thus why I sometimes found nothing in the corners of the vents but enemies.
  • I guess there's a closed window at the far end of the ground floor of the library, but it looks like it should be passable (the solid part is only visible while scrolling)
  • It's tricky to hit F as it's so close to the direction keys.
  • Sometimes the snap for the cleansings was significantly louder and detracted from the jingle, I couldn't see a pattern to when it worked that way so might just be a bug.
  • The landing sound effect seemed inappropriately hard, I quickly got tired of hearing it.
  • I'd have liked an easier way to return to a checkpoint than seeking out an enemy to force a reset. In the last passage along the top level to the door to the final area, I kept falling down, and then it would reset to a lower checkpoint and I'd had to go all the way around again.

The complaints are mostly  minor, sorry for itemizing so many of them. Excellent job!

Hello again! And thanks for trying out our entry. Proud to be the first you were willing to fight through to the end (and that you enjoyed the ending)!

I appreciate the list of pain points! Some are interesting to hear, like the vent areas and the closed window in the library. I had intended the vents to simply be dark maze areas, the first with a mild penalty for missing the jump (you'd have a longer way up the dining room), and the second just being a straight maze. Was there anything in particular that made you want to explore them instead? The closed window (in my mind it was a door) in the library was me just trying to make it make some sense of the layout of the house. I put the door there to "make sense", but it wasn't where I wanted the player to be, so I closed it off. I'll be more careful with the visuals for something like that in the future.

I hadn't thought of making a forced "death", but it's a good fix for some of the design problems I'd run into (and easy to explain premise-wise with the blossom spirit doing teleports already). Trying to make different parts of the room contain different parts of the main path (i.e., the dining room has path 1 through the middle, path 2 along the bottom, and path 3 along the top) was tricky for the checkpointing. I think it suffers most there and in the dash part of the top of the library. (We did provide a path from the bottom of the dining room straight up to the top that was possible once you had all the unlocks, but you're not the only one who felt like they had to go back the long way, so I wonder if there was a better way for us to point it out.)

Thanks again for the feedback and the nice praise. Glad it wasn't too frustrating in the end ; )