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(1 edit)

Honestly one of the most ambitious games I have seen, and it mostly works!

The gameplay consists of getting new face properties and face numbers - even if I mostly used just a few, the option to have others was really nice, and with more developed levels this "dice building" gameplay could be really engaging and interesting, especially with a little bit of a cost to be bale to improve your dice. During the first 70% of the game or so [20 minutes of my 30 minute playtime] I really disliked how the dice controlled, however after this point I got quite used to controlling it. The amount of control the game gives you is actually quite big, however to master this power, you must really use visual markers and learn how to position the camera properly. If you were to develop this game further, I would recommend giving the dice a little bit of a random force when throwing it, so it spins, as oftentimes I would find that I could just throw the dice in just the right way and keep it on the same face. The camera controls okay, however, its oftentimes really slow and I would have to pick up my mouse multiple times just to turn around, the zoom speed is also painfully slow. It also does not allow you to look up, which isn't a super big deal, but I did find myself wondering why at some points.
One of the biggest detractors to my enjoyment of crook was the unclearness of the goals of each level, the premise of reaching the highest point seems simple, however what this point is seemed to change arbitrarily, even on the same map, just with different levels (i.e the jars and the book with a skull)
Another notable thing about the gameplay are the bugs, there are two main types I noticed: the ones which will get your model 95% stuck into geometry, and the ones which do not put a cap on your use of face abilities such as explosion and reroll. The former is the more serious one, as it can sometimes make it so you cannot click on your dice to throw it, which means that you will have to reset the level, the latter is more funny than anything , but still an exploit.
This game's definite biggest shortcoming is its presentation, specifically the textures and lack of lighting - these features, or rather lack thereof, made the game look really mushy and they also injected problems into the gameplay, where the player can't properly see edges from most angles when both faces are made of the same material, which sometimes made it hard to see where you're going to fall etcetera. Another thing I am sorry to not see here is music, and general sound effects, as I would've liked something spooky or relaxing to add to the atmosphere.
A feature which this game really excels at is the UI - quite a rarity in gamejams such as these; the UI was simple but it was good enough, and most importantly, it worked: there was a pause menu which allows you to exit and change your dice, the main menu has a level select which opens up as you play the game, you get to read a little story snipped before every level and it all feels quite polished. Speaking of the story, it added some context which was really nice, it was not in fact Shakespearean, if you can believe it, but nonetheless I enjoyed it.

This is definitely the most full fledged game I have seen so far, and I really hope that it gets more reviews, as it really deserves some more attention. I wish you luck and thanks for making this!


P.S: You submitted this game 12 minutes before the deadline — you are a mad lad

(+1)

Hello, Thanks a lot for the detailed review!

We were two persons working on this game, and one of us spent most of the 2 days trying to make visual markers for the dice. However, this feature couldn’t be debugged in time.

At the beginning, we wanted to add some angle velocity to the dice when throwing it. However, we didn’t want to make it random and we liked the possibility to keep the same face. It is why in the end we didn’t implement it. However, if we were to develop this game further, we would definitely try to implement a way to turn the dice more easily. Showing the goal better and music are on the todo list too, simply too low in the priorities to be done during the 48 hours.

We were aware of some issues with certains meshes as we took preexisting art for the dungeon but had to remake every mesh. However, thanks for pointing out the issues with colors and art itself as we didn’t notice it. Thanks also for the review on the sensibility (we had a lot of discussions internally on it).

(+1)

Glad to hear my review was helpful, I'd love to check this game out again if you plan on polishing it up a little bit after the jam!